Catalinbread Tribute Low Gain Pedal

Ahoy ahoy, you’ve just accessed the lore of the Tribute, a pedal that literally every guitarist needs. Yes, even you, outlaw country fan, and you, person wearing indecipherable metal logo band shirt. You see, the Tribute is an all-analog circuit that combines an extremely expressive high-headroom drive engine with obscenely powerful and flexible tone control. The back end of the Tribute pays—ahem—an homage to one of our oldest designs, the VariOboost. This circuit gives you a supercharged one-band parametric EQ in lieu of a tone control for some serious studio-esque tone sculpting power. Playing rhythm? Dial-in a low-mids grunt and boost that band for some fat chords. Playing leads? Flip that thing and inject some sparkle into your sound. Want to fake a cocked wah pedal to nail your cover of “Money for Nothing”? Want to simulate some Peter Green-esque out-of-phase pickups? Want your single-coils to sound like humbuckers? What about the other way around? Sure, why not? Want all of that and more? It’s time to play Tribute.

Volume Control

Do you enjoy it when your music is loud? That's fortunate! You can get a lot of the excellent stuff using the Volume control.

Drive Control

The core of the Tribute is an exacting buffer, which is followed by a driving circuit controlled by a dual-gang potentiometer. When you turn the Drive knob, it impacts two parameters at once rather than just one. The clean blend and overdrive gain are the two parameters of the Tribute. Users get pristinely buffered clean signal with a soft treble filter when Drive is rolled all the way down. Maximum gain is achieved with no clean signal present when it's all the way up. Anywhere in the center provides a well-balanced clean-drive combination that lets your tone breathe at all positions.

Frequency Control

This control is part of the original VariOboost circuit, and Freq and Tone work in tandem. Freq selects a frequency between 70Hz and 1.4KHz, which can be adjusted with the Tone control.

Tone Control

Use this Tone control to increase or reduce the selected frequency by 12dB after dialing in the Frequency. A center-detent potentiometer is included with this control. Simply set it to noon, and the frequency will remain flat, meaning that nothing will be boosted or cut regardless of the location of Freq. The VariOboost component is effectively removed by setting the Tone knob to noon.

*Note: The Tribute pedal only accepts a 9V center-negative DC power supply capable of supplying at least 50mA of current.