Recently, I've been on sort of a bass overdrive pedal 'tone quest', building more than 50 different pedals in the last 2 months. All of them have been clones of what I believe to be very nice overdrive pedals to begin with, and if one didn't meet my expectations stock, I modded it until it did, or moved on to the next one. This one is not a clone per se, but a combination of two pedals in one (an FET clean boost and a moderate overdrive) which have been tuned for use with an electric bass. I think that each of them sound great on their own (and can be used that way), but cascaded together takes them to a whole new level. This pedal is capable of an incredible amount of clean boost (more than 40 db!) , can be used to thicken, thin, scoop, emphasize the mids, or just 'enhance' your tone ,as well as go from a very light overdrive to a full out heavy fuzz, all still retaining your low end, or even boost it. As far as its tone goes, it's big fat and smooth sounding with none of the harshness or strange artifacts that alot of overdrive pedals have. In my opinion, this one's a tone monster and has become one of my 'go to' pedals for any gig or recording session.
After building so many pedals, it seems that one of the hardest things to do is to make one that can add just a hint of 'hair/grit' to your tone without masking the original tone of your instrument, and this one does it in spades. Most overdrive pedals have just one (or two types of distortion- symmetrical or assymetrical) and then increase the gain or drive to just give you various amounts/degrees of it, but this one can reshape the signal (or a sine wave) a number of ways (scroll the page down to see the charts below).
I will only be offering 5 of these custom pedals, since they are all hand made and very time consuming to build. Each of them will be hand signed, dated and numbered, and after those 5 are sold, that's it .As of today, 4 have been shipped, so there ONE AVAILABLE!
This is a very natural and 'organic' sounding pedal. The FET side of the pedal sounds and feels like your playing thru a clean, yet warm tube preamp without any sponginess and can be used as an 'always on' effect making your bass sound bigger and more punchy with tons of clean boost available The overdrive section can go from a trans[arent clean boost to a moderate overdrive. There is a footswitch for each section, but rather than running the two effects in parallel, there is an 'order' switch that toggles the order in which the two sections are cascaded. The LEDs are bi colored ones. When red, it indicates that it is the first effect in line, and green when it's the second in line. When using the FET side first, you can use the volume and gain controls to drive the input of the overdrive section ALOT harder turning it into a heavy distortion pedal, and with the eq controls, you can use them to determine what frequencies that you want more distorted, which is basically like having a crossover to drive the overdrive/distortion.. When using the overdrive section first, you can run it as a clean boost, or overdrive into the FET preamp to overdrive it's front end, use the FET's gain, treble and bass controls to further shape & color it, and then use the FET preamp's volume control as a 'master volume' as you would on a tube amp.
The picture to the right shows the internals of the pedal. To keep the pedal as small as possible, there is no room for a 9 volt battery, so a standard 9 volt Boss or a One Spot type of adapter is necessary to run it. I use Alpha 16mm pots, silver mica and film capacitors in the overdrive, metal film resistors for low noise, and Switchcraft jacks wired thru true bypass switches, so when the pedal is switched off your signal is uneffected. The IC and transistors are socketed for easy replacement should that ever be necessary. I use hi-temp teflon coated silver plated wire thruout. All the electrolytic capacitors are rated at 25 volts or more so you can run this pedal at 18 volts for those that like to experiment with higher voltages.
Below is a picture of a TrueRTA real time analyzer test that I ran on the pedal to show the frequency response of it when run clean. (You can click on the picture to enlarge it)
.....and just a few of the shapes that a sine wave can be 'reshaped' to with using its OD/distortion. Anywhere from soft symmetrical, to rounded symmetrical, a sawtooth symmetrical, asymmetrical, to a full square wave
Here's a quick soundclip that I made of it, playing a stock Fender AVRI P bass thru my SVT-7Pro/2x15 Eminence 3015 cab with the amp's tone controls at noon, recorded on a Zoom H4n recorder.
First bypassed and then with just some of its various settings.
