Catalinbread Knight School Distortion DIY Kit

The Catalinbread Knight School Distortion DIY Kit is a build-it-yourself distortion pedal from Catalinbread, sold as an unassembled kit rather than a finished stompbox. It belongs to the Knight School line, a family of DIY pedal kits and built pedals that also includes an overdrive, a fuzz, a synth, a bit crush, a filter and a delay, which Guitar World described as Catalinbread hopping on the DIY pedal trend¹². As a distortion design, it sits in the distortion pedals camp, and you solder it together yourself.

What it does

The circuit is built around a single op-amp distortion stage, and the DISTORTION control is what sets it apart. Catalinbread describes it as adding much more saturation than the standard single op-amp distortion: as the control clears the clipping threshold it gives sparkling clean gain, and turned up further it produces heavy, clipped, mushy gain³. In practical terms, the knob sweeps from a boost-like clean edge into full distortion, letting the player choose where the circuit breaks up.

The VOLUME control sets the output level. Catalinbread's own product page introduces it with the words "VOLUME: It does that thing!"³, which is as much as the maker says about it.

Power and warnings

The kit accepts a center-negative DC power supply capable of supplying 9 volts³. That is the standard pedalboard supply polarity, so it will sit happily on a typical daisy-chain or isolated supply setup alongside most other pedals.

The Knight School family

The Distortion kit is one of several Knight School designs, and the line mixes DIY kits with pre-built versions of the same circuits³¹⁴:

The family reflects a teaching approach: the Synth kit's circuit board has everything labeled as to what part goes where⁴, and the Fuzz kit comes with a list of suggested mods, including transistor substitution, changing the bias resistor, swapping clipping diodes for germanium, LEDs or none at all, and changing the input and output caps⁵. The Distortion kit follows the same idea, giving a player a straightforward single op-amp distortion circuit to assemble and, if they choose, to modify.