When presented with the opportunity to design a pedal that did the Brian May thing, I said, “Hell yeah!”
Always loved his sound. So soaring, juicy, and epic. We already had the basic building blocks with our CB30
and Naga Viper pedals. The easy thing to do would have been to just stuff those two circuits in a dual-pedal
box and call it a day. But I knew I could hone and refine them and really get the Queen vibe going.
On the CB30 side, I tuned it for higher gain potential and refined it’s frequency response to get what I hear
Brian May gets. I primarily referenced live Queen concert recordings throughout their career. I’ve read that
Brian May has all his AC30s modded for more gain and whatnot but I didn’t have access to those schematics.
But I could listen to his recorded work and that’s what I based my voicing decisions on. Well, that and just play-
ing guitar through it and tuning it until the pedal “wanted” to play Brian May style parts.
On the “Top Boost” side, I took our Naga Viper circuit which has three controls and distilled it back to a one
knob treble-boost optimized to boost the Galileo into juicy Brian May territory.
With both channels on, this may be the most fun to play dirt pedal Catalinbread has offered yet! It just feels
good to rock out through this thing!
If you watch Brian May play you’ll notice that his booster is always on (in fact, on recent tours it’s actually
mounted to his guitar strap before the wireless transmitter so that the guitar “sees” the treble booster circuit
first (this is important because a Rangemaster style treble-booster is designed to interact directly with the
guitar’s pickups and not through a buffer circuit of any kind such as that on a wireless unit). So the booster is
always on and he controls his entire range of sound from clean to soaring from his volume knob. He’s always
riding the volume knob on his guitar!
Enough babble from me, plug in, get down, make love.....
Thanks!!!!!!!!!
Howard Gee, Catalinbread
Circuit Designer, Guitar Hacker, Audio Janitor
Designer’s Notes
