Catalinbread Tribute / Low-gain OD / VariOboost

The Tribute is an all-analog circuit that combines an extremely expressive high-headroom drive engine with a powerful and flexible tone control. The back end of the Tribute pays 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? The Tribute can do all that and more. The core of the Tribute is an exacting buffer followed by a drive circuit that is governed by a dual-gang potentiometer. This means that the Drive knob affects two parameters at once: clean blend and overdrive gain. When Drive is down, you get your pristinely buffered clean signal with a gentle treble filter. When it’s up, maximum gain is achieved with no clean signal present. Anywhere in between gives you a carefully balanced clean-drive combo.