Tone Report Weekly 185 | Page 13

family is holding up fine, but it’s been a challenging year, as you might have guessed. We have had to deal with estate and probate issues that may have distracted us a bit, but we have tried to stay focused on what we do best, which is to come up with great pedals. To that end, we worked on our most ambitious development effort yet throughout 2016 until we went to Winter NAMM in 2017, which as you know is the Belle Epoch Deluxe and the Epoch Pre. So that’s what we’ve spent most of the last year doing, and we’re really proud of that work. But the thing is, it’s been difficult because we lost our founder and comrade, Nicholas Harris. But Nic used to joke all the time (especially in the last couple of years) that he had worked himself out of a job by building this team around him. I don’t know if it was by intention, design, or default, but he kind of ended up doing that, as it turns out, because we basically have a full team in place that enables Catalinbread to run at full speed, even without him. I, for that matter, have been the head of R&D, and the primary designer of our pedals for quite a few years now anyway, and so we’ve been able to continue to do what we do pretty seamlessly. And our philosophy for what we do, and of our pedals, which is creating dynamic, responsive instruments specifically for guitar (although they can be used for lots of other things) comes largely from me: one of the pickiest motherfuckers around. A large percentage of our current products are already of my design. ToneReport.com 13