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: 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. Our Soft Focus is not an exact recreation but was exhaustively compared with Catalinbread's own FX500; the difference is that a fairly generic fixed-time digital delay is present on the Soft Focus patch. They found that leaving this feature intact ate into the circuit’s memory just a little too much for such little payoff, so they leave that addition to you and your favorite delay.
Features
- Based on a famous patch used by quintessential '90s shoegaze bands, including Slowdive
- Essentially a heavily modified plate reverb with tweakable modulation and more
- Expands on the original patch’s functionality while addressing some flaws by adding a mix control and improving the bypassed signal quality
- 3 sections: chorus modulation, octave-up for reverb shimmer, and straightforward reverb
- Mix control lets you retain dry signal for better control over articulation
Specifications
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