Boss LMB-2 bass limiter pedal

[ThingsAbove]

I picked up an old beat up Boss LMB-2 (not the LMB-3) pedal for $15 today from Craigslist.

I recently began playing a Mustang RI and it has lower output than the other basses I've been playing the past few years. I often run simply through a Sansamp to FOH and I like the unmodified sound of the Mustang so much that I find I am often using the Sansamp simply as a DI rather than engaging it to color or boost. As such my levels are now much lower than with my other basses. At one of the places I played last week they had problem in their board getting enough gain out of me unless I used my Sansamp to boost so I wanted to get a pedal to raise the gain without coloring the sound for those circumstances in the future.

I'd read the reviews of the LMB-3 and they were quite good but there wasn't much here concerning the LMB-2. It's an old pedal with 3 controls... "Enhance" "Level" "Threshold"

The "Enhance" adds some noise but it's not too bad at 50% and it adds a little sparkle although I prefer it off. I might use it somewhere with a particularly dull FOH sound. Somehow I prefer it's effect on the tone over the "Presence" knob on my Sansamp.

The Level is at about unity a little less than 50% and offers about 9db of gain (I'm estimating) when turned up 100%. It adds a very little bit of noise at unity that disappears when the pedal is off. And It adds quite a bit of noise with the gain boosted to 100% and the Enhance set at zero but I think that it will probably be OK in the circumstance that I need to boost for the house.

As described in the LMB-3 review when the "Threshold" knob is turned counter clockwise it begins squashing the tone and there is an audible click when it limits hard. I couldn't hear it in a mix, only when soloing.

All in all it's a fairly transparent pedal when you're not applying the effect heavily. If you turn the Threshold to heavily limit it really squashes the tone and IMO thins out the bass but that's only with extreme limiting.

If you primarily want to use the pedal to boost your gain I think it would be a good inexpensive choice. I'm a pretty lousy slapper so it can also help me level out some of my sloppy slap work but I obviously should practice slap to even out rather than rely on the pedal.

[seedokebass]

I had one years ago, but I saw one on my local Craigslist again.... $15 is a steal on that!