Catalinbread Dirty Little Secret MkIII

The Dirty Little Secret is, according to Catalinbread, not one, but two Marshalls-in-a-box.
Namely the Super Lead and the Super Bass. I will have to admit at this point that guitar amps are, to me, things for guitar players. I have absolutely no clue about the Marshall lineup and which amp does what. I thought they are all named JCM800, but apparently, there are several different models of them. They all look the same to me. Black Box, Marshall logo, golden front plate with a lot of knobs. From what I gathered, the Super Bass is an early Plexi, and all these names (Plexi, Super Lead, Super Bass) are nicknames they got, because they are all called a bunch of letters followed by a few numbers. It’s something you will have to invest some precious grey matter and even more precious time to really get a grip on, and I don’t think I will.
The pedal comes with a simple, straightforward set of controls at first glance, but it has hidden depths.
You get a three band EQ plus gain and master. In addition to that, you also get a hidden switch on the inside, so switch between Super Lead and Super Bass. While you’re on the inside, careful inspection lets you find another little pot, one that controls overall presence, 3kHz and upwards. Last but not least, inspection of the power plug shows that this pedal can take up to 18V and the (well written) manual states that running different voltages alters the tone of the pedal.

That said, I set to plugging it in and plonking around.
First impression: Yet again, I picked a pedal that does some amp like, organic sound.
Organic. A bit darker than the Meatsmoke, and man, can it roar in anger. I did not know how to start properly, so I simply set everything to noon and started twisting knobs. Quickly figuring out how the EQ works … twisting more knobs, and five minutes later, I’m none the wiser.
I mean, turning treble up makes the signal have more treble content. Is it boost only? Cut only? I really sat in front of this thing for a solid ten minutes and then fired up the Tone Stack Calculator and looked at the Marshall tone stack. There seems to be no such thing as a flat setting and it’s all rather confusing. I did give up bending my mind around the tone stack and simply resorted to twisting knobs until finding something I like. Then I looked inside to see which setting I’m in and it was set to Super Lead. I flipped over to Super Bass and the first thing I noticed was that the gain dropped. In SL mode, the signal has a fair amount of grit even with the gain knob at zero, in SB mode it’s nearly clean. The manual says that the Super Lead amp is cutting bass, but the pedal does not seem to follow that closely, because I could not really attest that mode a neutered low end. It might be measurable, it might be that my cab sim or HPF are set higher than the pedals cutoff point – but what I can say from this end is that it’s totally fine to use with a bass – it’s not like a Tube Screamer or a Klon with the controls dimed.
SL has more of a singing distortion sound, with more momentum to it, while the SB mode has more of a push back, but both act sensitive to the touch.

The smell of that tone is a bit on the brown side of things. You get notes of warm earth after a summer rain, a fallen tree in an autumn wood, and coffee grounds from a Bialetti after you poured the shot. All the metal you can find in there is so rusty, it crumbles when you hit it with a hammer. While it has some bite, it’s like being bitten by a horse: Solid muscle behind the jaws, but all molars and no canines.
However, I cannot fathom why the good people at Catalinbread would choose to hide that switch on the inside, in a corner that is not properly accessible with a finger. This should be a proper switch up top, where the user can access it without removing screws and searching for something small enough to push the switch.
For my personal taste, it is a bit too dark. I did like how the Super Bass setting has an amp like feel to it and can offer some organic grind – but it’s simply not made to drop into my setup and please my ears.