Pigtronix Tremvelope Demo

A little while back Pigtronix contacted me asking if we’d be interested in demo’ing a pedal of theirs.  I’ve definitely highlighted their products in the past. They make absolutely great pedals, so I was very interested in what they wanted to send over. About a week later I received the Pigtronix Tremvelope.

The Pigtronix Tremvelope is a tremolo on steroids… and really thought out. First off it’s a optical stereo panning tremolo. For this demo we did not demo the stereo or panning capabilities but focused on the tremolo and the envelope aspect of it. The envelope portion of the pedal is what really caught my ear and what separates this tremolo from others. By adjusting the sensitivity, the tremolo will affect your signal as your signal fades, so it reacts to how you play. The speed and depth are affected by how hard you play. Pretty cool!

Pigtronix set the Tremvelope with all the controls to manage all points of the effect. You can turn the envelope feature on/off, as well as controlling the speed, depth, sensitivity and waveform.

Here is the official description from Pigtronix’s web site on the Tremvelope:

Tremvelope puts a new spin on a classic effect. This tremolo pedal allows the dynamics of your playing to change the speed and depth of the effect. The result brings traditional sound to a whole new level that is intuitive, engaging and totally addictive.

Tremvelope is a versatile, high fidelity optical tremolo with stereo panning outputs. The Tremvelope’s fat sounding audio path is modulated by SPEED, DEPTH and WAVEFORM controls. When the envelope is switched on, the tremolo effect is influenced by what you play. The SPEED and DEPTH knobs can each be assigned to increase or decrease in response to the strength of the signal coming from your instrument. These changes start from where the knobs are set and independently move in the assigned direction.

The ACCELERATION switch adjusts the response time of the tremolo to changes in your playing and the SENSITIVITY knob provides control over the amount of increase it takes to create changes in the tremolo settings. Expression pedal inputs for speed, and vol / pan add external foot control to this animated beast of a pedal. There is also a TRIGGER input for running the Tremvelope late in an effects chain but still allowing your clean signal (or even a different instrument entirely) to control the envelope directly.

Go forth and modulate!

For this demo, we have Jimmy Rolle and he’s using his American Fender Standard Stratocaster into his Germino Lead 55 head through a Marshall 4×12 cabinet. There is nothing between the guitar and amp except for the Pigtronix Tremvelope. Audio is captured using a Fathead Ribbon Microphone and a Shure SM57 Mic, both close mic’d.

You can listen to the high quality MP3 clip via SoundCloud

As you can hear, this is a great sounding tremolo that takes the tremolo effect into a new direction. I can see some guitarists going nuts for this thing. If the Pigtronix Tremvelope is something you are interested it is available for $249.00 at Amazon.

Please check out Pigtronix’s site for their other great products, as well as liking them on Facebook to see what they’re up to.