Fulltone Catalyst - Manual

Model CT-1 Model CT-1
Catalyst
Catalyst
Catalyst Catalyst
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Fuzz pedals are generally simple circuits, and often-times these simple circuits end up being the most exciting, interactive, and musical sounding ones
due, in part, to the absence of filters, restrictions...governors, if you will. They Scream, Roar, and allow us to express the more primal/less refined side of
our personalities, which is what I love about them! But fuzzes can be very quirky. They can be picky about temperature, what power supply it will accept,
what type of pickups you can feed it, what comes before them or even what comes after them in a signal chain, all causing frustration and the inability to
get a consistent sound from night to night. It’s for these reasons fuzzes have become widely misunderstood and (often times) dismissed by guitarists who
don’t have the time to learn ways around the quirks or just plain don’t have enough available real estate on their pedalboards to justify the space for (what
can often be) temperamental “one-trick Ponies.” There seems to be two camps..those who get it and those who don’t , as a maker and player of fuzz
pedals for over 20 years I have had years where there wasn’t even a fuzz pedal on my board due to these very same issues.. Now I am pleased to offer
not only a great no-compromise fuzz, but also a great clean Boost, OD, and distortion! Enter Fulltone Catalyst.
Catalyst is a simple circuit, using only discrete F.E.T.’s to achieve its throaty roar, but it also brings something more to the table by virtue of some cool
features which allow it to do things that no other fuzzes can. With its mini-toggle switch set to “SPARK” Catalyst does Clean Boosts, sweeter overdrives
and all sorts of distortion sounds. Want more? Flip the switch to “FLAME” and you’ll be treated to a host of less civil OD’s, unique distortion voicings, and
a plethora of vicious Fuzz sounds, all of which clean up with a twist of your guitar’s volume knob, offering a linear transition from clean to mean. To further
enhance your tonal control, Catalyst offers a pair of very effective low-loss tone controls that set it apart from the masses. Standard Fender or Marshall
style tone stacks (and even many Baxandall tone circuits) end up cutting so much gain that the effect designer has to make-up for this “loss” later in the
circuit, and many times you loose some of the magic in the process. Not so here because Catalyst’s low-loss Bass/Mids knob allows you to dial-out the
flubby low-end with the added bonus of supplying varying amounts of rich midrange when the Bass/Mids knob passes the 3 o’clock mark. This Midrange,
on top of an already wildly-distorted tone, has the effect of increasing sustain to insane proportions as well as breaking you out of the standard super
bright/super bassy FUZZ mold. Need to smooth out the Highs? Simply turn down the Treble mini-knob, a low-loss hi-end roll-off allowing you to shave off
as much of the treble as necessary....enough to use Catalyst into a fairly bright Fender clean amp and still retain a rich tone.
Finally, all Fuzz pedals have wacky input and output impedances, causing them great difficulty in mating-up successfully with wah-wah pedals, Univibe
clones, and even Boss, Ibanez, etc. non-true-bypass “buffered” pedals. Catalyst has none of these issues, sporting a friendly 1 meg Input Impedance and
an astonishingly low 10K output Impedance. When’s the last time you had a fuzz work with a ‘vibe or wah-wah? Things have changed, indeed.