Introducing the Catalinbread Soft Focus Gold (Special Edition), designed for the modern musician seeking a unique and versatile sound. This pedal offers a blend of distortion and overdrive, with a warm and responsive tone that will elevate your playing to the next level. Upgrade to the Special Edition for enhanced features and a stunning gold finish.
The Soft Focus patch on the Yamaha FX500 was widely used in the ‘90s by early shoegaze bands, most notably Slowdive on Souvlaki. With its roots in that patch, the Catalinbread Soft Focus is intended to be an instant shoegaze button, while addressing the most glaring issues of the original unit: no mix control, a sub-par preamp, and a ghastly tone-sucking bypass signal. At its heart, the Soft Focus is a heavily modified plate reverb with adjustable time, which is subsequently split into three paths.
One path contains a multi-voiced chorus modulator, another features a well-appointed octave-up mixed in with the reverb, and the third path leaves the reverb untouched. The Mod knob controls the rate of the chorus on path one, and the Symphony knob controls the level of the octave on path two. All controls are "coupled" to the tone of the reverb to give users an expansive playing field of sounds to discover and fine tune.
The Soft Focus is not an exact recreation but was exhaustively compared with Catalinbread's own FX500; the difference is that a fairly generic fixed-time digital delay is present on the Soft Focus patch. Catalinbread found that leaving this feature intact ate into the circuit’s memory just a little too much for such little payoff, so they leave that addition to you and your favourite delay.
Key Features:
- Based on a famous patch used by quintessential '90s shoegaze bands, including Slowdive
- Essentially a heavily modified plate reverb with tweakable modulation and more
- Expands on the original patch’s functionality while addressing some flaws by adding a mix control and improving the bypassed signal quality
- 3 sections: chorus modulation, octave-up for reverb shimmer, and straightforward reverb
- Mix control lets you retain dry signal for better control over articulation
Got questions?
Head to our contact page or give us a call on 02 9449 8487 and our friendly team will be able to assist you.
