"If you follow our Instagram (please do! we try to make it worth your while) you might have seen when we made this post. A collection of guitar picks we’d included in the packaging had made a mess of a batch of our Parabola tremolo pedals, somehow chemically reacting to our finishes and giving the pedals a distinctly Gorbachevian set of birthmarks.

We were vexed, downright flummoxed, and infuriated – but if you can’t turn chicken sh*t into chicken salad, you can at least turn lemons into lemonade.

The week before, our shop manager Ben had acquired this incredible vintage Silvertone 1482 amplifier. It sounded gnarly and smelled even worse. The riffs were stanky, but the amp itself smelled. We struggled to come up with the best analogies for it. I think the winner might have been Dylan saying “that amp smells like a scholarship to a nursing home.” It was so musty and mildewy that the tubes were covered in gunk that would activate like the world’s worst Febreze plug-in once the amp was turned on and warmed up.

But damn, if it didn’t sound great. Loose, greasy, and wild, with a distinctly greasy and woofy overdrive and a tremolo circuit that added a distinct rumble of danger to the mix. After hearing that old tube amp, and looking at our birthmarked blems, we had an idea.

Our original Parabola was subtitled “Solid State Tremolo” because that was factually accurate: it’s a classic two transistor analog LFO that also reminded us of cheap 70s solid state amps with tremolo that despite it all, had a vibe.

So we decided to re-work this batch of pedals into a limited run to give our customers a taste of that old Silvertone tube amp’s fun…a taste, but not the smell! We cranked up the max gain range significantly but maintained the full range response, so it kinda overloads in the low end the same way the amp does. It will give your signal a dose of that “pawnshop score” vibe regardless of how nice an amp you run through – or even if you don’t run through an amp at all. And if you just crank the gain and kill the depth, you get a gnarly, dangerous drive happening."