SFT

Catalinbread developed the SFT as a bass overdrive pedal to serve as an emulator for the famous Ampeg SVT line of amps. Just as many guitar players took a liking to the Fender Bassman amp (which was also designed for electric bass), and just as the Bassman served as the basis for the Marshall JTM, many guitar players have also taken a liking to Ampeg amps and used them for guitar as well.

Controls

Image from Motor City Guitar

• Knob 1 - "Treble": Turn the knob increasingly clockwise to increase the treble frequencies.
• Knob 2 - "Bass": Turning the knob clockwise increases the bass frequencies.
• Knob 3 - "Volume": Turning the knob clockwise increases the volume output on the pedal.
• Knob 4 - "Gain": Turning the knob clockwise increases the amount of distortion available and output by the pedal.
• Footswitch 1 - "On/Off": This toggles the pedal between being engaged (on), and bypassed (off).

Not unlike the Catalinbread Manx Loaghtan fuzz, the SFT implements a Baxandall tone stack.

NOTE

Newer versions of the SFT have a push-button switch to toggle between "Stones" (up/disengaged) and "Stoner" (pressed down/engaged). Our version is older and does not have this button. According to the latest Catalinbread SFT Owner's Manual, that push button is a gain boost, pushing the button down increases the gain. Our experience is that the gain knob on our earlier model has a wider sweep, enabling all the gain that is available on the latest pedal. We suspect Catalinbread retooled the SFT with a gain potentiometer designed to offer a tighter range, and that range is shifted to "gainier" when the button is depressed.

Bypass: True

The Catalinbread SFT is True Bypass.

General Information

As has been previously mentioned, this pedal was designed primarily for bass, but indiscriminate use of "wrong" music equipment by musicians is marked by promiscuity (in other words, it happens often). Certain bass players have no qualms using keyboard amps, and guitarists using bass amps - especially if the result sounds good. And so on and so on it goes. Sometimes all that matters is that a broke musician can cobble together to make something that sounds good. So that's what they do.

So that having been said, while the SFT was developed primarily as a bass overdrive, when the gain is turned up, and a guitar is plugged in, it not only can do good stoner "volume worship" tones, but it can also get pretty good sounding high-gain distortion as well, which ends up being a surprise to many.

Pedal Manual

http://www.catalinbread.com/manuals/SFTmanual.pdf

Phase Inversion: Uncertain

We're having a really hard time understanding the phase inversion dynamics in this circuit and pedal. If you take a look at the schematic, note that Q2 and Q3 are each accepting the same output from Q1, but then the signal splits and it can go through Q2 and/or Q3 - This means that the only reasonable conclusion we're drawing is that the transistors are both inverting, and keeping the signal original - then the regular and inverted signals are being processed and combined back together again, meaning that there should be a good amount of phase cancellation. This may take some more sophisticated understanding of signal flow.

Schematic ID	Electronic Part	Action	Phase State
Q1	2N5457	Inverts	Inverted
Q2	2N5457	Does Not Invert	Inverted
Q3	2N5457	Does Not Invert	Inverted
Q4	2N5457	Inverts	Not Inverted
Q5	2N5457	Does Not Invert	Not Inverted
Q6	2N5457	Inverts	Inverted
Q7	2N5457	Does Not Invert	Inverted
Q8	2N5457	Does Not Invert	Inverted

Schematic

Schematic obtained from this discussion board thread: http://musikding.rocks/wbb/index.php/Thread/16285-Catalinbread-SFT/?pageNo=12

The entry on the linked thread claims that the original schematic was downloaded from: http://juansolo.demon.co.uk/stompage/schematics/Catalinbread/SFT_Schematic.png which is no longer available as a site. Even "demon.co.uk" is apparently gone. It's a bit amusing in that there's no "Juansolo" that we've been able to find that corresponds to a British instrument effects pedal enthusiast with a goofy-fied Star Wars nickname. We do know that Juansolo was affiliated with Rej Bernier from GrindCustomsFX.com, but GrindCustomsFX.com also seems to have gone neglected too...

Finally, we have found a particular "Juan Solo", but he is a singer from Mexico. He can be found at http://www.juansolo.net, and Youtube, and Twitter, and Instagram, etc, etc, etc... Clearly not the guy we'd be looking out for.

Believed to be public domain. Unaware of any copyright claims. Juansolo's pedal website is gone.

Artists

We are currently unaware of any artists actively using the pedal now, or who have in the past.

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Additional Sources

• https://youtu.be/_Fp7n5FgFQk