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MSU's Epic OD Battle: B3K, B-PEG, The Elements, Grombass

#62
Found 'em:

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Both clips are with it set in a medium-gain gain range where you can hear some clipping. I usually run it a little lower-gain than the first one, and it can go completely clean. It can also go much higher-gain than the second one, but IMO it sounds terrible that way, all fizzy and mushy.
 
#65
MSUsousaphone said:
The thing about the B3K is that it has a sound. Its very much own sound.....so I would imagine it would depend on where "your sound" is before the B3K is on that matters.....like if the B3K were lukewarm water, you might have hot water and say the B3K is cold....I might have ice water and say the B3K is warm....it's all relative....I dunno...I get weird philosophical when I'm tired....I'm heading to bed.... :hiding:
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That's cool, haha:) - you can see how much it brightened up the very "warm" setting I used on my Oxford here. And my stings were almost 4 years old at that point. It almost sounds too bright, as I hadn't dialed in my tone yet:

http://soundcloud.com/centaurus_a/b3k-ox

And here is a clip of the Rusty Box into a a Behringer speaker sim with my bass ungrounded, so excuse the buzz. Also, I think the battery was crapping out on the Behringer speaker sim i used, so teh beginning of the clip sounds better than halfway through(the signal starts to weaken a bit). If I still owned it, I would make another clip for comparison:

http://soundcloud.com/centaurus_a/rusty-box-gi100

And lastly, here is the B3k dialed in a bit better with the Oxford, in a mix. The treble is dialed pretty far bck on the Oxford and there is still nice grind up top.:

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I hope these clips help your thread!
 
#68
MSUsousaphone said:
So many good things and Ryan, the maker/owner, is another one. You can catch him in his very own subforum on ilovefuzz.com. He's extremely approachable and communicates quickly. There really is no doubt in my mind that if something ever happened to this well built pedal, he would take the time to troubleshoot with me on it and that it would be very easy to send back to him for quick repairs if it's beyond the troubleshoot stage.
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I can attest that he will. I thought I had a ground issue in my pedal when I first bought it, turned out it was the old wiring in the house, but he hung in to help me figure it out and was more then willing to take a look at it. He even walked me through a Multi Meter test. Good dude.
 
#71
Totally. The only way a person would have to choose between the two is if they're determined to just keep one OD. Otherwise, different voicing for different uses.

kringle77 said:
Bongo, thanks! Now that actually sounds like a tube amp. You can still here a clean note with the overdrive.
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That might be my fault. All of these pedals have a mix/blend and can get a clean note with a hanging chad of OD. I tend to prefer more dirt on my notes and leave the mix/blend on 75% or so. So that's my bad.
 
#72
MSUsousaphone said:
That might be my fault. All of these pedals have a mix/blend and can get a clean note with a hanging chad of OD. I tend to prefer more dirt on my notes and leave the mix/blend on 75% or so. So that's my bad.
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I like it that way too. It's hard to do these things as it's almost impossible to get the entire range of everything for everyone who may be interested. Just adjusting the knobs on the bass will yield some different results as well... Great reviews man!:bassist:
 
#74
That wasn't a slam, I just like the h&k sound sample. I would love to try a BATT. The B-peg should do something very similar I would think. Mike did finally e-mail me today and said the B-peg should be shipping out next week. Cool.
 
#76
Real life application. I've got The Elements on the entire song and kick the F*** OD on top of it about two minutes in.



That's my ONLY gripe about all of these pedals. Other than the Swell, they all only have one footswitch. So it's really hard to get two different levels of dirt out of one of these pedals in the same song. Advantage Swell.
 
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#79
Onkart Gromt Grombass

I started this thread calling the Grombass my dark horse.....and it still is. This thing just has so many sounds inside it. As far as gain is concerned, The Elements has the widest range.....but this guy has the most flavors. You can switch between three clipping diodes (Germanium, LED, Silicon) and they all give you different gains. The thing that makes this pedal difficult to master is that it has a tone shaping knob and a three way switch that alters the tone shaping knob.....and they alter each clipping setting differently....AAAAAND those all change when you mess with the input gain and the output gain.... :eyebrow:

I know. I know. Confusing. It also doesn't help that there isn't a nice big fat manual written in English to really spell this stuff out for you. So you have to play with it. But man.....when you DO play with it. Oh wow. There's just so many different settings in this guy. I think I've only unlocked about half of them. It loses no low end to my ears.

Something about the way this pedal sounds screams for grindier and heavier music than the Elements and B3K to me. If I were in a band that was sludgey, grungey....like a harsher punk, rock, or metal...I think this would be my guy. Or at least, that's where I would utilize this motha. It won't get near as much press as the other ODs in this thread, and it's certainly less accessible, but it totally belongs right alongside them.

Americans will have to shell out $270 to get there hands on one of these. I've seen them sub $200 every now and then in the classifieds....like once a year or so.

Status S2-Classic
Mesa Bass 400+
fEARful 15/6/1
Onkart Gromt Grombass



Status S2-Classic
Onkart Gromt Grombass
Roland R-05 MP3 Recorder



With that DI clip, I basically just play clean, then click it on with the Germanium setting, play through the gain on that, mess with the tone shaping knobs a bit, switch to a pick, then I went to Silicon and do the same, and then LED and do the same.
 
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