In 2020, the folks at Catalinbread were hard at work coming up with any way they could to use their facilities to help those in need. From that, the Blood Donor was born. A portion of the proceeds was donated directly to charity and it sold out almost immediately. Just two years later, the Blood Donor is back on the menu but with a handful of updates. This year, Catalinbread updated the artwork for 2023 and selected a charity to support. For every Blood Donor sold in the month of March, Catalinbread will donate a portion of each domestic sale to ALS research. Though the cause has changed, the message is as vital as ever; giving one's blood is still an important act of charity and you should continue to do so.

With that said, the Blood Donor is a revamped and fine-tuned version of the venerable Katzenknig with a slew of changes that truly unlocks the circuit's potential. A well-curated transistor set pushes the saturation and gain of the Katzenknig topology to their electrical limits, giving the old cat a little more fur and bite. The noise floor has been trimmed while widening the utility of all controls, giving an increased range of input sensitivity that mimics the volume knob on your guitar. Get into it!

The Catalinbread Blood Donor can be powered with a standard 9V battery, or a center-negative, regulated 9V DC external power supply.

Like all Catalinbread gear, the Blood Donor is hand-built in beautiful Portland, Oregon by a mostly caffeine-fueled staff of musicians,… read more gear heads, and artists.

Like the original Katzenknig, the Blood Donor combines the best elements of a Tone Bender MKII and a Pro Co Rat. Namely, a supercharged silicon Bender circuit and the output section of a Rat. By tweaking the knobs, you can cop everything from a robust, chimy clean tone to full-on high-gain meltdown. This comes at the expense of ... nothing.

You can use any stringed instrument, synthesizer or drum machine all to equal effect with only minor tweaking involved to find the sweet spots.

- A Little Closer:
Compared to our original Katzenknig, the Blood Donor offers more gain, less noise, more saturation, more ease of use, and tons of volume, enough to push your amp into breakup without breaking a sweat, allowing your amp to shake hands with the gain easier.
Have you ever heard the term "input impedance"? If you haven't, the technical stuff isn't super necessary, but it does correspond to how well a certain pedal will function when following certain other types of pedals. For example, wah pedals are very finicky about the pedals that follow them, otherwise their sweep seizes up.

The Blood control adjusts this "non-audible" value while also adjusting input gain, so mess around with this knob if you're having trouble with your wah and Blood Donor failing to get along. The Blood control is very close to the volume control on your guitar, so if you're the type of player that is constantly riding your volume control, you would likely get better results from the Blood Donor by leaving the Blood knob at maximum or close to it.

If you prefer the sound of fuzz into a cranked amp (and let's be real, who doesn't), the Blood Donor has a neat trick up its sleeve in the form of otherworldly amounts of volume when cranked. No matter if you leave your amp's volume in the extreme lower digits, the Blood Donor will easily push your amp into the throes of creamy distortion if you really want.

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