The Catalinbread Dirty Little Secret Deluxe is all the sizzle and spice and everything you love about Plexis in a cool-looking pedal – with a few crucial improvements over its smaller yet older sibling.
The Preamp and Master gain act like they would on your favorite old British amp and give you a lot of different options for gain staging.
The Deluxe version was thoroughly upgraded with a phase inverter, power amp sim and output transformer, and some new features were added following popular demand, like the Voice toggle, which brings to the surface a previously under-the-hood switch to let you choose between Super Lead and Super Bass modes.
Here’s the list of the other new features compared to the compact version of the pedal:
- External Presence knob
- Routable Boost circuit with separate volume knob and footswitch voiced after a tube preamp
- Tightness knob lets you cut the low end to taste for a more focused tone
- Line Out to plug the pedal directly into your mixer, DAW or PA.
Here’s the launch video of it!
We added the Catalinbread Dirty Little Secret Deluxe to our article about the Best Plexi Pedals.
Catalinbread Dirty Little Secret Deluxe, Builder’s Notes
The ultimate Marshall Plexi emulation and fully-customizable amp-in-a-box experience.
The Dirty Little Secret Deluxe represents the next logical step in Marshall Plexi emulation, reaching beyond the preamp circuit and adding the rest of the amp for an extremely authentic take on everything inside that chassis. Our original DLS circuit has been tweaked and upgraded throughout, now featuring a phase inverter, power amp sim and output transformer as well as some new features and the most requested modifications for the original.
One such addition is a toggle switch on the outside to select between Super Lead and Super Bass modes, and we’ve also externalized the Presence knob to easily dial in your preferred Marshall flavor. Also added is a piece of the Dirty Little Secret—a single preamp tube simulator—as a built-in boost circuit that can be used independently of the main circuit. You can run the boost and DLS in any order you like; put the boost before the DLS for a high-powered saturated tone or after to pummel the front end of your amp.
A new tightness knob lets you shave off the sub-bass for a little extra clarity or completely attenuate the low end for some cool thrash metal tones. A Line Out jack gives you a dedicated +10dB output that you can use with a mixer or DAW, and you can use both outputs simultaneously. Between the Boost, order selector and the external Super Lead/Super Bass modes, the Dirty Little Secret Deluxe is engineered to be a total performance tool that does the line justice.
