I've been working on a bass crossover distortion for the last several months and finally dialed in everything that I was looking for in one. Most, if not all of the crossover pedals offered today aren't very user friendly to set up, and many have a 'baked in' tone that's impossible to dial out, so my goal was to make one that sounded organic, easily capable of retaining your original tone (if desired), with a wide range of sounds, yet simple and intuitive to use. The result being, in my opinion, the finest and most versatile bass overdrive/distortion that I've built to date.
Back in the 70's, one of my bass rigs was an Acoustic 360 with its powered 18" cab. Due to it being a folded horn, I found it to be lacking clarity in the top end so I ran a blackface bassman with it's small 2x12 cab along with it. I cut the lows on the bassman since the 18" had more than enough low end and used the bassman for the highs, and could run it clean, or push it into having a slightly dirty top end. I was basically running a "poor man's" bi-amped rig. Fast forward 40+ years later, and I now can achieve the same thing with this pedal. This is also similar to the way that Chris Squire got his HUGE tone, by running his lows to a bass amp his highs to another. When I saw him back in the day he used Sunn's for the lows and a Marshall for his overdriven top end.
First, I designed a Linkwitz-Riley crossover circuit with a variable crossover point from 100hz to 1khz. Next, the crossover goes into a two channel mixer with separate low and high volume controls. With the distortion switched off and both of the high and low controls set at the same level, you can rotate the frequency control from 100hz to 1Khz and the tone remains flat, as if the crossover isn't even there. If you set the high and low volumes at different levels, you can use it as a tone control for for either cutting highs or lows, or even get reggae or dub bass sounds out of it.
Before the top end goes into the mixer, it first enters a foot-switchable cmos distortion circuit with it's own level and gain controls. The distortion's character sounds very much like a tube amp breaking up .The variable crossover allows you to have a distorted top end with super clean and punchy lows.
Coming out the mixer, both channels go into a gyrator based 4 band graphic eq (using 4 center detent rotary pots) replicating an inductor based equalizer. It took quite a bit of experimentation to decide the optimum frequencies, and how wide of a slope the boost & cut should be. With the eq pots in their center detent position, it's running flat.
Finally, the circuit exits to a master volume control.
Another cool feature is that if you bypass the distortion circuit (via the right stomp switch) you can use it as a clean preamp with separate levels for your lows and highs and a 4 band equalizer to sculpt your tone, or even run it flat and use it as a clean boost.
I designed each circuit individually, and it has 5 separate PCB's in it: the crossover, the mixer, the distortion, the eq and a charge pump to create a bipolar +9 & -9 volt supply for the opamp circuits from a standard 9 volt power supply. Since it contains an internal charge pump, this pedal should ONLY be run at 9 volts, and the pedal's total current draw is 52ma.
The XO comes in a polished and etched 1590BB, with 10 machined black anodized knobs, all top jacks, a true bypass and a distortion bypass switch. My pedals are completely hand-made and I make them in very limited quantities. I prep & polish the enclosures, acid etch them, etch my own PCBs, tin plate them, mount & hand solder all of the components and wire and test them before they ship, making them a truly hand-made boutique pedal. Nothing is farmed out.
Since this pedal is such a time consuming build, I am only going to offer 7 of them for order. Please allow an approximate 1-2 week build time.
