The Catalinbread DLS MKII is an overdrive pedal designed to create the sound and response of a 1970s-era Marshall amplifier1. It was introduced in 2011 as one of two new pedals in the maker's Drive Line, alongside the CB301.
What it does
Catalinbread positions the DLS MKII as a "foundation" overdrive: a pedal that forms the core of a player's guitar sound rather than a one-trick boost. The idea is that everything else in the rig builds on top of it, and Vintage Guitar's news item lists the kinds of pedals and tricks players stack on a foundation drive: boosters, fuzzes, filters, other overdrives, or simply rolling the guitar's volume knob back1. In practice that makes it a pedal to run always-on into a clean-ish amp, with the rest of the board shaping what goes into it.
For context on where it sits among amp-in-a-box style drives, Catalinbread's wider range includes the Formula No. 55 and RAH, and the DLS line itself continued after the MKII with the Dirty Little Secret, the Dirty Little Secret Deluxe and the DLS Red.
The DLS circuit family
The DLS circuit has been traced in detail by the DIY community. Guitar FX Layouts published a vero board layout for the later DLS MKIII, noting that the volume pot in that version is a 250k linear pot and that "volume 2 goes to output" in the circuit's signal path2. Builders in that thread also shared a mod for the tone of the circuit: replacing the 100n capacitor, which acts as a low pass filter at the output, with a 22n, which "opens the mids and highs up and removes the mud and wooliness"2. A single-voltage-only version of the layout was also drawn at a builder's request, though it saved only one row on the board2.
"the easiest way is to just replace the 100n cap (low pass filter) at the output with a 22n"
Later versions
The DLS line was updated after the MKII. In 2019, Guitar.com reported on the DLS Red, saying that compared with the standard DLS MKIII, the Red version "features a more refined set of gain stages, while also retaining" the original's hi-gain applications3. The Red lineage also appears in the Dirty Little Secret Red Mod and the Dirty Little Soda (DLS Red).
Videos
Catalinbread Effects
Brett Kingman
Sources (3)
- Catalinbread Revamps Drive Line, Vintage Guitar magazine, 2011-06-28
- Guitar FX Layouts: Catalinbread DLS MKIII, tagboardeffects.blogspot.com (Guitar FX Layouts), 2013-04-27
- Catalinbread gives the Dirty Little Secret an upgrade, Guitar.com, 2019-11-26
