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 like it loud? Good thing! The Volume control gives you plenty of the good stuff.

Drive Control

The core of the Tribute is an exacting buffer followed by a drive circuit that is governed by a dual-gang potentiometer. Turning the Drive knob affects two parameters at once instead of just one. In the Tribute, those two controls are clean blend and overdrive gain. When Drive is rolled all the way down, you get your pristinely buffered clean signal with a gentle treble filter. When it’s all the way up, maximum gain is achieved with no clean signal present. Anywhere in between gives you a carefully balanced clean-drive combo 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 is then cut or boosted by the Tone control.

Tone Control

After dialing in the Frequency, use this Tone control to boost or cut the selected frequency by 12dB. This control is equipped with a center-detent potentiometer. Just click it to noon and the frequency is flat which means that nothing is boosted or cut regardless of Freq's position. Clicking the Tone knob to noon effectively removes the VariOboost component.

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