Catalinbread FX40 Soft Focus Shoegaze Reverb Pedal (Black)

Catalinbread FX40 Soft Focus Shoegaze Reverb Pedal (Black)

The Soft Focus patch 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 the 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 circuit’s memory just a little too much for such little payoff, so we leave that addition to you and your favorite delay.

Symph(Symphony)

This mixes in a slight octave effect on the wet reverb signal. While subtle, this shifts the mood and character quite a bit. This is also tied to some frequencies in the reverb for more harmonic content.

Mod

This parameter controls the rate of the multi-voiced chorus and changes some of the frequencies in the reverb oscillation.

Verb

This controls the decay time for the reverb.

Spatial

Spatial pedals include delay and reverb. This is where the Soft Focus could go. Typically, delay comes before reverb because natural reverb occurs after the sound is produced or mechanically within amps, which is typically the last stop for your signal before it hits your ears.

Other

Your compressors, filters, synth emulators, pitch shifters and other things like this go here.

Modulation

This is where your choruses, flangers, vibratos, tremolos, etc go. Modulation pedals notoriously accept very hot signals with ease, including effects loop outputs, so running them after dirt just makes sense. Order within this category is completely subjective, so try different stuff until you dig it.