Introducing the Catalinbread Airstrip, a full-featured console preamp based on the Trident A-Range desk that gives you everything from rich cleans to amp-melting fuzz.

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.

CONTROLS
PUSH: This is where the Airstrip goes from a mild-mannered enhancer to a collapsing wall of fuzz with one simple twist.

VOLUME: Keeping both Trim and Push controls at their minimum settings and cranking this knob offers a superb and very loud clean boost with a tailored tonal profile that makes your guitar sound pre-mastered right out of the box.

FILTER: Serving up a gentle treble filter, the Tone control cuts treble at its minimum and adds a trebly topnote to the final product at its maximum.

TRIM: This knob controls the amount of gain from the preamp itself, as the knob adjusts a variable resistance from within the circuit.