New Catalinbread Tribute Parametric Overdrive Guitar Effects Pedal

From Catalinbread:

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 an obscenely powerful and flexible tone control. The back end of the Tribute pays—ahem—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.

Controls
TONE: After dialing in the Freq[uency], use this 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; this means that nothing is boosted or cut regardless of Freq position. Clicking the Tone knob to noon effectively removes the VariOboost component.

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

FREQ: 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.

DRIVE: 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: 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.

Designer's Notes
I originally built the "rough draft" of this pedal for my dear friend Tom Keithly years ago. As good as it was, it wasn't perfect. When it came time to design the Tribute, I thought "we have so many pedals that sound like other amps, but what about your amp?" I got hold of the prototype and took it back to the drawing board, stripped it down to a component level and markedly improved every aspect of it.

Firstly, despite the dual-ganged Drive control, the Tribute is not based on one of those "K-style" overdrives. However, I did borrow one thing from that circuit: the charge pump. +18V and -9V (27V rail-to-rail) is just about the maximum I could push the charge pump while allocating enough current to supply the rest of the circuit. The front end of the Tribute is front-loaded with a very powerful transistorized buffer circuit, producing an extremely transparent and warm rendition of your dry tone. It also runs at +18V internally. The second half of the Tribute runs on the same supercharged 27 R2R volts for a high-headroom version of our original VariOboost circuit.

Power Supply
The Tribute ONLY accepts a 9V center-negative DC power supply capable of supplying at least 50mA of current. Plugging in anything other than this (center-positive, AC, higher voltage) will damage the pedal. Plugging in the wrong supply will void the warranty.

Measurements
Input impedance: 1.6M
Output impedance: 8K
Current draw: 50mA
Dimensions: 4.33" x 2.36" x 1.96" (110mm x 60mm x 50mm)
Weight: 0.5lbs/227g

NAME: Tribute Parametric Overdrive
TYPE: Overdrive + Parametric EQ