CATALINBREAD "Airstrip"

The Trident A-Range console dominated the UK recording scene in the late ‘60s to early ‘80s, due in part to just how good it made things sound. The heart of the beast consists of a discrete germanium-and-transformer-equipped preamp that can be adjusted to suit all tastes, from the tones of Lou Reed to the fuzzy freakouts of Frank Zappa. And of course, when pushed, console preamps distort, saturate and heave, dripping with harmonics and other desirable tonal artifacts. Our Airstrip distills these legendary tones into a stompbox-sized console preamp with a handful of extras on offer. A discrete op-amp based on a vintage UREI design pushes the front end of the console into blissful gain if you want it. On the back end, a tasteful treble filter sets the luminosity of the pre to suit your rig and a specially-selected transformer adds a touch of iron to the signal. Capable of every gain sound imaginable from warm, “mastered”-style cleans to gnarly collapsing fuzz, the Airstrip puts the mixing desk on your pedalboard in a much more manageable package.