Chase Bliss Automatrone Preamp MK II

[el murdoque]

I admit I'm late to the party. The party is probably over, the rooms cleaned and the trash outside collected.

I saw that at some point, Chase Bliss stopped making the Brothers. I wandered for a moment, until I saw that they released the Preamp MK II - and thought that this surely is a very guitar specific pedal, so I was not really interested at all.
Then I've checked a pedal review on Zach Rizer's youtube channel and his review of the CB Preamp MK II came up next.
That's when a tiny seed was dropped on my barren fields of "I don't need another dirt pedal". The weather was fair and that seed grew into "That's not another dirt pedal. That's a dirt machine --- actually, that's THE dirt machine".

Has anyone here been blessed with real life hands on experience with that machine able to talk me out of it?

Follow up question: Will I be able to map my MIDI expression pedal to make the faders dance or is that only possible with a directly connected expression pedal?

 

[bassbrad]

No answers but it does look pretty wild and the video is pretty nerdy funny, not sure they were smoking cigars if you know what I mean. Those flying faders do look fantabulous.
Preamp MKII — Chase Bliss

 

[sydneytdc]

I had one for six months and loved its tone. Yes it’s pricey, but its versatility and MIDI control more than made up for that. Using presets controlled from a switcher I could go from very light warmth or thickening progressively through to full on overdriven fuzz collapse.

The faders are indeed excessive, but invite you to mould your sound. Only drawback I found was that the range of tones I liked were in a small part of some of the faders throw. Presets and full MIDI CC control negate any concerns about recalling a dialed in favourite.

One fun patch I had made was a filthy Fuzz Envelope style thing where I had a Zoia analysing my incoming signal and the creating a MIDI CC signal that matched my bass’s amplitude envelope. This was then mapped to a few faders in the Automone, so as I played the faders followed in a sort of env-filter fashion. The same sort of set up was easily changed into a single pole phaser using an LFO in the Zoia. (Note you can switch off the faders movements if you want - to preserve the motors from such silliness)

Recently I decided to liquidate all my pedals and have moved to a Quad Cortex. It’s able to handle all sounds I need except for an OC-2 and a Doom 2.

Overall the Automatone is an awesome sounding and fun device.

 

[Kendescending]

I borrowed a friends for a few days in 2021, and really liked it. I liked it so much, I kept thinking about it and waited patiently for him to sell it. That never happened, so I bought a used one on Reverb last week, and it should arrive this week.

Never tried the expression pedal, so I can't comment on that. I was very impressed with versatility of the EQ and dirt. It could go from minimal dirt to full out doom and then some. I report back once I get this in my hands again.

FWIW, there's currently one of these for sale in the classifieds. No affiliation.

 

[midfieldgeneral]

thread resurrection!

I have one of these and love it. Right now its my only pedal, straight into an audio interface where I use vsts for compression, eq, etc. I'm slowly going to build a pedal board though. I think first up is the Empress Effects compressor that should compliment this well.