Behringer BOD400 Bass Overdrive

New Pedal Day!

Yup, I dropped a whole $23.99 on a Behringer BOD400. This isn't for my main board, but just for experimentation purposes. That, and curiosity.

The first thing I learned is that TV Jones mini-humbucker in my Gretsch G2202 bass sends the BOD400 into distortion with the gain at minimum. I was trying to find a warm, driven sound in the low gain. What to do? My Behringer BEQ700 pedal to the rescue? A quick and simple attenuation of -15db to the signal and suddenly, the gain knob had a range of greater than zero. w00t.

After 30 minutes of tweaking, I gotta say that there is nothing wrong with this pedal. I was able to find a nice driven sound that was more than a clean signal, but not distorting. Now, I did purposely send it into the distortion settings and it seemed to sound just fine. The blend knob for clean/od all the way to OD didn't seem to lose much at all of the low end.

In all, I think I am going to have some fun with this cheapy pedal. And that is one of the goals of this game, after all, to have fun.

 

With cheap pedals, I think the expectations are a lot less, so one can surprised and pleased more easily. With a $300 overdrive pedal, expectations will be high.

Last night's experiment with the level from guitar are still true, I wasn't just too tired to get the settings right. I have to attenuate the signal from my bass down -15db to keep the gain knob of the BOD400 useful.

Now I am understand more closely what people are talking about with high-output basses not always working various drive pedals.

 

And that is when I remembered, I have a lower output bass. I picked up a Dean XO VM on the dirt cheap to convert to fretless. The Dean humbucker pickups aren't nearly as high-output as the Gretsch. I plugged it in this morning the Dean went from sounding thin and weak to something I might just describe as beefy.