Catalinbread Formula 55

Turn your amp into a 100 watt tweed Deluxe!

Well no, but that’s what it’ll feel like when you plug into your new Catalinbread Formula No. 55! Big and powerful, yet refined, the Formula No. 55 melts into your amp, transforming it into a wide ranging tweed monster capable of everything from smokey, clean Grant Green jazz tones all the way to full on raging Crazy Horse excursions!

The old amps from the 50s were primitive beasts and the 5E3 Deluxe was no exception. Its preamp section let a lot of low frequencies through but then it would encounter an output section (power tubes, output transformer, and speaker) that couldn’t handle all that low end, often resulting in a flubby response, especially if you turned the Volume up. In fact, if you look at the manual from an old 50s tweed, it advises you to “turn down the Volume should you experience any distortion”. Of course, a lot of guitarists ignored that advice and cranked it up anyway, much to Leo’s chagrin, and the sound of rock was born. The Formula No. 55 gives you that huge low-end response but was specifically voiced for touch-sensitive dynamics and a fat, but tight and punchy sound. You can play a palm-muted boogie-woogie rhythm pattern, for example, and if you don’t bear down too hard with your picking attack you’ll get a big chunky, woody sound, the kind of sound that you’d think would flub out if you suddenly started strumming harder. But start thrashing away and the response will get tighter instead of flubbing out! You just have to try it for yourself to see!

The Formula No. 55 is a Foundation Overdrive that reproduces, in exacting detail, the preamp section of the classic Fender™ tweed 5E3 Deluxe using an all-discrete JFET-based signal path. The Volume and Tone controls replicate, part for part, the circuitry of the 5E3, giving you authentic tweed amp response. The output section is designed to give you lots of punch and volume with a low output impedance to drive your amp perfectly. Set the Hi-Lo button to “Lo” for the cleaner response of a vintage tweed. “Hi” is like hot rodding your amp by swapping in higher gain tubes.

Like all Catalinbread pedals, no SMD parts are used for audio circuitry. Only through-hole components selected for tone and response are used such as carbon composition resistors and premium capacitors. We hand-build them and we tone-test each one to ensure you get the best we can offer.