For sale Steel Guitar Black Box

Did this work well for you without the bass mod?

pbrane said:

Did this work well for you without the bass mod?

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Yes, absolutely! Brad Sarno originally designed the Black Box for pedal steel guitar, which needs tons of clean headroom and hits low tones in the range of bass guitar. I believe he has been active on TB in the past, and he may chime in here.

The version of the Black Box with the "bass mod" is designed for acoustic/upright basses that use a piezo pickup. This is the original version designed for magnetic pickups in electric bass, steel guitar, electric piano, etc. It has a Vari-Z knob that acts a little like a tone knob.

The Black Box does a few things...

• It adds some warm tubey mojo to your sound.
• It reacts organically to different levels of attack in your playing, with more aggressive playing causing some subtle tube squish. That's why most players go directly from the instrument to the Black Box in the signal chain.
• It balances out the pickup response to give more even reproduction across the strings. I find this comes in handy for my Telecaster bass that has a '51-style single coil pickup that is very transparent (and unforgiving, heheh).
• Also, I have heard that it delivers a friendly, even signal downstream to whatever you have right after the Black Box.

^^ I formatted that list to see if I could use the "bullet list" formatting, and it worked!

It is the kind of device that makes your tone sound lively, full, and organic, but not processed. In fact, I got so used to the sound that I thought it didn't have much effect... until I removed it and rediscovered how sterile my rig sounded without it.