Fulltone Supa-Trem

The Fulltone Supa-Trem is a tremendously good pedal. At first I balked at paying this much for a tremolo. Now I do not regret it at all.

The interface and feature set are seriously well designed. Let's take a look. The big knobs, of course, are rate, which determines the rate of the tremolo, and mix, which controls the amount of tremolo applied, depth, in other words.

The on off footswtich is dead center. To the left is a "Speed" switch that halves the current tremolo rate (very cool feature) and also, a blinking LED indicating the current tempo rate. Obviously with any cyclic effect like tremolo or vibrato, a nice analog tap tempo feature would be ideal, but those are rare and expensive for a reason. The blinking LED is surprisingly effective at helping you roughly sync the effect in live performance, and I do find syncing to be important, more so the more dramatic the effect.

On the right is teh hard/soft switch. "Hard" produces a steep square wave tremolo. Soft, as we will see in a moment is adjustable, and not just via the Mix knob.

Inside are two trim pots. One adjusts overall output (would LOVE to have that on top, even it is a tiny knob on the side, but I am sure it is a real estate and cost issue.) The other trim pot fine tunes the severity of the wave's slope. I set mine to pretty mild. I've got "Hard" there if I need a really dramatic Trem.

The build quality is...Fulltone. Say no more. Over built.

The sound quality in terms of basic robustness and fullness is so good that people figured out a hack to use it even when tremolo is not desired. Set the output internal trim pot high or to max. Set the wave slope internal trim pot to its softest setting. Now, when the pedal is on and mix is set to to zero you get almost no perceptible trem effect, just the volume boost and tone thickening that the pedal undeniable provides. There is not an awful lot of gain on tap, but if you are playing with a small vintage amp, you can set it so that the boost is juuuuust enough to drive the amp to breakup. And You've still got all the Mix knob settings to dial in trem level when you want, and the Hard mode for un-subtle effects.

I dock it a few points in features because I CRAVE having those two internal trim pots being external in some way--I find them so useful and would love to have them in reach all the time, especially since I do use this a very subtle boost pedal.

Also one note: several people I know, including myself, have mistaken on internal trim part for the other because of a layout quirk in the manual, so when you go to set those make sure you have correctly identified pot 1 and pot 2.

SUPERIOR pedal, best I own.