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Hit Me with your Fav Dirt

#83
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#84
Zak TMD said:
TL/DR: Tell me your fav dirt pedals for bass with a brief why. I'm considering swapping out one or both of my current ones.

What I got:
I have a Wren & Cuff Tall Font Russian (sovtek, pre-civil war green muff clone) and a Smallsound/Bigsound Frik Mini (jfet overdrive)

Why change these?
These pedals are great, but neither are quite hitting the sweet spots I'm looking for from.
  • The TFR is maybe too gritty, angular for what I'm thinking - I'm looking for a big buttery, saturated fuzz I think.
  • The SSBS mini handles low freq well, but maybe is just a tad more fuzzy than I want - my straight dirt is tricky because I'd like it to keep the lows pushing through, while sparking up the mids a bit.

What am I doing?
Thing is my amp (Verellen Meatsmoke) has a great orange-ish overdriven channel all on it's own, so I'm looking for specific variations to hit the "clean" (70s SVT style) channel with. I don't want to override the character too much, but also want to get some solid grit as describe above on demand.

What you got?
Click to expand...

My ears are fickle: I own a variety of basses and dirt pedals just to change things up from one day to the next. That said, the epiphany for me was discovering multi-band distortion pedals: they split the signal into highs and lows, then allow different levels of distortion on each band. Note that some allow distortion only on the high band, but even when low band distortion is also possible, I leave lows clean (or mostly clean) and turn up distortion on the high band. I'm not a huge fan of heavily distorted lows and low mids because it can sound farty (I've got nothing against Jack Bruce "tuba tone", it's just not for me).

Basically, my goal is to simulate John Entwistle's bass tones: he invented the technique of mixing overdriven guitar amps (for distorted mids and highs) with powerful bass amps set for clean low end. It really comes through on live recordings of The Who. The first incarnation was Live at Leeds, when he was playing passive P-basses and "Fenderbirds". He then switched to Alembic (and other active basses) and developed his "piano bass" tone... the live version of Baba O'Riley is a great example. Entwistle inspired Chris Squire, Geddy Lee, Billy Sheehan, dUg Pinnick, and others.

The multi-band distortions I own and recommend:
Brimstone Audio Crossover Distortion 2 (XD-2) - allows dirt on lows and highs, variable crossover point
VFE Triumvirate - 3-band pedal (lows/mids/highs), distortion on each - no longer in production
Tech 21 DP-3X - dUg Pinnick signature - clean/compressed lows, dirty highs
Darkglass X7 - - clean/compressed lows, dirty highs, variable filter for each band

There are others such as the Orange Bass Butler and EBS Billy Sheehan... haven't tried 'em all. :eek:

Compression on the clean lows is a brilliant feature; especially useful with heavily distorted highs. That's because distortion compresses your signal: the greater the distortion, the greater the compression. If you don't compress clean low end, it can sound "bouncy" compared to the dirty highs. Mixing compressed lows with dirty highs results in a more cohesive tone.

Multi-band distortion won't be for everyone. First, it can be tricky to dial in, and second, it can sound clangy and modern, not necessarily what you want for a typical cover band! It doesn't have to sound clangy (I usually tone that down with my classic rock/r&b cover bands), but I mention it because someone looking for a traditional-sounding distortion may not want to bother with multi-band/crossover distortion.
 
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#85
El_Charro said:
Apologies if I missed it in the comments above, but has anyone here tried the Metal Muff from EHX?

Seems like it might be the Metal version of the Biff Muff Pi (?): Nano Metal Muff | Distortion with Noise Gate - Electro-Harmonix

Thanks! \m/
Click to expand...
Also, the circuit is very different from any sort of muff; op-amp based with hard-clipping diodes more like a Rat, and without the low-end compression of a muff. A completely different animal, gotta wonder why they chose to name it such as they did.
 
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#86
I like full-range distortions as well: I own a few each from Darkglass and Tech 21; Tronographic Rusty Box, Idiotbox Blower Box for RAT-tones (and more), Damnation Audio MBD-1 for a wide range of dirt tones (and it handles my hot active basses beautifully). I also recently added the Master Effects Super 300 SVT sim, that's a great one too. But for hard rock I prefer modern clangy tones from the multi-band distortions I mentioned previously.
 
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#87
Basically, my goal is to simulate John Entwistle's bass tones (and lots more)
Click to expand...

A great deal of good info in here! I love Johnny E! He really changed the way bass approach in rock and roll was done.

If we're gonna get specific, a lot of my break up is in the mids with how I have everything tuned as of right now, and I typically EQ down a good deal of the highs - not a LPF or anything, but I keep em down a bit in my EQ.

My band is a 3 piece, and part of my tone hunting has to do with filling up that frequency space between my guitarist and my drummer, while also adding the sub push to the total mix. Our kinda sound goal is to be as big as possible tonally with just 3 guys.

I am kinda fascinated with and want to learn more about multiband dirts! I'm not sure if I'd slide these into my chain right now, as that much complexity might be too much for me atm haha, but possibly when I slowly convert my simple board to spaceship territory.
 
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#88
Fuzzbass said:
I like full-range distortions as well: I own a few each from Darkglass and Tech 21; Tronographic Rusty Box, Idiotbox Blower Box for RAT-tones (and more), Damnation Audio MBD-1 for a wide range of dirt tones (and it handles my hot active basses beautifully). I also recently added the Master Effects Super 300 SVT sim, that's a great one too. But for hard rock I prefer modern clangy tones from the multi-band distortions I mentioned previously.
Click to expand...

That's multiple recs for the IBB and the DA MBDs.
 
#89
El_Charro said:
Apologies if I missed it in the comments above, but has anyone here tried the Metal Muff from EHX?

Seems like it might be the Metal version of the Biff Muff Pi (?): Nano Metal Muff | Distortion with Noise Gate - Electro-Harmonix

Thanks! \m/
Click to expand...

As someone already mentioned the circuit of the Metal Muff has nothing to do with a Big Muff circuit, to me it sounds good though, judging from various YouTube demos I've watched featuring it.

It comes in a Nano version too (the Top Boost feature exclusive for the big version is totally useless for bass, so really just get the Nano version and save a lot of space and a bit of money).

And the Joyo Extreme Metal is a cheaper but pretty accurate clone of it (with all the features of the original EHX big version, but in a bit smaller enclosure).

As far as I can hear it is not all too dissimilar from the type of high gain distortion you get from the Ibanez Super Metal Mini pedal.

Here's a fairly decent demo of it used with bass:


Here's what the Nano Metal Muff looks like:
nano-metal-muff-front.jpg
 
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#90
Zak TMD said:
That's multiple recs for the IBB and the DA MBDs.
Click to expand...

I'm sure it's been mentioned that bass distortion is an enormous rabbit hole. So many options, it's mind-boggling. Blower Box and MBD get mentioned a lot for good reason. For me, a big one is practicality: both of them handle my hot active basses as well as my passives. Another is that they both sound great from barely-there subtlety to full-blown distortion, and all points in between. Also, the builders are good guys and provide great customer support.

Obviously these are not the only two pedals to fit all those criteria, but they are two I've tried and recommend. As for which would be better for you (or anyone else) -- depends on all kinds of things: the tone you're looking for, the feature set you want (clean blend? top jacks? eq? pedal size?), etc etc.
 
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#91
Fuzzbass said:
I'm sure it's been mentioned that bass distortion is an enormous rabbit hole. So many options, it's mind-boggling. Blower Box and MBD get mentioned a lot for good reason. For me, a big one is practicality: both of them handle my hot active basses as well as my passives. Another is that they both sound great from barely-there subtlety to full-blown distortion, and all points in between. Also, the builders are good guys and provide great customer support.

Obviously these are not the only two pedals to fit all those criteria, but they are two I've tried and recommend. As for which would be better for you (or anyone else) -- depends on all kinds of things: the tone you're looking for, the feature set you want (clean blend? top jacks? eq? pedal size?), etc etc.
Click to expand...

OH yea, no doubt whatsoever - these two are already on my future GAS. I just like to note throughout the thread when people multi-rec a thing (not to call em out) but so a reader can see that these pedals are getting many recs. And that whole "barely there to full-blown distortion" thing is huge. Definitely one of the factors I was looking at when I started the thread.

I really have no idea how deep my bass dirt thing is gonna go, but I would be willing to bet money that I will have both of those pedals in my toolbox sooner than later.
 
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#92
Andy westwood said:
DIRT TALK
Click to expand...

Andy, I was just gonna message you but I figured maybe other people might be interested, so why not resurrect this Dirt thread.

Just watched you YT video ( ): all your dirt pedals on your board and stacking, etc.

You have any dirt stacking best practices? I find a lot of times when I've attempted to do this, the signal can get overwhelmed and just kinda grinds out to pure buzz or growl - losing a ton of definition. On your vid, though, you seem to stack em pretty proficiently for all kinds of neat tones. What's the secret to this wizardry?
 
#93
Zak TMD said:
Andy, I was just gonna message you but I figured maybe other people might be interested, so why not resurrect this Dirt thread.

Just watched you YT video ( ): all your dirt pedals on your board and stacking, etc.

You have any dirt stacking best practices? I find a lot of times when I've attempted to do this, the signal can get overwhelmed and just kinda grinds out to pure buzz or growl - losing a ton of definition. On your vid, though, you seem to stack em pretty proficiently for all kinds of neat tones. What's the secret to this wizardry?
Click to expand...


Alot of time spent working it out tbh, i always atleast try to go low gain into hi gain, i always keep the tones pretty bright which might help aswell, a bass heavy sound stacked gets mushy pretty quick.

also i suppose none of these bar maybe the Bass Fuzz scoop much mids which i think helps! but mainly i think its just finding stuff that works together and with your amp.
 
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#94
Andy westwood said:
Alot of time spent working it out tbh, i always atleast try to go low gain into hi gain, i always keep the tones pretty bright which might help aswell, a bass heavy sound stacked gets mushy pretty quick.

also i suppose none of these bar maybe the Bass Fuzz scoop much mids which i think helps! but mainly i think its just finding stuff that works together and with your amp.
Click to expand...

Hahaha I was afraid you were gonna say exactly that. Staying away from mid scoops is great advice imo.
 
#97
Bob_Ross said:
Damnation Audio MBD-1

Because it sounds freakin' huge!!! Fattest, gnarliest distortion I've ever used that doesn't sacrifice any low end...it lets your bass still be bass while also being a caterwauling buzzsaw of serrated joy.
Click to expand...

That seems to be the big consensus. I got the MBD on my future GAS list
 
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