So I recently got back from a vacation to England and had the chance to wander around the famous Denmark street area in London. Close by is Macaris music, home of the famous Sola Sound company. As a sort of "souvenir" I bought a Colorsound Tremolo as they were reduced to £99 from the usual £129:
It certainly has a unique vibe to it. As I understand it the design is by the same guy who designed the Vox AC30. It's not quite square wave, not quite sine - sort of in between. Certainly a great throb to this thing.
Dead simple controls, rate and depth and for some reason the input and output jacks are reversed. The controls aren't really that linear. A lot of the main function seems to be found 11 - 3 o'clock.
The tremolo effect can get quite choppy on the deeper settings and obviously more subtle as you roll back the depth. The rate seems geared in the more amp tremolo range ie you won't find any ring mod hyper speed settings here. The slow is also a more real life slow at its lowest setting. No long on - off - on - off mode here. This isn't really a negative thing; the range of speed is within a completely useful field.
One major flaw in the design is the battery access, very hard to get into this thing. One small screw either side of the pedal locks the base tray into place. However, the tray doesn't simply drop out when you remove these. Indeed, it could probably function quite well without the screws! You have to sort of pry open the base from the pedal. Then you can change the battery.
I don't use batteries as a rule of thumb, preferring to work from my Pedal Power and since this pedal is battery powered only I've taken matters into my own hands and installed a power jack wired to a battery snap:
Now I can plug and play without worries and if I ever wanted to run a battery it's just a matter of unclipping the battery snap.
To give a more real sense of scale here's a pic of the pedal next to my Valcoder:
All in all a funky retro looking device with quite a cool mojo vibe to it. It's probably the largest tremolo I've ever come across and the design itself could probably fit quite easily in a Phase 100 sized enclosure but I think that misses the point. I'm very much a tremolo fan - if only Matamp offered the option on their amps!
