CATALINBREAD PEDALS

The Catalinbread Super Chili Picoso Boost Pedal

The Super Chili Picoso is Catalinbread’s infamous MOSFET boost. The SCP based on the “MOSFET BOOST” circuit designed by the great Jack Orman. MOSFETs characteristics are great for guitar boost due to their musical sparkle, HiFi response, and immediate feel. The SCP utilizes every advantage of the MOSFET. The Super Chili Picoso Boost has three main functions: -Buffer Mode -Clean Boost Mode -Fat Grit Boost Mode Buffering Mode turn the boost knob down and you have the perfect buffer, high input impedance, very low output impedance and mirror perfect tone presentation. Clean Boost Mode provides upward of 35dB of boost that will help you leap through the mix or drive your amp into a natural overdrive. Fat Grit Boost Mode provides a ton of boost while adding girth and pleasing harmonics that fill-out your tone. The SCP gives you MORE of what you've already got!   
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The Catalinbread Semaphore Tremolo

The Catalinbread Semaphore Tremolo Delivers classic tremolo sounds from the smooth and buttery coaxing of vintage "harmonic vibrato" to more modern aggressive hard chop "repeat percussion". There are of course plenty of nontraditional trem-based sounds too - pulses, swells, blips, & surf amplitude modulation can all be found inside. It wouldn't be a Catalinbread pedal if it didn’t do some weird stuff too, right?

The Catalinbread Semaphore doesn't color your tone, what you put in is what you get out– and since it is analog there is none of that sterile, fake digital clang you get from the "competition". Useful, intuitive features with clear benefits – that is what this pedal is all about. We kept it simple and easy to use with a minimum of tweaking required to find what you’re looking for.

The Semaphore runs off a 9v battery or any good quality 9v/200mA/center-negative tip power supply. It can also be run at 18 volts for increased headroom if desired

The Catalinbread Teaser Stallion Distortion

Catalinbread presents the new and improved Teaser Stallion. This old favorite has been shrunk down to a standard sized enclosure, using a toggle switch for the oscillation circuit instead of a second foot switch. Though the size may have shrunk, the circuit has been amped up, making this lust pent beast even more aggressive and chaotic.

The distortion ranges from mellow to blistering. The feedback loop thickens your tone, adds a unique texture to your sound, and even functions as a controllable synth. This pedal turns heads, offends traditionalists (and cats), but most importantly open doors to truly unique sounds and creative possibility.           

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The Catalinbread Supercharged OD Overdrive

The SuperCharged OD is the audio equivalent of a forced induction high displacement big block make up the heart of the SCOD's "distortion power plant". It is designed like a tube amp, fine tuned cascaded gain stages cause the distortion, not diodes. Catalinbread knew they had a winner when the Supercharged OD made a 5W 6V6 amp push air like a full stack.

The tone for leads is balanced, focused, and sustains forever. Chords are chunky, tight, and resonant. Turn the GAIN and CONTOUR down for hi-wattage British sounds. Increasing the GAIN brings you into more modern saturation territories without un-natural compression. Crank the CONTOUR knob and you tighten up the low end adding resonance of a sealed 4x12.

Ottava Magus II Fuzz Pedal

Most octave pedals in the past have been thin and glitchy, you needed to run them into a cooking amplifier to get any beef or sustain out of them and even then it was a challenge fighting the thing to ride out a note.  When Catalinbread set about developing the original Ottava Magus they wanted to address those issues and make a pedal that was more friendly to use. With the Ottave Magus II they added a new Saturation control which alters the attack response allowing you to morph your pick attack into a more saturated (duh!) and elastic feel. It also adds some more gain into the mix that all the cool kids are into nowadays.

Like the original, you can bend a note and hold it without it dropping out using any pickup you wish and playing anywhere on the neck you want. The input sensitivity is the same, so you’ll get a variety of tones just by using your guitar’s volume knob. Those dissonant double stops still turn into huge polyphonic screams, and it’s still capable of the subtle ‘flutey’ high octave tones or crazier full-on ring mod sounds - and now you can mix in more gain using the Saturation control for ’60s ’Thumper Fuzz’ type stuff too.

Catalinbread SFT Bass Overdrive

When Catalinbread originally set out to make the best Bass overdrive ever they never imagined that it could also sound so amazing with guitar – but then they got to thinking about some of the classic late ‘60s/early ‘70s ‘Ya-Yas’ era tones and thought we should take a stab at them. And heck while they were at it they thought it would be really cool if it worked for the more modern drop tuned heavy stuff too. Made sense since those tones were due in large part to guitars being played through amps designed for bass, right? And what about the Bass tones? We wanted a pedal that FINALLY let you control the amount of grind solely based on your finger attack. You know the feeling - full and rich and clean when you brush lightly and some nice wooly edge when you dig in. At the other end of the sonic spectrum we wanted a drive pedal that could deliver bone-crunching grind and still hold together without sounding thin or turning into a sludgy mess no matter how hard you hit it.  This is a great pedal for guitars and basses.        

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Catalinbread WIIO Overdrive

Sheer raw power. Dynamics that feel like a roundhouse kick to the chest. Incredibly responsive clean up with the flick of the wrist. This is the WIIO. The WIIO is an overdrive inspired by the powerfully unforgiving British amps from the ‘70s. Its all right there at your fingertips - your picking attack determines how much gain is delivered to the speakers. There is none of the typical compression found in most other overdrives to hide behind or to soften the blow - this is brass knuckle to the jaw type sonic impact we‘re talking here - you literally feel as though you plugged straight into the power section. Like the amps, the WIIO has a wide freq spread so if your amp can deliver you’ll be rewarded with crisp clear highs and a very full tight low end. Lower gain settings are very clean and linear - you can hear every pick stroke and fingerprint, and the headroom allows for some very rich sounds when using modulation pedals. As you crank up the Gain the breakup is aggressive, powerful, punchy, and immediate then it decays quickly to a full clean sound. The midrange bark particular to the amps on which we based the WIIO is right there too as you crank it up. This pedal cuts like a broadsword so no need to fear being lost in the fray. It respects the integrity of your pickups, and loves being slammed with other overdrives or your favorite fuzz too. The EQ controls on the WIIO are interactive with the Gain knob - increasing the Treble will not only give you more highs but also more grit to the gain. Likewise, increasing the Bass control will not only deliver more lows but will also alter the feel and attack. There are great rewards to be had once you’re able to grab hold of the reins and attempt to ride the mighty beast.

The Catalinbread Formula No5 Overdrive

The Catalinbread Formula No. 5 was inspired by old tweed amps, most notably the 5E3 circuit. The character of the 5E3 is very unique. It has very minimal power filtering, low plate voltages, elemental tone stack, and does next to nothing to control the low end between gain stages, not to mention the under-rated output transformer and speaker. The entire system runs inefficiently resulting in a loose bass, greasy mids, cutting treble, and incredible grit – none of these qualities were ideal or intentional back in the day. In spite of this, over the past five decades the amp inspired some of the coolest, most sought after guitar tones ever recorded. We’ve captured the unique qualities of these amps in the Formula № 5. For this circuit we felt cascaded JFET gainstages yielded the best result. They have a softer sound than MOSFETs. JFETs also have much more natural attack/decay than diode clipped rigs which are pingy on the attack and fizzy on the decay. We chose capacitor types that enhanced the midrange and burnished the treble. We felt this behavior was crucial to reproduce for an accurate tweed-in-a-box. The Catalinbread Formula No 5 can run at 9V or 18V. At moderate gain settings you will find an increased bass tightness and volume @ 18V. The difference between a great dirt box and the average run of the mill distortion pedal is how well it respects your pickup position.

The Catalinbread Heliotrope

What do you call an effect that isn’t quite a Bit Crusher, or an Octave, or a Harmonizer, or a Ring Modulator, or a Lo-Fi dirt box/fuzz – but a bit of a blend of each? Yeah – we don’t know either, so we came up with “Harmonic Pixelator”. The Heliotrope is an "analog bit crusher" of sorts. Since there is no analog to digital conversion happening it isn't a true bit crusher, hence the name "Harmonic Pixelator". It works with guitar, bass, keyboards, etc. We designed the pedal to be intuitive and easy to use even though what it is capable of sonically is actually quite complex and varied. 1 The Heliotrope can be powered from a 9v-18v adapter or a 9v battery. At 18v you’ll notice more output volume and headroom is available.  A very cool pedal for bass or guitar.

The Catalinbread Pareidolia Harmonic Mesmerizer

Harmonic Mesmerizer is Catalinbread's newest development. It has an amazing sound !!! Truly the “sinewave” Brownface tremolo sound, folks are looking for. We used this as the starting point adding a lot more range of speeds and much more depth. The controls are simple, but powerful. The sine wave LFO is controlled by two knobs, DEPTH and RATE. The Depth control is able to go from just a slight shimmer in your sound to undulating ocean waves. The Rate ranges from molasses slow phase sweeps to lush tremolo and skittery chops. The Volume, obviously, controls the loudness and was designed to pull double duty as a fantastic boost when the Depth is off. Like most other Catalinbread pedals, the Catalinbread Pareidolia was designed for both 9v and 18v operation, the latter giving a more pronounced up-front sound to the effect. We worked very hard tuning this pedal, and the result is a complex modulation that is quite literally a mesmerizing effect, where you stop thinking and just start playing. It frees your mind to be creative. It is hypnotic, yet unlike over the top modulation effects the Pareidolia doesn't overpower your sound, allowing your playing to shine through. And unlike other modulation pedals it is less picky in its placement with other pedals.

What you hear is quite literally mesmerizing. Your brain has multiple points of modulation to listen for, phase shift, amplitude, and frequency band. When you play a held out chord your brain hears things that are not actually happening, such as the LFO sometimes seems to be speeding up and slowing down. In reality the LFO is staying the same speed, but because the sound is so complex your mind is attempting to make sense of all the variables. I liken it to seeing faces in clouds, in wood grain, or on Mars – thus the name Pareidolia.