The Cloak by Catalinbread is a no-nonsense, room-style shimmer reverb. What I like about most Catalinbread pedals is that they are simple, to-the-point utilitarian music production tools: a couple of useful knobs and that’s it, which is perfect for simple minds like myself.
At its core this is a room reverb, and that room/cave-like character together with smooth shimmer makes for a great atmospheric, mystical sound. The shimmer here adds three orders of harmonics into the reverb tails, and the high-cut control keeps things from getting unpleasant no matter how far you push it. If you’ve never dabbled in shimmer reverb, this is a perfect introduction.
The four knobs sit in two rows. Top row, left to right: Room Size, High Cut. Bottom row, left to right: Mix, Shimmer.
Room Size controls the length of the reverb tails and also feeds gain into the reverb engine, so larger settings get denser as well as longer. Mix is your dry/wet blend. Shimmer dials in how much of the octave-up harmonic effect sits on top of the reverb. High Cut is a low-pass filter over those harmonics: opened up, the shimmer gets airy and bright; swept down toward zero, it smooths the overtones into something warmer and more diffuse.
In the demo above I’ve set up sweeps for the High Cut, Room Size, and Shimmer knobs so you can hear exactly what each one does to the same riff.
The five static presets map the Cloak’s range. “Mystique Shimmer” (Room Size 8, Shimmer 7, High Cut 7) is the sweet spot: long tails, full shimmer, and the High Cut open enough to let the harmonics breathe. “Piercing Shimmer” tightens the room down to 2 and sets Shimmer to 5 for a shorter, more present sparkle. “Drowned In Reverb” pushes Room Size to 10 and Mix to 8 with Shimmer at zero, so you get the reverb algorithm on its own without any octave content. “Sunken Strings” keeps Shimmer low at 2 with High Cut pulled back to 3, producing a subtle, darker texture. “Creepy Reverb” sets both Shimmer and High Cut to zero, leaving just a large, unfiltered room with no shimmer at all.
The Walrus Audio Slö is the natural comparison: both are ambient reverbs with some form of pitch content in the tails. The Slö offers three distinct algorithms (Dark adds a sub-octave, Rise is an auto-swell, Dream is a latch-capable modulated reverb), three modulation waveforms, and a dedicated Sustain footswitch. It is a multi-tool. The Cloak does one thing: room reverb with blendable shimmer and a high-cut filter to tame it. Four knobs, no waveform selector, no sustain switch.
The tradeoff is real. If you want to sculpt the shimmer amount and high-frequency content precisely, and if a single great-sounding algorithm is all you need, the Cloak delivers that with less to manage. If you want the sub-octave reverb of Dark mode, Rise’s swell behavior, or Dream’s latch, the Slö is the one to get. The Cloak also runs up to 18V for extra headroom, while the Slö is 9V only.
Both pedals offer a bypass choice, though in different ways: the Cloak has selectable true bypass or buffered bypass via an internal switch; the Slö is buffered bypass with a selectable trails mode.
Ambient, post-rock, and atmospheric players who want a shimmer reverb that stays musical rather than overwhelming will find the Cloak very easy to live with. The high-cut control is genuinely useful: you can have the Shimmer knob at 7 and still dial back the harshness to taste, which is not something every shimmer reverb lets you do. It also works well as a set-and-forget reverb with shimmer completely off, as the “Drowned In Reverb” and “Creepy Reverb” presets show.
The honest caveat: this is a mono pedal with a single reverb character. If you want multiple algorithms or modulation waveform options, look at the Slö; if you need stereo output, the Slöer covers that.
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Get detailed specs on Catalinbread's website
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