God my LBM is noisy!!

[Geddyfleaharris]

I love the fuzz sound of my LBM. Even my 2 guitardists say it sounds great. It is not on all the time and I use it for coloring here and there. The trouble is is the amount of noise the LBM kicks out when I am not playing. It is so incredibly noisy that I cringe when I turn it on for songs where I do an intro. Really makes me feel amaturish. I am considering a noise gate for noise suppression for when I am not playing. The noise/hiss from my rig is minimal when the LBM is not turned on so I don't want anything that is going to alter my signal by cutting lows/highs etc when I am playing.

I found this quote from bassybill (moderator) in another thread:

"The NS-2 does NOT suppress noise while you're playing. If you can hear your bass, the Boss NS-2 is doing nothing at all, except "waiting" for you to stop!! The threshold control simply adjusts how quiet your signal has to get before the NS-2 does anything to mute the signal."

This sounds like what I am after.

But the reason for this thread is that I would prefer to not have to add another pedal and would sooner remove the offending pedal and replace it with a pedal that is close to the LBM in fuzzyness.

Please chime in with opinions on the Boss NS-2 as well as any opinions on fuzz pedals that would be a good, less noisy replacement for my LBM (one can never have too much GAS )

Thanks! (sorry for the long post)

[JanusZarate]

The NS-2 is indeed as good as it's made out to be here. I used to own one, and I can attest that it's an excellent noise suppressor. What makes it better than most is that noisy pedals are placed in a loop parallel to the clean signal, which gives it some advantages that a noise suppressor in-line with the rest of the chain wouldn't have.

But if you want a less noisy fuzz pedal with the Big Muff tone... you'll need to look into its boutique clones or its cousin, the Way Huge Swollen Pickle (and all of its clones).

IME, other fuzz pedals beyond those won't get you the Muff sound, but if you were going to check out anything that could get close, you'd want to check out the Maestro Brassmaster clones. They're generally in a different ball park of fuzz, but they can have some similarities on certain settings.