Catalinbread Formula No. 55
The Catalinbread Formula No 55 is the next-generation 5E3 Tweed Deluxe. It is inspired by Foundation Overdrive with an incredible range from Grant Green to Crazy Horse!
Turn your amp into a 100 watt Tweed Deluxe!
Well no, but that’s what it’ll feel like when you plug into your new Catalinbread Formula No. 55!
Big and powerful, yet refined, the Formula No. 55 melts into your amp.
It transforms it into a wide-ranging tweed monster capable of everything. From smokey, clean Grant Green jazz tones all the way to full on raging Crazy Horse excursions!
The old amps from the 50s were primitive beasts and the 5E3 Deluxe was no exception.
Its preamp section lets a lot of low frequencies through. However, then it would encounter an output section that couldn’t handle all that low end.
This often results in a flabby response, especially if you turned the volume up.
In fact, if you look at the manual from an old 50s tweed, it advises you to “turn down the volume should you experience any distortion”.
Of course, a lot of guitarists ignored that advice and cranked it up anyway. Much to Leo’s chagrin, and the sound of rock was born.
The Catalinbread Formula No 55 gives you that huge low-end response. It is, however, specifically voiced for touch-sensitive dynamics and a fat, but tight and punchy sound.
You can play a palm-muted boogie-woogie rhythm pattern, for example.
And if you don’t bear down too hard with your picking attack you’ll get a big chunky, woody sound. The kind of sound that you’d think would flub out if you suddenly started strumming harder.
But start thrashing away and the response will get tighter instead of flubbing out! You just have to try it for yourself to see!
What’ it like in use?
The Formula No 55 is a Foundation Overdrive reproducing the preamp section of the classic Fender tweed 5E3 Deluxe. It uses an all-discrete JFET-based signal path.
The Volume and Tone controls replicate, part for part, the circuitry of the 5E3, giving you an authentic tweed amp response.
The output section is designed to give you lots of punch and volume with a low output impedance to drive your amp perfectly.
Set the Hi-Lo button to “Lo” for the cleaner response of a vintage tweed. “Hi” is like hot rodding your amp by swapping in higher gain tubes.
Like all Catalinbread pedals, no SMD parts are used for the audio circuitry.
Only through-hole components selected for tone and response are used such as carbon composition resistors and premium capacitors.
We hand-build them and we tone-test each one to ensure you get the best we can offer.
CONTROLS:
- MASTER volume control has a heaping helping of output on tap. This allows you to dial in a huge, fat, woody clean tone. Or push your amplifier into overdrive all on it’s own.
- PRESENCE control governs frequencies in the 5khz range. This allows you to tune the top-end response to your particular pickups and amplifier.
- TONE control sounds and behaves just like it does on the actual Deluxe amplifiers. You will notice that as you wind up the VOLUME control that the TONE control’s influence becomes more subtle when the VOLUME is maxed out.
- VOLUME settings, you can set it at noon for the flattest response. To the left of noon for those smoky jazz cleans or crank it up for more barking, greasy upper midrange tones that slice through the mix.
- VOLUME control is essentially your gain control.
It works in concert with the HI/LO switch enabling you to set your maximum desired level of dirt. From squeaky clean to DAMN THAT’S STANKY! Want to clean it up? Simply roll back your guitar’s volume knob!
The HI / LO switch offers two discrete gain modes:
The HI / RED mode is the raging, hot-rodded 12AX7 mode with more gain and saturation. You’ll notice that your pick essentially turns into a ‘throttle’ of sorts – lay off the attack and it cleans up but there’s always that potential there for ‘acceleration’ when you lay into it!
The LO / GREEN mode is lower gain overall – as if your amp were now sporting 12AY7 preamp tubes. Cleaner and more immediate in the pick attack with more ‘bounce’ when you’re chord comping, but still has that fat, juicy harmonic response.
A Note From The Designer
I’ve been designing pedals at Catalinbread since around the beginning of the Obama administration and, wow, now it’s 2017 and I’ve certainly learned a lot over my two terms of designing pedal circuits.
Just as it is with songwriting or guitar playing, as your skills mature you don’t necessarily get more complicated. Rather, your work becomes more refined, more elegant, more essential.
So, when I was informed that some of the parts we were using for our first tweed-inspired design, the Catalinbread Formula No 55, were no longer available and could I approve some substitutions, instead of doing that I jumped at the opportunity to take what I’ve learned and apply it to the concept of a tweed-inspired Foundation Overdrive.
My mantra as I started from scratch with the circuit design was, “I want to be able to go from Grant Green to Neil Young”.
I wanted to make it even more accurate to the 5E3 preamp design and have a wider clean-to-overdriven range.
It needed to have more output and I wanted it to feel even better to play, and also stack even better with other pedals.
I dove into the breadboarding process with all this in mind.
What happened?
After two or so months of intensive development, which means sitting in front of a breadboard with a guitar in hand and playing and tweaking the circuit until it SOUNDED right and it FELT right, I emerged with a simple, elegant circuit that has the widest range of clean-to-dirty yet.
Thanks for considering the Catalinbread Formula No. 55 for your pedal board. Please check it out and play one for yourself and I hope you will find it as rewarding to play as it was for me to develop.
Power
Runs on battery or 9vDC – 18vDC centre negative supply. Draws 5ma (9V) 10ma (18V)
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