USER’S GUIDE
USER’S GUIDE
Congratulations! You are the proud owner of a Catalinbread RAH!
BACKGROUND
So. Led Zep. Jimmy Page. The Royal Albert Hall gig in 1970. This pedal.
Turns out Jimmy Page used a custom “Jimmy Page” Hiwatt for gigs from mid-1969 through late-1971 of which
the Royal Albert Hall gig in 1970 is the most famous due to the release of the footage on the Led Zeppelin DVD
set. The tone was great, similar to his Marshall tone, but there was a little somethin-somethin going on there.
Was it the amp? Or maybe it was the fact that the band was still young with a lot to prove?!
Well, thanks to the prodding of a very good friend of Catalinbread, we decided to do some investigation.
Google, being everyone’s best friend ;-), yielded a schematic for the “Jimmy Page” model Hiwatt. Comparing it to
a standard Hiwatt head of the same era, we notice that it is modified to provide more gain. Plus, there was a foot-
switch that allowed two gain settings. So, what we have, in essence, is the standard Hiwatt amp with a bit more
gain. We had already explored the Hiwatt realm with our WIIO pedal, which was modeled after the amp Pete
Townshend had used, with the two-knob (Treble and Bass) tone stack. The Jimmy Page amp had the Hiwatt
three-knob tone stack. Now, the tone stack is the heart of the preamp, and the Hiwatt three-knob tone stack is
quite different than any variation of the Marshall three-knob tone stack so there was something here. And it’s
also very different in sound from the two-knob tone stack used in the Pete Townshend version. Oh! Let’s not
forget that Page was plugging these heads into Marshall cabs, not Hiwatt cabs, and there is a big difference in
sound between the two due to construction differences and Celestions in the Marshall vs. Fanes in the Hiwatt.
The Marshall cabs have a lot to do with Page’s tone still sounding “Marshall-y” even though the head is a Hiwatt.
(Stay tuned we may actually shoot a video of this!) *FUTURE CBREAD VIDEO ELABORATION!*
Now, while the Jimmy Page model Hiwatt has more gain than the standard Hiwatt, that is not to say it is a “high
gain” amp. It’s gain level is more in line with plexi-era Marshalls - clean turned down, crunchy turned up a bit,
and singing and saturated when cranked. With a PAF-loaded Les Paul, it can even sound a bit furry when the
amp is cranked. BUT - there was no fuzz pedal used! There is a lot of debate about this issue but we’re pretty
convinced that it is his Les Paul plugged into two daisy-chained Jimmy Page Hiwatts with the only thing
in-between a wah pedal and possibly an Echoplex (the Echoplex would add a bit of gain, but certainly not fuzz
pedal levels).
