My Dirt Bender - Another Jounal

[tidbits]

In that setting, it also takes other dirt pedals well. Set another pedal to the brink of breakup into the 'not-quite-there-yet' range of the gain knob and fire the one "clean" pedal into the other "clean" pedal and your #10 rasp becomes a #3 rasp all of a sudden.

I had my drive pedals set up in the order of lowest gain --> highest gain, but with the settings on the Jive (and maybe because it's set not far above unity output) I'm not getting anything worth using when stacking them.

Maybe I'll try pushing the Jive towards the end of the gain chain to see what it does when it gets hit harder.

 

[gillento]

I had my drive pedals set up in the order of lowest gain --> highest gain, but with the settings on the Jive (and maybe because it's set not far above unity output) I'm not getting anything worth using when stacking them.

Maybe I'll try pushing the Jive towards the end of the gain chain to see what it does when it gets hit harder.

I have my lowest gain pedal/preamp always at the end of the chain right before comp.

 

[voosies]

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

Try running volume 10, lows and highs 10, and distortion at 0. Avalanche Master Song by Godflesh used those exact settings into an Ampeg SVT rig, round and midrange-heavy but not harsh or chainsaw-y.

 

[sunbeast]

Try running volume 10, lows and highs 10, and distortion at 0. Avalanche Master Song by Godflesh used those exact settings into an Ampeg SVT rig, round and midrange-heavy but not harsh or chainsaw-y.

I figured there were probably some bassists that had also figured out that HM-2 low-gain thing! I just tried it on a whim one time on a P with flats and was really surprised. I'll have to revisit it.

 

[el murdoque]

Are you people really telling me I need a HM-2 on top of the Metal Zone?

 

[Teryup]

Are you people really telling me I need a HM-2 on top of the Metal Zone?

And run one into the other for maximum metal

 

[el murdoque]

Speaking of metal!

Yesterday, I brought the Wessex along to the metal band practice for gathering the last bit of information on that pedal, and it is like I suspected: In heavier music, while having a certain bite, it lacks density to hold its own against the acoustic miasma of distorted guitars (one of the guys actually brought a Metal Zone! Since he is but a filthy peasant, he of course only had the Boss version.). The Wessex drowns in the mix. A quick double check with the Meatsmoke confirmed it - it feels like an on/off switch. Stomp on the Wessex and the bass is gone. Stomp Wessex off and Meatsmoke on and the room is shaking.

My final verdict is this:
The Bogner Wessex is a terrific pedal for magic tone sweetening and lowest to low gain overdrive. It works so well you might assume it was intended for bass use. The touch response is great, it sounds great and feels great. Heavier drive is possible, but it gets spread thin and won't really work in dense mixes.

 

[johnk_10]

i have had a Wessex for a long time and i dig it.

 

[el murdoque]

Those Effectrode pedals are harder to find than anticipated!

At least when you're looking on the European second hand market and want to pay a good price.

 

[el murdoque]

Readers of the Jounal,
I want to inform you that I have entered negotiations, discussing the purchase of both an Effectrode Blackbird and a Tube Drive.
Both look promising, but it's not possible to predict the outcome yet.


Best case scenario: I will settle a compact with both sellers and receive both units in about 10 days' time, starting to annoy you with comparisons of giant tube driven pedals when I pit them against the Meatsmoke.

 

[Ritter667]

One thing that does absolutely not happen with the gain past 10 o'clock is note separation.
When you go for a power chord (root, fifth, octave), and then play alternating patterns where you do the root first as a solo note, then play the fifth and octave as a double stop, the two sound nearly identical - the Metal Zone adds that many harmonics and also cuts off that much definition.
However, the EQ is indeed incredibly powerful to shape the drive.

I forgot to ask, since you own both now, have you tried stacking the Metal Zone in Standard mode into the Orange Juice, as I suggested earlier in this thread?

A completely different high gain distortion tone, a tighter more grindy one.

And an improvement as far as I am concerned.

 

[el murdoque]

I forgot to ask, since you own both now, have you tried staking the Metal Zone in Standard mode into the Orange Juice, as I suggested earlier in this thread?

A completely different high gain distortion tone, a tighter more grindy one.

And an improvement as far as I am concerned.

Oh, I forgot about that. The Metal Zone has so much gain, It never occurred to me to stack it with even more.

 

[Ritter667]

Oh, I forgot about that. The Metal Zone has so much gain, It never occurred to me to stack it with even more.

Yeah, I don't think I ever used my Metal Zone with the Gain above noon for anything, except maybe when I got my first one, many years ago, as my first pedal, for guitar, and I had no clue what I was doing.

In general it's a pretty extreme pedal regarding parameter control range, all the controls goes way beyond ridiculous, which is why it is so easy to make it sound like crap if you don't know what you are actually doing.

My go to settings on the Metal Zone is Gain set about 10 o'clock, then High at about 11 o'clock, Low at about 1 o'clock, Mid Freq at about 9 o'clock, and Middle at about 2 o'clock, then into Orange Juice with Drive at about 3 o'clock, Tone at about 11 o'clock and Voice at about 1 o'clock, both set at just about unity level.

 

[el murdoque]

Yeah, I don't think I ever used my Metal Zone with the Gain above noon for anything, except maybe when I got my first one, many years ago, as my first pedal, for guitar, and I had no clue what I was doing.

In general it's a pretty extreme pedal regarding parameter control range, all the controls goes way beyond ridiculous, which is why it is so easy to make it sound like crap if you don't know what you are actually doing.

My go to settings on the Metal Zone is Gain set about 10 o'clock, then High at about 11 o'clock, Low at about 1 o'clock, Mid Freq at about 9 o'clock, and Middle at about 2 o'clock, then into Orange Juice with Drive at about 3 o'clock, Tone at about 11 o'clock and Voice at about 1 o'clock, both set at just about unity level.

I did that just now, but I have to admit that you seem to enjoy it a lot more than I did. I will have to try again with the OJ directly in the signal path. I hit the Broughton FFXL with the MT-2w and had the OJ in the loop to preserve more of the low end - I guess that the tightening up you're talking about does get negated by that move, now that I think of it.

 

[Ritter667]

I did that just now, but I have to admit that you seem to enjoy it a lot more than I did. I will have to try again with the OJ directly in the signal path. I hit the Broughton FFXL with the MT-2w and had the OJ in the loop to preserve more of the low end - I guess that the tightening up you're talking about does get negated by that move, now that I think of it.

I think you are right.

And also I don't think you should expect not to loose any low end with this setup.

You will, but in return you do get a glorious seriously evil grinding high gain distortion tone out of it.

Whether that is useful to you is another matter however.

It isn't really a tone suited for traditional bass play and a traditional bass role, holding down the low end (which is not what I usually do anyway).

But placed after a reverb it is perfect for tremolo picking, and black metal/black gaze stuff in general.

I must admit though that I prioritized it not to be part of my main setup, I use a Turbo RAT clone blended with parallel "clean" signal, and if I need more distortion an EHX English Muff'n overdrive stacked into the Rat + "Clean" signal, for my high gain distortion needs, but if I had had room for just two more pedals the Metal Zone + Orange Juice likely would have been included, for those special occasions.

 

[el murdoque]

I did try to stack the Metal Zone into the OJ without running it through a loop and I get what you mean now, @Ritter667 .
In this scenario, the loss of low end (a small bit by the MT-2w and a small bit by the OJ amounts to a large bit) has a certain effect that really works for the ear when you're playing on your own. I would not know how to utilize it in my current situation, but this might be a good voice to play a lead in a metal song.
....but as you might have noticed somewhere in the last 107 pages of this thread, I am a man of the low end.
However, since I was stacking pedals already, I did try around a bit to see if there are hidden gems in my current collection.
I already said, a long while back, that the rabbithole of dirt pedals and the rabbithole of dirt stacking creates a rabbithole² and that is a bit scary to explore.

After some unsuccessful combinations, I tried running the Fake Plastic Trees into the Meatsmoke, with both pedals set to boost bass and both gains set to a touch sensitive level that yields grit at a playing strength that is just before the threshold of my comp.
A few things happened:
1. The touch response stacks. You go from clean to a lot more dirt than either pedal can manage on its own, all with your fingertips.
2. I want to say the bass knob of the FPT makes the bass a bit more dense in the mix, while the bass knob of the Meatsmoke makes the bass, for want of a better word, bigger. For a reason I cannot fathom, those two effects also stack.
3. The combined grit of both pedals yields a completely different taste. The size of the individual chunks increases, it gets more coarse.
4. When kicking in the "F it, we ball!" switch on the Meatsmoke with the FPT still engaged, the amount of kaputt in my sound increases. It's getting a bit unpredictable and more chaotic. I already said the Meatsmoke is capable of giving you a vibe of a tube amp that's running at slightly over 100% capacity. This feel increases, and there are some dips in the decay of the note, sounding like the amp wants to produce the tone, but cannot. Where the Meatsmoke on its own sounds like a tube amp turned to 11 or 12, the stacked combination sounds like the same thing, but with power tubes that are way past their prime. You've already looked at a new set on TubeAmpDoctor.com and kept putting it off because you don't enjoy that particular kind of amp maintenance and you're telling yourself that you'll swap them before the next gig, but for the band practice this week, it'll be fine - since no gigs were lined up, you've done that for way too long and now you're hoping the amp makes it through the entire band practice.

 

[el murdoque]

This is where I have gotten now. I put a pedal sideways - and the board looks like a mess.

 

[el murdoque]

To get a grip on the situation I just ordered an aftermarket patch bay that mounts to the side of the Pedaltrain. This will allow me to properly orient the Broughton pedal. I also got an angled power cable for the Meatsmoke to save some space there, plus some more patch cables that allow me to re-do the board, hopefully in a more fashionable way - else I got to talk with @moon-bass for therapy ;-)

 

[moon-bass]

To get a grip on the situation I just ordered an aftermarket patch bay that mounts to the side of the Pedaltrain. This will allow me to properly orient the Broughton pedal. I also got an angled power cable for the Meatsmoke to save some space there, plus some more patch cables that allow me to re-do the board, hopefully in a more fashionable way - else I got to talk with @moon-bass for therapy ;-)

I think the sideways pedal adds character ...

 

[el murdoque]

I think the sideways pedal adds character ...

So does a crack pipe ;-)