Based on the Yamaha FX500’s “Soft Focus” patch, the Catalinbread Soft Focus is billed as shoegaze pedal” But what is it exactly? What even is shoegaze tone?
Reverb pedals might be the ultimate shoegaze guitar pedals. With that in mind, the Soft Focus is a modified plate reverb pedal with three reverb channels: chorus, octave up, and unaltered.
This guy has a few improvements over the original, including adding a mix control, improving the preamp, and getting rid of all the tone-suck. What it doesn’t include is the original’s fixed-rate digital delay. Just use your own, eh? This might not be the only pedal you need to learn how to play shoegaze guitar, but it’ll get you close.
Get the Soft Focus: https://catalinbread.com/products/soft-focus-reverb
0:00 Intro
2:06 Compliment
2:25 Pedal info
4:38 Reverb path one (unaltered) and mix
7:20 Reverb path two (chorus speed)
8:21 Reverb path three (octave up)
13:25 Final thoughts
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Video Transcript
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welcome to get offset my name is emily and are you a little bit out of focus? let’s fix that can you
do you mind like oh that’s better now i can see your beautiful and happy face i love to see it
well uh i’m here today with the Catalinbread soft focus it’s based on the shoegaze machine
the yamaha fx 500 specifically the soft focus patch essentially that was a heavily modified
plate reverb and this is the same so let’s talk about it mix the original didn’t have
a mix control from my understanding and it had a subpar preamp uh this improves on both
of those things and it doesn’t suck as much tone as the original did the only thing that
this doesn’t have is that fixed time digital delay just pair it with your favorite delay
there’s better delays out there there you go but essentially it’s a modified plate reverb with um
i guess three paths so the first path has a chorus on it that’s the mod and that controls the rate
of the chorus it’s more intense the farther to the right slash counterclockwise you turn it
the next is the synth that’s another path that has an octave up there you go and then there’s
the verb and that controls the the length slash decay of the reverb farther to the left is shorter
though it never goes completely off while the petal is on and all the way to the right is really
long and super duper dreamy all right um i’m going to be playing this with the benson chimera plugin
and my elvis costello signature jazz master as far as the tone i’m going to use i have
the amp cranked a little bit to get that breakup sound um i just feel like you don’t usually hear
super duper clean shoe gaze and this is essentially a shoegaze in a box i mean
people like slow dive use the um yamaha fx 500 and this is based on that so this is the idea is this
is a shoegaze reverb machine it’s pretty great so yeah that amp’s gonna be a little bit dirty if you
have a problem with that i’m sure there’s another demo that does it super duper clean somewhere
all right um yeah so let’s get playing shall we play the clean tone first
and i have the mix and the verb at about 50 and everything else down except the volume obviously
nice uh let’s turn that mix up to about three o’clock
so
all the way up
mix all the way up on a reverb uh seems like it’d be
helpful for like recording but i i would just struggle to use that live and have it sound normal
so i’m going to keep it around there that’s really really high probably in the four o’clock range but
i feel like that’s kind of a natural place where
people would play it let’s uh check out the verb control still there but
not too short let’s see how long it gets so
i feel like that’s a good place to keep the verb and the mix as we start to investigate
the modulation and the synth elements of this petal so um modulation’s been at zero
that’s dreamy
so
definitely dreamy uh now let’s look at the synth that’s the octave up
so
so that feels a little more subtle to me but it adds a really
nice uh ambient kind of it’s dreamy i don’t know how to describe this petal but dreamy
the modulation wasn’t even all the way down but hey here you go
the
uh it’s a little different to play without the capo
this is one of those petals where i wouldn’t be surprised if most people play it with
almost everything dimed including the mix
i like the modulation all the way up i personally prefer the symphony closer to one o’clock
and then just adjusting the reverb for whatever i’m playing you know
obviously longer reverb is going to kind of step
on whatever else you’re playing especially with a mix that far
up but i think a lot of people are going for that kind of sound with this kind of pedal i like it
i think it’s beautiful um again i just like it with some drive either before it or
after it i’d been playing with having like a rat style pedal
in front of it i thought that sounded great obviously the focus of this demo is this pedal
so i made up for it with having kind of a dirtier amp which i think also sounds really good
and i even used some plug-ins uh in the intro track like the preamp and fuzz kinds of things
and those all would have been of course after the pedal which i think is pretty common in shoegaze
to have the dirt after the reverb and honestly it’s a sound i i really like when you’re trying
to go for more soundscape kind of beautiful stuff so again this is not an exact recreation
of the soft focus patch on the fx 500 uh it’s probably an improvement in several
areas including the preamp the ability to have a mix control and no no tone suck the only thing
it doesn’t have again is that fixed digital delay just pair it with your favorite delay
problem solved you probably already have one i think it’s a really well done pedal
and i think shoe gazers are gonna like it not that i know the most about shoegaze but i do enjoy it
from time to time and i just like a really dreamy reverb in general it has that octave
up without being overly shimmery which i’m not a huge fan of overly shimmery things and i’m a
sucker for reverb with some sort of modulation chorus is one of my favorite modulations to have
in a reverb pedal as well but yeah thank you again to cowl and bread for sending me this
to demo i’ve really been enjoying it since i’ve had it and um to all of you out there please like
comment subscribe consider using the affiliate links in the video uh description um but also
always buy from independent builders directly whenever you can if there’s anything else in the
world that you want though i have sweetwater reverb and perfect circuit affiliate links
uh you can find the mix wave chimera affiliate link in the video description from sweetwater
um i think it’s a really cool plugin and also portland uh yeah so everybody out there thanks
for watching thanks for understanding please like comment subscribe check us out at patreon.com get
offset for access to our exclusive discord server and uh tell your favorite brands about us love it
um yeah and until next time thanks for watching thanks for understanding my name is emily goodbye