The Catalinbread Formula No. 5 is our take on the vintage tweed sound – that clear buttery top end, stringy but slightly spongy and growly bottom, and greasy sizzling midrange that slides right through the mix like chitlins through your lower intestine.

The Formula No. 5 is extremely input sensitive, so you can grok a variety of gain flavors just by using your guitar’s volume control – set the Gain as high as you’d like and roll back a little for chunky rhythm or further for chimey cleans, or just lighten up your picking attack – it’s that responsive.

The controls are simple – Volume, Gain , and Tone – and like the amps, are interactive. The range of gain available goes from a gritty bark with some serious bite to the raging cooking output transformer-style spongy sag. Balancing the Gain control with the Volume allows you to dial in the low end picking response from chunky to loose. The Tone control adds some sparkle and more grit or fattens up a thin sounding pickup. This simple but effective arrangement makes dialing it in with a variety of guitars easy as pie. We don't trust people who don't like pie.

There are a number of reasons why those old tweeds are so sought after and chief among them is their harmonic complexity when they’re cranked up – smack a chord and it blooms and seems to get bigger as it sustains, bend a string and it decays into layers of rich harmonic feedback. We nailed those hard to recreate characteristics in pedal form with the Formula No. 5 and still managed to keep the amp-like dynamics intact. If you’re an old school slide player who uses their fingers instead of a pick this pedal will floor you – the compression level is perfect for single note legato stuff but it still breathes when chording. Like the Rev says – “MERCY!”.