Schaller Tremolo TR-68

Having recently bought on of these little analogue beasts I thought I’d better do a review.
There doesn’t seem to be too much information on the web about them despite plenty of excellent comments in pedal forums from owners there didn’t seem to be any detail.

According to the Schaller web site these have been in production since 1957 and still basically use the same design, which explains the premise for the delicious tremolo sounds.

There seems to have been a few alterations to the device over the past 50 years, the main point was some models have an LED on/off indicator.
Schaller are still making these little monsters now with the metal stomp switch, whereas the originals have a plastic switch.

I have assumed the model I tested was a late 1970s early 1980s device, since it made in West Germany.

There are four controls; on/off stomp switch, speed toggle switch, amplitude and frequency knobs. The on/off is self explanatory, however the other three are not so since they all affect the oscillator signal and all related.

The Speed sets the speed of the Freq and Amp to either Fast or Slow.
The Frequency is how fast the signal is modulated or tremolo-ed and Amplitude is how great the level of the frequency is. As you can see all three controls effect how much tremolo sound you will get.

The pedal is true bypass so your tone is clear when it is off, it must be noted that when you’re not using the pedal unplug you ¼ jacks else when you return the battery will be drained flat.

The oscillator is a sine wave based one so this is a very organic sounding tremolo. This is in contrast most modern tremolos, which favour triangle or square wave oscillators; that give a trebly or bass driven end result.

You can only hear oscillator bleed (the sound of the osc when you are not playing) when the speed is fastest, freq and amp are set to highest.
This sound is not unpleasant, and could probably be used to great effect with a synth pedal placed after it or to stop this bleed a noise gate would solve the problem.

On the sounds produced to quote Schaller; “the variation range of the Schaller pedal spans from barely audible to extreme.” Well, ‘extreme’ is probably a German mistranslation but it does definitely give good tremolo sounds at high settings.

The pedal seems to be as loud as the signal you put through, it would therefore be worth adjusting your levels to be inline with the TR68 or maybe have a booster/gain pedal after the TR68 if you have nothing gain related when using it.

There are a few aspects I thought that would niggle or benefit some buyers…

The device is 9 volt battery only, accessible via screwed bottom.
The case is a very hard plastic (so lightweight, won’t rust and unlikely to be broken by a stomp but I wouldn’t trust a drop from a great height).
The enclosure is about an inch longer and half an inch flatter than you standard Boss offering, it also won’t sound like your standard Boss.
No Wet/Dry level, so if you play fast during a slow tremolo setting you cannot hear the guitar as it fades out, e.g. the tremolo is set to 100% wet all the time.
Older models have a plastic stomp switch, however this seems stable.
Lack of On/Off LED indicator on some older models.

Despite all this it’s a great sounding little box, which will sound different from the usual ilk. The niggles may as I suggested actually be benefits for some people and could all probably be corrected by someone with half a head for electronics, especially if this simple looking circuit hasn’t changed since the 1950s.

It’s worth noting that Schaller also made the TR68 as an outsourced pedal for Hofner and Kent, both these models had metal enclosures.