Silvertone Twin Trem review – “if you want the best, this is pretty much it”
$299/£249, silvertoneguitars.com
With any type of classic effect, you’ll find snobs who insist that you can’t possibly get the full authentic essence of the sound without using the original thing, which is usually some sort of gigantic and extremely temperamental bit of studio gear. Think about it, reverb, delay, hell even drive in some cases. And then there’s tremolo – there are plenty of guitar players who will tell you that if you want to get yourself an authentic tremolo sound, it needs to come built into a vintage tube amp burning away at maximum volume.
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Quite a few of those tremolo connoisseurs will point to the old department store favourite Silvertone amplifiers of the 1960s as being something of a holy grail for authentic tones, but they’re not exactly reliable or robust enough to trust on stage every night… but what if there was another way?
Enter then the reborn Silvertone (which has been making affordable reproductions of the company’s golden era catalogue guitars for a few years now) and Keller, Texas boutique effects maker Jackson Audio. The pair previously teamed up to produce the Twin Twelve, a pedal preamp version of the legendary 1484 amp, and now we have a second Twin pedal – this time focusing on a tremolo effect.
Silvertone Twin Trem – what is it?
The Twin Trem combines two separate tremolo effects in one dual-switch enclosure. These are not digital recreations, however, they’re all-analogue. There’s a fully functioning optical tremolo circuit on the left side and a fully functional harmonic tremolo on the right side.
The effects can either be used separately or together, and to emphasise quite how separate these circuits are, they even have independent input and output jacks on the top so you can fit them into your chain independently should you so wish. If you don’t then you can just run an input into the first in and an output out of the second so they’ll run together in series.
As you’d expect for two independent circuits you get separate controls for speed and depth for each pedal, plus a mini-knob for the volume of each. Other than that, its robust metal chassis is pretty much the same as the Twin Twelve.
Image: Press
Silvertone Twin Trem – usability and sounds
Tremolo is a relatively simple effect, but having two separate circuits in one small unit still requires a certain amount of smart design to be usable, and thankfully the Twin Trem has that in spades.
For starters, the single status LED in the middle of the pedal has three colours for you to instantly tell at a glance what’s active – red for harmonic, blue for optical and purple (nice) for both. What’s more, the mini-volume controls for each pedal are also illuminated in the colour of their reference effect, and they also pulse at the speed of the tremolo – a nice touch.
Having the ability to independently route each effect is also less of a gimmick than it might seem – I really enjoyed patching my harmonic side out to a reverb and then back into the optical side, and it also gives you the flexibility to flip it up and run the optical effect first in the chain if you don’t mind a bit of ugly patch-cabling. Personally I preferred running the harmonic into a delay and reverb and then back into the optical and then into a drive pedal before it hit the amp.
In terms of sounds, I’ve played a fair few vintage Silvertones and find them to be a bit of a mixed bag on the tremolo side – some of them sound great and full, but others can be quite anaemic. Thankfully, both of the sounds here are a great deal removed from that – they’re very different, but still full and lush, warm and expressive, with no latency or bad ambient sounds. What’s really special though is the ability to combine the two sounds in one – the added tonal modulation of a harmonic tremolo pairs beautifully with the straight volume-based throb of the optical to create something really magical.
Whenever a brand claims to be capturing the authentic sound of something from an amplifier in pedal form, I tend to be a bit sceptical about it – physics has a part to play in a lot of this stuff and many of the sounds we know and love are intimately connected to the experience of moving air in a real sense.
The Twin Trem doesn’t just capture the sound of an authentic old amp tremolo circuit – it surpasses it in many ways. As you turn the rate up and add more and more of the effect, you don’t get any of the weird noises or artefacts that you’d get from an amp – just bigger, bolder tremolo sweeps. When you consider that in a very real sense this is two vintage tremolo pedals in one too, even the price looks pretty reasonable – if you want the best, this is pretty much it.
Silvertone Twin Trem – alternatives
If you don’t mind your incredibly authentic sounding vintage tremolo sounds coming from an algorithm rather than some analogue circuitry, then the Strymon Flint ($349/£315) is a wonderful pedal – and comes with reverb too. If you don’t mind just one tremolo sound but you want some stereo goodness, Walrus’ Monumental is an impressive and compact beast ($279/£269). Finally, if you want another optical/harmonic tremolo that’s all-analogue, the Fulltone Custom Shop Supa-Trem ($279/£289) has been doing the job for over two decades now.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
