Catalinbread Soft Focus // Guitar Pedal Demo

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. The original unit had a very plug-and-play approach, offering 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. One path contains a “symphonic” 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. Our Soft Focus is not an exact recreation but was exhaustively compared with our own FX500; the difference is that a fairly generic fixed-time digital delay is present on the Soft Focus patch. We found that leaving this feature intact ate into the patch’s memory just a little too much for such little payoff, so we leave that addition to you and your favorite delay. Catalinbread Soft Focus: https://www.zzounds.com/a--3979288/it... Guitars: Fidelity Guitars Stellarosa Lite II: https://bit.ly/FIDELITYGUITARS Walsh Guitars Yadah: https://bit.ly/WALSHGUITARS Abernethy Guitars Sonic Empress: https://bit.ly/ABERNETHY Baum Guitars Conquerer 59: https://bit.ly/BAUMGUITARS Amp: Silktone Amp: http://bit.ly/silktone Recording Rig: Universal Audio Apollo X16 https://www.zzounds.com/a--3979288/it... Manley Force https://www.zzounds.com/a--3979288/it... Universal Audio 4-710d https://www.zzounds.com/a--3979288/it... Golden Age Pre-73 https://www.zzounds.com/a--3979288/it... Warm Audio EQP-WA https://www.zzounds.com/a--3979288/it... Tech 21 SansAmp RBI https://www.tech21nyc.com/products/sa... Drawmer DL241 https://www.drawmer.com Vintage DBX 160A (pair) Yamaha HS7 Monitors https://www.zzounds.com/a--3979288/it... Guitar Amp Mics: AKG C 414 XLS https://www.zzounds.com/a--3979288/it... Cascade Fathead https://www.cascademicrophones.com Avantone CV-12 (room mic) https://www.zzounds.com/a--3979288/it... Vocal Mic: Warm Audio WA-47 https://www.zzounds.com/a--3979288/it... 0:00 Intro 0:43 In the Mix 2:57 Controls 3:41 Clean 6:16 Dirty 7:38 Closing Thoughts #demosinthedark #guitar #guitarpedals