My Dirt Bender - Another Jounal

[el murdoque]

The Joyo Oxford Sound is essentially the same pedal, but without the tone knob, which instead has been replaced by a 3 band active EQ section.

However this one does suck quite a bit of low end, as it, unlike the Orange Juice, has a simple basic analog cab sim filter build in, which is basically just a combined LPF and HPF.

On the other hand it got both more gain and volume on the tap, so you can get more of the glorious grindy overdrive going into regular distortion, and drive a poweramp with it should you want.

But because this one actually does suck quite a bit of low end it works best for bass when blended with clean signal, via for example a Boss LS-2, on the other hand the fact that low end is cut, in my experience/opinion, does make it work greater than the Orange Juice in this context, as sort of a faux bi-amping setup.

I love the Orange Juice, so much that I bought 2 of them, but currently only use my Oxford Sound, as described above, for always on overdrive/grind, if I had more room on my pedal board I would have included an Orange Juice as well, for occasional grindy overdrive, but I've had to prioritized and chose the more meaty overdrive growl from an EHX English Muff'n and then my Mosky Black Rat for high gain distortion, as the drives on my board.

This is, for me, the point where my tolerance is limited.
As a self-confessed cork sniffer and pedal snob, I happily pay the extra few hundred bucks and search for four years all over the internet until I find that one rare pedal from the 2002 limited run.
I will also happily buy a 50 bucks pedal that can get me a sound that is unique and gives me a great tone, but I will not make it work by putting it into a bypass loop which will take a second pedal's space on my board when I can find something that does the job without training wheels.

Snide remarks about the size of the Meatsmoke vs. the size of a LS-2 and the Orange Juice are, of course, welcome, nay, invited.

 

[GrowlerBox]

Snide remarks about the size of the Meatsmoke vs. the size of a LS-2 and the Orange Juice are, of course, welcome, nay, invited.

Well, now; that just takes all the fun out of it .

 

[el murdoque]

Well, now; that just takes all the fun out of it .

(secret fistpump) It works!

 

[Teryup]

This is, for me, the point where my tolerance is limited.
As a self-confessed cork sniffer and pedal snob, I happily pay the extra few hundred bucks and search for four years all over the internet until I find that one rare pedal from the 2002 limited run.
I will also happily buy a 50 bucks pedal that can get me a sound that is unique and gives me a great tone, but I will not make it work by putting it into a bypass loop which will take a second pedal's space on my board when I can find something that does the job without training wheels.

Snide remarks about the size of the Meatsmoke vs. the size of a LS-2 and the Orange Juice are, of course, welcome, nay, invited.

I have never agreed more with a post online. If anyone ever sees me with a bypass loop on my board to blend in clean sounds please consider it a cry for help.

 

[el murdoque]

I have never agreed more with a post online. If anyone ever sees me with a bypass loop on my board to blend in clean sounds please consider it a cry for help.

Does the light of the bypass looper have to flash S O S in morse code or is the sheer existence of it enough?

I could see myself using something like the first Klon Centaur (the one with the serial #001) with a bypass looper, just to drive people mad.

 

[el murdoque]

I would like to play a Coolsound A117 Rough OVD.

Now that seems like a hard to get pedal!

 

[Parzival]

I have never agreed more with a post online. If anyone ever sees me with a bypass loop on my board to blend in clean sounds please consider it a cry for help.

I'll second that. There are just too many pedals out there now that are made for bass or work well with bass to not only take up more space but complicate the routing and possible new trouble spots in the chain. I tried it one time with a LS-2 a few years ago and after a while I just had to ask myself, what are you doing here? Stop it.

 

[Zbysek]

This is, for me, the point where my tolerance is limited.
As a self-confessed cork sniffer and pedal snob, I happily pay the extra few hundred bucks and search for four years all over the internet until I find that one rare pedal from the 2002 limited run.
I will also happily buy a 50 bucks pedal that can get me a sound that is unique and gives me a great tone, but I will not make it work by putting it into a bypass loop which will take a second pedal's space on my board when I can find something that does the job without training wheels.

Snide remarks about the size of the Meatsmoke vs. the size of a LS-2 and the Orange Juice are, of course, welcome, nay, invited.

I have exactly opposite approach. I love using dirt pedals in a cross-over blender....because I want to keep low end clean.

I want the dirt to apply only to mids and highs.

To my ears, overdriven mids and highs on top of a clean (and compressed) lows sound superior to overdriven full range signal most of the time.

YMMV

 

[Teryup]

I have exactly opposite approach. I love using dirt pedals in a cross-over blender....because I want to keep low end clean.

I want the dirt to apply only to mids and highs.

To my ears, overdriven mids and highs on top of a clean (and compressed) lows sound superior to overdriven full range signal most of the time.

YMMV

To each their own. Personally I like to send as much low frequency content as I can into the clipping signal, too much clipping on the mids and highs sounds harsh to my ears.

 

[Zbysek]

too much clipping on the mids and highs sounds harsh to my ears.

Yes, it can sound harsh soloed...but the harshness makes it cut through the mix, IME. Clipping low frequencies tends to sound mushy and muddy...IMHO

But as you stated: to each their own.

 

[el murdoque]

Inspired by the respectful discussion here,
where @el murdoque @Parzival and @Teryup ganged together as the "Blenders are for <insert medium wild swear word that you deem politically correct enough for the occasion>"-Crew, @Zbysek came in with a flying tackle to claim that blenders are the best thing ever and instead of tearing him apart, it quickly dissolved in YMMV, to each their own.

So I did the unthinkable. No, not with a pick. I got out my @Charlie Tuna 's Blender (as if I'd ever own such a piece of <same swearword again> tech).
I quickly hooked it up to the OJ and started plonking.

Yet again, the fair comparison of the tiny pedal that costs less than a dinner and the behemoth that would buy you a dinner you probably remember fondly in a decade.

First observation: The OJ has more gain than the normal channel of the Meatsmoke, but not as much as the boost channel. When trying to match the gain to either channel, the normal channel feels like a closer match. The breakup mayhem that happens in the boost channel is a lot richer and more complex than what the OJ is capable of.

Second observation: The Meatsmoke is able to give you more low end, compared to the clean signal, and sounds even fatter than the Broughton FFXL and the OJ in combo.

All in all, it took a couple of minutes, but now I'm fairly confident that I can spot the differences between the pedals easily, even in a blind test. While their flavor is the same, the textures are different. The Meatsmoke is just more of basically everything. I have no idea how the Orange amp topology looks like and if the Meatsmoke and Orange are identical in how they are built, so I am comparing apples to oranges, or much rather oranges to possibly apples that might also be oranges, but that's not the point at all.
It's just that the Meatsmoke had such a distinct flavor that I was more than surprised that this cheap little pedal I ordered from the internet without really knowing what it does, except that some people on TB claimed it rules on bass, came into my house and starts painting soundscapes from the very same palette.

With the OJ hooked up to the Broughton, I was able to throw caution to the wind and damn the low end on the OJ side of things, riding gain high and using the tone and voice knobs to form the sizzle without a care in the world about the foundation. With carefully fine tuning the high and low pass filters and the volume levels (riding clean a fair bit higher than wet), I crafted something truly nice. A tone that makes you play slow riffs and bob your head. I can understand @Zbysek better now. I mean, you still should get a Meatsmoke if that kind of tone floats your boat, because the Meatsmoke does not need the clean blend to shake the floor in a oh-so pleasant way, but the OJ is taking you places.
Had I an LS-2 at my disposal,
I'd probably tried and blend in a heavily (squashed!) compressed signal with a LPF and a slight bit of saturation for a more dramatic effect and a boomier low end. Luck graced me, though - and I sold the LS-2 years ago and never got another, so I did not indulge in such foolish behavior.

 

[el murdoque]

Ah, and by the way.
While I did not buy a Metal Zone, I also did not not buy a Metal Zone.

 

[el murdoque]

 

[GrowlerBox]

View attachment 7201906

Bro ...

 

[Parzival]

View attachment 7201906

Metal, he’ll yeah

 

[Ritter667]

View attachment 7201906

I am curious of this.

Especially if your judgement will also be that the original Metal Zone mode sounds better than the custom channel for higher gain stuff.

 

[el murdoque]

This thing honestly started off as a big surprise!
I thought this would be something akin to the Bliss Factory or the Fjord Fuzz Fenris, in the sense that you get the feeling of riding a race car down an ancient cobblestone road, with the accelerator pedal stuck to the floor and your co-pilot hysterically screaming obscenities instead of navigational instructions.

Instead, it feels more like a hot-rodded golf cart with the accelerator stuck and you're shooting down the fairway with your co-pilot merely shouting in a mild panic.

I'm pretty sure the EQ is post drive, and it's working remarkably well for bass. The bass knob does not really bring thunder down low, but when you max it out, the tone suck does not feel half as bad as I thought - I even want to go as far and say it's tolerable.
The parametric mids can be used to either push a bit more down low (for mids, that is) in 200-500Hz to increase the throat size for the bark, or it can be used to tame the metallic clank that rings through - with the mids knob turned down a bit and the frequency knob about two thirds up.
The treble knob controls the squealing and shrieking of the sound and I liked it best when applying a bit of a cut around 10 o'clock.
The most interesting knob, of course, is the gain knob.
The pedal does not only pass signal with gain at zero, it also gets you low gain distortion.
There is no clean tone in the Metal Zone.

Travelling through the gain, I get a low gain distortion at zero that increases in a linear fashion until about 10 o'clock. That is the point where things get real.
Two things happen simultaneously. The amount of gain I get from here out can only be described as heavy distortion and a gentle compression sets in.
It is as subtle as a sledge hammer to the face - blink and you miss it, and you barely feel a thing. The way it sets in and works is as delicate as an anvil.
Your signal gets squashed in a way that will make most dedicated compressor pedals on the market flash their lights yellow with envy.
When I ride the gain at noon or past and set the level just 1dB below the threshold of my comp, the comp will idle around, no matter what I do.
The pedal does show some dynamic reaction to how hard you play it and it also clears up unexpectedly well with the basses volume knob, but that distortion and compression give you an amount of sustain that has to be measured with a calendar instead of a stop watch.

I only had a little session for a first impression, but I did not expect to have this much fun with the pedal!

 

[Ritter667]

This thing honestly started off as a big surprise!
I thought this would be something akin to the Bliss Factory or the Fjord Fuzz Fenris, in the sense that you get the feeling of riding a race car down an ancient cobblestone road, with the accelerator pedal stuck to the floor and your co-pilot hysterically screaming obscenities instead of navigational instructions.

Instead, it feels more like a hot-rodded golf cart with the accelerator stuck and you're shooting down the fairway with your co-pilot merely shouting in a mild panic.

I'm pretty sure the EQ is post drive, and it's working remarkably well for bass. The bass knob does not really bring thunder down low, but when you max it out, the tone suck does not feel half as bad as I thought - I even want to go as far and say it's tolerable.
The parametric mids can be used to either push a bit more down low (for mids, that is) in 200-500Hz to increase the throat size for the bark, or it can be used to tame the metallic clank that rings through - with the mids knob turned down a bit and the frequency knob about two thirds up.
The treble knob controls the squealing and shrieking of the sound and I liked it best when applying a bit of a cut around 10 o'clock.
The most interesting knob, of course, is the gain knob.
The pedal does not only pass signal with gain at zero, it also gets you low gain distortion.
There is no clean tone in the Metal Zone.

Travelling through the gain, I get a low gain distortion at zero that increases in a linear fashion until about 10 o'clock. That is the point where things get real.
Two things happen simultaneously. The amount of gain I get from here out can only be described as heavy distortion and a gentle compression sets in.
It is as subtle as a sledge hammer to the face - blink and you miss it, and you barely feel a thing. The way it sets in and works is as delicate as an anvil.
Your signal gets squashed in a way that will make most dedicated compressor pedals on the market flash their lights yellow with envy.
When I ride the gain at noon or past and set the level just 1dB below the threshold of my comp, the comp will idle around, no matter what I do.
The pedal does show some dynamic reaction to how hard you play it and it also clears up unexpectedly well with the basses volume knob, but that distortion and compression give you an amount of sustain that has to be measured with a calendar instead of a stop watch.

I only had a little session for a first impression, but I did not expect to have this much fun with the pedal!

This is of course with guitar, but quite interesting still:


Watched it just the other day.

They to a remarkably degree manage to make the Metal Zone sound somewhat close to a variety of drive pedals, from RAT to Klone, to show how powerful a drive tone shaping tool the EQ of the pedal actually is.

 

[sunbeast]

This thing honestly started off as a big surprise!
I thought this would be something akin to the Bliss Factory or the Fjord Fuzz Fenris, in the sense that you get the feeling of riding a race car down an ancient cobblestone road, with the accelerator pedal stuck to the floor and your co-pilot hysterically screaming obscenities instead of navigational instructions.

Instead, it feels more like a hot-rodded golf cart with the accelerator stuck and you're shooting down the fairway with your co-pilot merely shouting in a mild panic.

I'm pretty sure the EQ is post drive, and it's working remarkably well for bass. The bass knob does not really bring thunder down low, but when you max it out, the tone suck does not feel half as bad as I thought - I even want to go as far and say it's tolerable.
The parametric mids can be used to either push a bit more down low (for mids, that is) in 200-500Hz to increase the throat size for the bark, or it can be used to tame the metallic clank that rings through - with the mids knob turned down a bit and the frequency knob about two thirds up.
The treble knob controls the squealing and shrieking of the sound and I liked it best when applying a bit of a cut around 10 o'clock.
The most interesting knob, of course, is the gain knob.
The pedal does not only pass signal with gain at zero, it also gets you low gain distortion.
There is no clean tone in the Metal Zone.

Travelling through the gain, I get a low gain distortion at zero that increases in a linear fashion until about 10 o'clock. That is the point where things get real.
Two things happen simultaneously. The amount of gain I get from here out can only be described as heavy distortion and a gentle compression sets in.
It is as subtle as a sledge hammer to the face - blink and you miss it, and you barely feel a thing. The way it sets in and works is as delicate as an anvil.
Your signal gets squashed in a way that will make most dedicated compressor pedals on the market flash their lights yellow with envy.
When I ride the gain at noon or past and set the level just 1dB below the threshold of my comp, the comp will idle around, no matter what I do.
The pedal does show some dynamic reaction to how hard you play it and it also clears up unexpectedly well with the basses volume knob, but that distortion and compression give you an amount of sustain that has to be measured with a calendar instead of a stop watch.

I only had a little session for a first impression, but I did not expect to have this much fun with the pedal!

I may have forgotten, but have you spent any time with a Boss HM-2 or any of the boutique derivatives? I have an original HM-2 and it can definitely do some interesting things with bass. It’s been awhile since I plugged it in, but I recall a few specific settings being really uniquely cool (of course the most famous setting is the Swedish Death Metal guitar setting, with all knobs cranked- not really useful for me personally on bass). It actually has a useful low-gain range as well, though quite tweaky to dial in

 

[el murdoque]

I may have forgotten, but have you spent any time with a Boss HM-2 or any of the boutique derivatives? I have an original HM-2 and it can definitely do some interesting things with bass. It’s been awhile since I plugged it in, but I recall a few specific settings being really uniquely cool (of course the most famous setting is the Swedish Death Metal guitar setting, with all knobs cranked- not really useful for me personally on bass). It actually has a useful low-gain range as well, though quite tweaky to dial in

Not that I'd know. The MT-2w is my first foray into the Metal Zone ;-)