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My Dirt Bender - Another Jounal
- Thread starter el murdoque
- Start date
I read online that the Dark Driving is based on the Honeybee and the Blueberry. Is there any truth to this claim?
RE: compression
I think the EQ filtering going into a clipping stage really effects how compressed it feels probably more than anything else- if you feed full unfiltered bass into most clipping stages then your output tends to feel quite smashed/congested, as a clipping stage like a compressor will run out of headroom fastest in the lows. So most bass (and especially guitar) drive pedals use some form of high-pass filtering before the clipping stage to retain more dynamics, then often have some low-pass filtering after the clipping stage to try to re-balance the signal.
It might be that what people mean by "compressed" is whether or not the pedal still displays some touch-sensitivity, where it changes tone and drive character based on input amplitude (which a lot of pedals really don't do well). I feel like a lot of lower-wattage tube amps are renowned for touch-sensitivity even when they may still be quite compressed most of the time at normal gig volumes (that was how I ran my Mesa Prodigy for years in a very loud band in half-power mode at 125 watts- I could get really nice punchy attack peaks even as my sound was constantly pushed/saturated), and those are the types of tones many people aim to emulate with drive pedals.
For me, the Blackstone Mosfet does both of the above really well- at low-Gain settings it retains dynamics and sits at that "edge of breakup" place really nicely where the drive amount and character are very dynamic based on my playing, and at higher gain settings it still maintains touch-sensitivity where the peaks poke through and create different textures rather than getting completely smashed. I actually find the DCX after the Blackstone to work really well to bring back some of the beef that the more mid-forward character of the Blackstone can tend to overshadow. By itself I find the DCX to be comparatively compressed sounding (even in EQ mode) once you actually hit consistent audible drive- though it does have dynamic touch-sensitivity to the character of the drive tone
I think the EQ filtering going into a clipping stage really effects how compressed it feels probably more than anything else- if you feed full unfiltered bass into most clipping stages then your output tends to feel quite smashed/congested, as a clipping stage like a compressor will run out of headroom fastest in the lows. So most bass (and especially guitar) drive pedals use some form of high-pass filtering before the clipping stage to retain more dynamics, then often have some low-pass filtering after the clipping stage to try to re-balance the signal.
It might be that what people mean by "compressed" is whether or not the pedal still displays some touch-sensitivity, where it changes tone and drive character based on input amplitude (which a lot of pedals really don't do well). I feel like a lot of lower-wattage tube amps are renowned for touch-sensitivity even when they may still be quite compressed most of the time at normal gig volumes (that was how I ran my Mesa Prodigy for years in a very loud band in half-power mode at 125 watts- I could get really nice punchy attack peaks even as my sound was constantly pushed/saturated), and those are the types of tones many people aim to emulate with drive pedals.
For me, the Blackstone Mosfet does both of the above really well- at low-Gain settings it retains dynamics and sits at that "edge of breakup" place really nicely where the drive amount and character are very dynamic based on my playing, and at higher gain settings it still maintains touch-sensitivity where the peaks poke through and create different textures rather than getting completely smashed. I actually find the DCX after the Blackstone to work really well to bring back some of the beef that the more mid-forward character of the Blackstone can tend to overshadow. By itself I find the DCX to be comparatively compressed sounding (even in EQ mode) once you actually hit consistent audible drive- though it does have dynamic touch-sensitivity to the character of the drive tone
That is what I had read long ago as well- some relation to the Blueberry, though I didn’t get along with the Dark Driving personally.
I want to say that very high gain distortion pedals, and distortion effects in general, feel the most compressed for me, as in there is a somewhat even response, no matter what you do. You play hard, you get a wall of distorted sound. You play softly, you get a wall of slightly less distorted sound.
That was what has got me musing about the nature of what we describe as a compressed pedal, or rather a pedal that feels like it compresses.
I do think that as long as you get reaction to your playing dynamics, you're less likely to feel compressed, and that has not too much to do with the nature of what a true compressor does.
Example:
An overdrive pedal that plays clean when you play with the lightest touch, and offers something just at the edge of your hearing capabilities when you play soft and is hovering on the brink of breakup when you play less than soft and shows audible breakup when you play medium strength, and solid grind and squeeze when you really dig in.
Most of us, that is my guess, would call this an open sounding pedal that reacts well to playing dynamics and we'd not really call it compressing.
Hooked up to a meter, one would most likely see that the playing dynamics in terms of dB output only increase significantly on the first half, but as soon as audible dirt sets in, the pedal takes your input dBs and trades them for overtones, harmonics and saturation - without really increasing the output dB as such. You still get a reward for your sensitive fingering action, in terms of the harder you go, the harder the pedal yells "Yes, daddy!"
However, yelling harder does not equal yelling louder. This is, so is my guess, still perceived as something that does not compress too much, for the aforementioned reasons, even though this behavior is correctly described as compression from a purely technical standpoint.
Make sure you know your pedal's safe word!
I think it is somewhat more complicated than that though- for the same reason that some types of compressors will smash the signal and dip and swell extremely when fed a full-range signal into the sidechain but can act quite punchy and robust when you add a sidechain HPF to cut the lows from the signal that triggers the compressor- clipping sections also tend to be more sensitive to low-frequency info, and so the ones that tend to sound the most compressed are the ones that see the most low-frequency info. A clipping circuit that filters the lows out before the clipping will tend to have a much more dynamic behavior, where the peaks it sees are mostly coming from the mids and highs and will be much more likely to have a Gain range where you can sit at audible clean when playing softly and consistent overdrive when you dig in. If you were to take that same circuit and remove the HPF then I’d expect it to immediately be hairier and less dynamic as the bass frequencies would consistently be smashing the drive section- you can test that with pedals like the MBD that have controls to adjust how much bass is filtered before the clipping section (also the Grunt switch on Darkglass pedals).
Another consideration is how linear the clipping section is- many tube amps are known for “sag”, where at a certain signal level the tubes or the power section feeding the tubes run short on being able to deliver the full signal cleanly after the initial attack and so it responds in a way that distorts the note envelope in a non-linear way. This happens in pedals when they clip too, not just tube ones, probably most obvious in some fuzz designs but it happens more subtly in other solid-state dirt pedals as well (that is some of the non-linear vibe I was talking about earlier that digital profilers totally miss). Sag is interesting because at lower levels it can actually emphasize the attack of the note where the amp/pedal is able to feed that initial part of the hit but then runs out of juice as it sustains- it can kinda work like a compressor with a slow attack where your attack pokes through then the drive/compression set in harder. The Mesa Prodigy I have is great at that- it has a relatively light power transformer but big output capacitors for a tube amp with that kind of tube complement, with enough juice and rebound speed to feed the transients well but with more sag after as the caps are depleted of juice (Randy from Mesa apparently designed it this way on purpose, from a TB post from him shortly after the Prodigy was released). Getting an amp like an SVT into that same response would require pushing it MUCH louder since it has a much more robust power transformer and relies less on the capacitors to feed the transients and sustain a more linear response (it may not even be possible to get an SVT to do that thing!). The lower sustained headroom of the Mesa actually helps it respond in a more aggressive way that I really love while an SVT feels more compressed to me. Sag when you push the amp even harder can just turn into mushy compression- depending on how hard you are hitting the amp and the line you are playing (faster lines never give the amp time to fully recover) it can turn into a super smashed output all around. Fortunately I never needed to push my Prodigy so hard that it hit that threshold (though I played a vintage 50 watt Fender Bassman head for awhile in a band where that super smashed bass sound was “the thing”). I think the Blackstone Mosfet really does a similar nonlinear thing for me- the way the transients always pop through even with higher gain levels.
I guess my point is that there is a lot more to the design of a drive circuit than just the level of the full-range signal hitting the clipping section. EQ filtering and linearity of the clipping section make a big difference to the compression or perceived compression to me.
Dark Driving.
Those two LEDs are a purple'ish hue, with a bit more leaning into the blue (or ultraviolet?) than the purple LED on my Blueberry. It's mesmerizing, nearly hypnotizing to look into them.
As you have seen on the pic I posted earlier, there are three knobs on that pedal and my predecessor has taken a few strips of tape and labeled them V G and T. It does not take a rocket scientist to deduce that these must be shorthand for Volume, Gain and Tone. Is it a little bit excessive, labeling a three knob pedal?
I'd have said yes this afternoon. Because I had not played it yet. I waited until the sun had set, so I could do some dark driving.
The right footswitch turns the pedal on and off, indicated by the top right LED.
V is volume. CCW for less, CW for more, it feels like just before noon is about unity.
The second switch ... I want to say it does impart a different flavor on the circuit, but I'd be hard pressed to identify which one is the bright and which one is the mellow setting. Maybe that is an easy one if you play a bass with strong treble and fresh rounds into the pedal, but I hardly need to remember you people that I'm the guy who will soak a fresh pair of flatwounds in skin care product over night before putting them on a bass, just to make them age faster. The setting where the second LED is on has more bass, so I went with that.
The Gain knob. You know how these work. Turn it fully CCW and there's no signal, turn it fully CW and all hell breaks loose. On other pedals. On my Dark Driving, it'll pass signal with the gain fully CCW. Here's what I think is happening. When you turn up the gain, just after the fully CCW position, there is a clicking sound in the signal, and I do think that with gain fully CCW, you only have the pedal's baked in clean blend passing. That clicking sound is the gain stage coming in. There is not much happening in terms of volume increase as you travel through the travel of the knob, and what increase you have is by no means linear. The difference between the gain at 9 o'clock and fully dimed is also not very drastic. It is a low to mid gain drive pedal and with a low output passive bass, you get low gain only.
The attentive reader might have noticed two things at this point:
1. I described all the controls the controls of the pedal in the order of how complicated they are to grasp.
2. I have not written anything about the tone knob yet.
It took me a while to untie the knot in my brain that I got from trying to wrap my mind around the function of that knob - I was lying on the floor, twitching spasmodically while trying not to bang my bass into furniture while drooling saliva on the carpet, but look at me, all cleaned up and back in my office chair, so I obviously managed.
Turn the tone knob all the way to the left and you clearly get a massive high cut and a muffled sound.
Turn the tone knob all the way to the right and you clearly get a massive high cut and a muffled sound.
I get the feeling that the whole nature of what the knob does changes every few increments - at times it even sounds a bit like my trusty ol' BDPG.
Did I write about how it sounds? Not really. I want some more mileage on it - all I want to say real quick at this point is ... um well, here's the problem: There's no short way to describe this.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who regularly gets extremely stupid DIY lifehack videos through social media (please tell me I'm not alone!) This afternoon on the 'gram, I saw someone making a silicone(?) mold off a Mercedes Benz hood ornament, then casting it in tin multiple times, soldering these together and then forming them around a piece of clay that looked suspiciously head-shaped. I swiped on at this point, not wanting to see the outcome, but it was probably some super stupid head gear, maybe a helmet that actively increases your chance of head injury in case of a crash.
It does not matter. All I wanted from all this was to conjure one single thing into your mind: These people often use something which I assume is silicone. The stuff is a thick liquid when it comes into view, is then poured into whatever stupid contraption they rigged and then it somewhat hardens, but also stays flexy. We'll need that now. Actually, a lot of it.
We'll also need a 11' piece of eaves gutter (however you call it in your local lingo, that half pipe you fix at the edge of your roof to carry off the rain water), some wood, and a 10 by 10 piece of ... help me with that term. The internet says its called corrugated sheet iron - but there has to be a slang term for it? Until any of you native speakers helps out, I'm gonna stick with wriggly tin. A 10 by 10 piece of wriggly tin.
Now cut the wood to size and glue it into the ends of the gutter, so we get them sealed, making a trough, in which we pour that silicone stuff from a minute ago. Next, take the wriggly tin and dip it in. Hold still until the silicone hardens. Repeat the process three times until all four edges of the sheet are covered with semi hardened silicone stoppers. Drill two holes into the thing along one edge and hang it up, using steel cables.
Phew, that took some time but now we got it.
When the clean sound of a modern djent metal player (short, well kempt hair, cashmere sweater, artsy tattoos, black framed glasses, Dingwall five string and a pedalboard decked out in darkglass products) sounds like sledge hammering a suspended strip of corrugated sheet iron, then the Dark Driving sounds like baseball batting the thing we just built. I dearly love it for that.
Those two LEDs are a purple'ish hue, with a bit more leaning into the blue (or ultraviolet?) than the purple LED on my Blueberry. It's mesmerizing, nearly hypnotizing to look into them.
As you have seen on the pic I posted earlier, there are three knobs on that pedal and my predecessor has taken a few strips of tape and labeled them V G and T. It does not take a rocket scientist to deduce that these must be shorthand for Volume, Gain and Tone. Is it a little bit excessive, labeling a three knob pedal?
I'd have said yes this afternoon. Because I had not played it yet. I waited until the sun had set, so I could do some dark driving.
The right footswitch turns the pedal on and off, indicated by the top right LED.
V is volume. CCW for less, CW for more, it feels like just before noon is about unity.
The second switch ... I want to say it does impart a different flavor on the circuit, but I'd be hard pressed to identify which one is the bright and which one is the mellow setting. Maybe that is an easy one if you play a bass with strong treble and fresh rounds into the pedal, but I hardly need to remember you people that I'm the guy who will soak a fresh pair of flatwounds in skin care product over night before putting them on a bass, just to make them age faster. The setting where the second LED is on has more bass, so I went with that.
The Gain knob. You know how these work. Turn it fully CCW and there's no signal, turn it fully CW and all hell breaks loose. On other pedals. On my Dark Driving, it'll pass signal with the gain fully CCW. Here's what I think is happening. When you turn up the gain, just after the fully CCW position, there is a clicking sound in the signal, and I do think that with gain fully CCW, you only have the pedal's baked in clean blend passing. That clicking sound is the gain stage coming in. There is not much happening in terms of volume increase as you travel through the travel of the knob, and what increase you have is by no means linear. The difference between the gain at 9 o'clock and fully dimed is also not very drastic. It is a low to mid gain drive pedal and with a low output passive bass, you get low gain only.
The attentive reader might have noticed two things at this point:
1. I described all the controls the controls of the pedal in the order of how complicated they are to grasp.
2. I have not written anything about the tone knob yet.
It took me a while to untie the knot in my brain that I got from trying to wrap my mind around the function of that knob - I was lying on the floor, twitching spasmodically while trying not to bang my bass into furniture while drooling saliva on the carpet, but look at me, all cleaned up and back in my office chair, so I obviously managed.
Turn the tone knob all the way to the left and you clearly get a massive high cut and a muffled sound.
Turn the tone knob all the way to the right and you clearly get a massive high cut and a muffled sound.
I get the feeling that the whole nature of what the knob does changes every few increments - at times it even sounds a bit like my trusty ol' BDPG.
Did I write about how it sounds? Not really. I want some more mileage on it - all I want to say real quick at this point is ... um well, here's the problem: There's no short way to describe this.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who regularly gets extremely stupid DIY lifehack videos through social media (please tell me I'm not alone!) This afternoon on the 'gram, I saw someone making a silicone(?) mold off a Mercedes Benz hood ornament, then casting it in tin multiple times, soldering these together and then forming them around a piece of clay that looked suspiciously head-shaped. I swiped on at this point, not wanting to see the outcome, but it was probably some super stupid head gear, maybe a helmet that actively increases your chance of head injury in case of a crash.
It does not matter. All I wanted from all this was to conjure one single thing into your mind: These people often use something which I assume is silicone. The stuff is a thick liquid when it comes into view, is then poured into whatever stupid contraption they rigged and then it somewhat hardens, but also stays flexy. We'll need that now. Actually, a lot of it.
We'll also need a 11' piece of eaves gutter (however you call it in your local lingo, that half pipe you fix at the edge of your roof to carry off the rain water), some wood, and a 10 by 10 piece of ... help me with that term. The internet says its called corrugated sheet iron - but there has to be a slang term for it? Until any of you native speakers helps out, I'm gonna stick with wriggly tin. A 10 by 10 piece of wriggly tin.
Now cut the wood to size and glue it into the ends of the gutter, so we get them sealed, making a trough, in which we pour that silicone stuff from a minute ago. Next, take the wriggly tin and dip it in. Hold still until the silicone hardens. Repeat the process three times until all four edges of the sheet are covered with semi hardened silicone stoppers. Drill two holes into the thing along one edge and hang it up, using steel cables.
Phew, that took some time but now we got it.
When the clean sound of a modern djent metal player (short, well kempt hair, cashmere sweater, artsy tattoos, black framed glasses, Dingwall five string and a pedalboard decked out in darkglass products) sounds like sledge hammering a suspended strip of corrugated sheet iron, then the Dark Driving sounds like baseball batting the thing we just built. I dearly love it for that.
Also the Blueberry.
I remember pedals that had a surprising amount of even response regardless of frequency range. The Heather Brown The Blessed Mother (v1) comes to mind, and I think the Blackstone did the same thing. You dial in a bit of hair, you get that amount of hair on the low B, as well as on the C string 12th fret - and both pedals that emphasize dirt on the higher frequencies or the lower frequencies and they will distort those more than the other end of the fretboard.
That is something the Meatsmoke excels at. That initial attack followed up by a small dip that sounds like heavy gear driven to the max, where stuff starts falling off along the way.
Sunbeast, I think you are really good at overthinking these things and I do appreciate that, since this is a thread for overthinking.
Let me re-phrase my initial question.
We, as bass playin' dirt lovin' folk that often run larger pedalboards, have a way of saying that pedal X sounds hella compressed, while pedal Y does not.
We do that by ear and by feeling alone, and we're quite quick at arriving at our conclusion. Are these universal criteria and if so, is it possible to formulate them in a simple way?
Guilty as charged haha! I love to try to understand why I think a certain way about tones, by getting at least a basic understanding of what I’m hearing and what is making it so. Of course it’s futile to a degree to communicate because we all experience things subjectively. One person’s “open” will be another’s “compressed” based on our internal biases and goals, etc. I think it’s actually part of what makes this all fun, is just how non-objective senses are and so how different we can feel about the same things when it comes to sound and gear made for expression. Not to mention that different feelings make us all play differently in reaction/response to what we hear (a really compressed device might make me play more dynamically in response or vice-versa), muddying objectivity even more.
Word!
It's also about tonal preferences and what your signal chain looks like. Maybe your drive pedal sends some transients down the line that really make your comp itchy, maybe that particular pedal sits really well in the mix because your go-to guitar player uses some unusual settings that float their boat. Maybes by the dozen.
I mean, there are people out there that actually recommend the EHX Bass Soul Food as a capable drive pedal!
I only have the v3, so I can’t make a direct comparison, but I know the newer one has more options, like separate Drive and Gain controls.
That sort of heuristic is by definition not going to be universal; there are way too many exceptions, but that does not reduce its utility for relatively rapid decision-making, especially when the evolutionary stakes are so low, except perhaps in the edge case where a good overdrive tone is a significant basis for sexual selection in your corner of the gene pool.
Other than that, I think you've done a fine job of formulating them in a simple way
.
I remember the last Jam session where this lady treated me to an overenthusiastic greeting, and me remembering that she was there last time, too - when I played the Prunes & Custard into the Le Bass. This time, I had brought the Headrush, and my gain sound was lacking.That sort of heuristic is by definition not going to be universal; there are way too many exceptions, but that does not reduce its utility for relatively rapid decision-making, especially when the evolutionary stakes are so low, except perhaps in the edge case where a good overdrive tone is a significant basis for sexual selection in your corner of the gene pool.
Other than that, I think you've done a fine job of formulating them in a simple way
I went home alone.
CMC Audio built a new pedal.
The BFF, which stands for Bi Filter Fuzz. It's a Fuzz, with two filters.
Friends of the Prunes and Custard, this might be right up your alley!
The BFF, which stands for Bi Filter Fuzz. It's a Fuzz, with two filters.
Friends of the Prunes and Custard, this might be right up your alley!
Could be, but I don’t need to pay that for a fuzz pedal, however much beer and chocolate it’s soaked in.CMC Audio built a new pedal.
The BFF, which stands for Bi Filter Fuzz. It's a Fuzz, with two filters.
Friends of the Prunes and Custard, this might be right up your alley!
It looks like the filter section was heavily inspired by the Moog MF-101 - but with the added benefit of being able to let the envelope go both ways.
There's also an EXP port, which lets you set the cutoff frequency by foot.
IMHO, this could be a good thing. Marrying a Fuzz to an Envelope is a hard task, and I know how many pedals I went through until I arrived at the Doom2+PX-101 combo - and I don't need to dig up my recipes to tell you how much those two set me back, you know it's a lot more than CMC is asking for their pedal.
Here are the questions that pop up in my mind immediately, and maybe @lowmid would like to contribute to that, if not too busy with rolling out his pedal release.
1. Where is the trigger for the envelope positioned? Is it before or after the clipping circuit? With the envelope trigger before the fuzz, the pedal would be able to 'listen' to the playing dynamics before they get mangled by a fuzz, much like the Chunk Systems Agent 00Funk and Brown Dog combo does when you run that extra cable or the Meatball Filter can do when you put the fuzz into the FX loop.
2. How "robust" is the pedal? Your average analog synth chain is quirky and fragile. Rig it up in you home, sound test it and set it to perfection, than carefully carry it over to the studio, plug everything in and it will sound totally off, until you've set all the knobs in the smallest increments. Play for an hour, take a break, come back and yet again, it sounds a little different. One of the factors that got many people interested in the Deep (Future) Impact or C4, pedals that do synth reliably and can recall presets.
Hello @el murdoque , the envelope trigger is just after clipping. I've tested this in my lab and since the clipping circuit is PROTO based , it's still dynamic enough for it not to be an issue. with higher gain values it gets more compressed, and so more predictable. you can set the amount of filter opening by setting the ENV amount more or less, so it's pretty versatile!.
2. it's made like the proto type, using the SSI2140 as the filter chip, which is temperature compensated and a modern take on the SSM2040. I find it to be very reliable in my testing. no open loop circuitry here, so each pedal is very consistent.
@GrowlerBox my price is cheaper than a 3leaf doom, and I can assure you the Bi Filter Fuzz contains a LOT of components, is made out of stainless steel, by hand, and yes it's covered in beer and chocolate
2. it's made like the proto type, using the SSI2140 as the filter chip, which is temperature compensated and a modern take on the SSM2040. I find it to be very reliable in my testing. no open loop circuitry here, so each pedal is very consistent.
@GrowlerBox my price is cheaper than a 3leaf doom, and I can assure you the Bi Filter Fuzz contains a LOT of components, is made out of stainless steel, by hand, and yes it's covered in beer and chocolate
It certainly is, but I wouldn’t buy a Doom, either, which is as much a reflection of the state of the NZ dollar and the country’s distance from everywhere as it is of my limited need for such a thing, no matter what a fine example of the genre it doubtless is. I wish it and you every success@GrowlerBox my price is cheaper than a 3leaf doom, and I can assure you the Bi Filter Fuzz contains a LOT of components, is made out of stainless steel, by hand, and yes it's covered in beer and chocolate
.
Question...... Using the Origin DCX along with the Bassrig SV 1/4" out, how would you gain stage this pair? What order? I enjoy the DCX as an always-on tone shaper but have used it as an OD device, as well, to great effect. Passive basses with rounds, generally.
