My Dirt Bender - Another Jounal

[Charlie Tuna]

That is happening vicariously through you.

 

[el murdoque]

Gentlemen, let me introduce the Ground FX Burning Sunn.
This pedal was produced about a hundred miles away from my home in the beautiful city of Hamburg.
This is, as the name suggests, some kind of amp in a box version of the Sunn Model T.

I never played a Model T, but I gathered that it has two inputs, normal and bright, and a way to combine both.
The Burning Sunn has two gain knobs, named normal and bright.
It also has a three band EQ.
The topology is a bit of a mystery. I gathered from an introduction in a German magazine that the tubes are emulated using JFETs and that there is some kind of power amp simulation going on as well, but they do not describe how that is achieved.

So let's get started. One knob is straightforward and holds no surprises at all: Volume.
The two gain knobs however, can kind of twist your mind a bit, at least when you have a passing layman's education on how signals are passed within amps and pedals. The two gains work independently as one would suspect they do. Turn one all the way down and the other one up, and you get that flavor.
Turn both down and you get nothing (sarcastic comment about stating the obvious).
Turn both up and... they stack. How? I have not figured that out yet.

Let's not get carried away and finish the description first: Three band EQ. Active (boost/cut), noon is flat.

My ears tell me that the EQ works somewhat unusual. It is post gain, But when you turn up the bass, it feels a bit like some clean signal is blended in, but I don't think that's the case.

So how does it sound?
There's a burning church pictured on the pedal, which is black. The LED is white, and add the metallic silver of the non printed enclosure, the switch and the knobs and you have the full color palette. Black metal.
This could be a clear message. This might not be first choice on a worship pedalboard.
However, the Sunn Model T is heavily used in Doom and Stoner bands, so it might not be that bad?
By that bad I mean black metal bad.

Nonetheless, I started slow. EQ at noon and both gains completely off. No signal passes.
Turning up the gain yielded a terrible noise, and no matter what I did on the bass, nothing changed.
Troubleshoot-mode did not have to be employed for long. I had forgotten to put the cable in the bass and the tip was touching ground.
It was a long day at work.
With the bass plugged in, the noise stopped and I was able to play notes.
Turning up normal gain, I got a decent sound, nothing too harsh or too metal to manage, actually it stays clean until noon. That's where a pleasant rasp is applied to the natural string sound. Turning up bright gain, I get somewhat the same, but now I get the feeling the normal gain is a bit on the mellow side. Double checking confirmed that. The EQ works, turning up bass gets the floor shaking. Turning up mids makes Lemmy Kilmister smile. Turning up treble ads a nice sparkly feeling to the texture that hits your eardrums. Each of the knobs has quite some range, so don't overdo it. It feels like the last two increments of the knob travel, there's a little extra added.
With a single gain turned a good bit past noon, I get a pleasant sounding dirt signal with lots of harmonics, and a certain amount of push back. Playing softly stays clean, plucking harder yields growl, but the notes clear up when they fade. Playing power chords showed a good note separation, each one blooming and driving on its own.
The bright channel has more of the upper harmonics and gives off a ... brighter (D'oh!) sounding structure. It reminds me of small metal marbles bouncing on a sheet of metal. A lot of them.
Take the whole range from dirty boost to overdrive, to distortion to fuzz and now cut the distortion out. This pedal does not do your typical high gain distortion sounds. It ventures well into overdrive territory but in this pedal, overdrive shares a border with fuzz, because distortion was not allowed in.
Near the end of the gain knob's travel, the dirt increases a lot more for the last bit.
When you max out one knob or stack them by turning up the other, you get a bit of spluttery fuzz sprinkled on top. The foundation of your tone is still an angry chainsaw that's running itself blunt by being driven into the side of a giant cauldron filled with rocks, but the uppermost harmonics are what you get from a muff when you set it to kill.
That's actually quite nice. You can toy around with the settings of the treble and bright knobs, running bright gain a little higher, but cutting some treble to smooth the harsh top end a little - or you can ride the bright gain a bit lower, compensate with normal gain and then boost the top end a bit. It's fun to experiment.
The mids give the signal a throaty growl. Imagine a large dog. I mean large. Larger than that. Even larger. Now imagine sneaking into that dog's home at night. The noise that dog might use to make you aware of it's presence. The one that weakens your resolve. When you look down you realize you're standing in a small yellow puddle. That's what the mids do when you set a growly tone with the gains and then turn the mids knob up.

I settled on both gains around 1 o'clock, the treble set to cut a little and generous helpings from both mids and bass.
My P bass into the Burning Sunn into Cali76 / Bassrig Super Vintage. What I got really felt like something I have not encountered before and that is in itself something to be treasured. This pedal tries to rival the feeling you get with the Fake Plastic Trees. there is an extra nerve wire running from your fingertips to your ears, going direct and omitting the usual path through the brain. You really feel the dirt. You push it and it will both add dirt and push back.
I needed to watch the treble content. Too little and it sounds muffled, but take too much and it sounds too artificial. But there is a path in the center, where it works great. I feel like this could be a great sound to play with a guitar that uses a high gain amp or distortion pedal that compresses a lot. The raw and dynamic signal could really bring some life to a mix. I tried it out playing to a few recordings and it really sat nicely. I think I want to try this out with the metal band. this could be something that works even better than the DCX.

 

[OnlyFlats]

View attachment 7011318
Gentlemen, let me introduce the Ground FX Burning Sunn.
This pedal was produced about a hundred miles away from my home in the beautiful city of Hamburg.
This is, as the name suggests, some kind of amp in a box version of the Sunn Model T.

I never played a Model T, but I gathered that it has two inputs, normal and bright, and a way to combine both.
The Burning Sunn has two gain knobs, named normal and bright.
It also has a three band EQ.
The topology is a bit of a mystery. I gathered from an introduction in a German magazine that the tubes are emulated using JFETs and that there is some kind of power amp simulation going on as well, but they do not describe how that is achieved.

So let's get started. One knob is straightforward and holds no surprises at all: Volume.
The two gain knobs however, can kind of twist your mind a bit, at least when you have a passing layman's education on how signals are passed within amps and pedals. The two gains work independently as one would suspect they do. Turn one all the way down and the other one up, and you get that flavor.
Turn both down and you get nothing (sarcastic comment about stating the obvious).
Turn both up and... they stack. How? I have not figured that out yet.

Let's not get carried away and finish the description first: Three band EQ. Active (boost/cut), noon is flat.

My ears tell me that the EQ works somewhat unusual. It is post gain, But when you turn up the bass, it feels a bit like some clean signal is blended in, but I don't think that's the case.

So how does it sound?
There's a burning church pictured on the pedal, which is black. The LED is white, and add the metallic silver of the non printed enclosure, the switch and the knobs and you have the full color palette. Black metal.
This could be a clear message. This might not be first choice on a worship pedalboard.
However, the Sunn Model T is heavily used in Doom and Stoner bands, so it might not be that bad?
By that bad I mean black metal bad.

Nonetheless, I started slow. EQ at noon and both gains completely off. No signal passes.
Turning up the gain yielded a terrible noise, and no matter what I did on the bass, nothing changed.
Troubleshoot-mode did not have to be employed for long. I had forgotten to put the cable in the bass and the tip was touching ground.
It was a long day at work.
With the bass plugged in, the noise stopped and I was able to play notes.
Turning up normal gain, I got a decent sound, nothing too harsh or too metal to manage, actually it stays clean until noon. That's where a pleasant rasp is applied to the natural string sound. Turning up bright gain, I get somewhat the same, but now I get the feeling the normal gain is a bit on the mellow side. Double checking confirmed that. The EQ works, turning up bass gets the floor shaking. Turning up mids makes Lemmy Kilmister smile. Turning up treble ads a nice sparkly feeling to the texture that hits your eardrums. Each of the knobs has quite some range, so don't overdo it. It feels like the last two increments of the knob travel, there's a little extra added.
With a single gain turned a good bit past noon, I get a pleasant sounding dirt signal with lots of harmonics, and a certain amount of push back. Playing softly stays clean, plucking harder yields growl, but the notes clear up when they fade. Playing power chords showed a good note separation, each one blooming and driving on its own.
The bright channel has more of the upper harmonics and gives off a ... brighter (D'oh!) sounding structure. It reminds me of small metal marbles bouncing on a sheet of metal. A lot of them.
Take the whole range from dirty boost to overdrive, to distortion to fuzz and now cut the distortion out. This pedal does not do your typical high gain distortion sounds. It ventures well into overdrive territory but in this pedal, overdrive shares a border with fuzz, because distortion was not allowed in.
Near the end of the gain knob's travel, the dirt increases a lot more for the last bit.
When you max out one knob or stack them by turning up the other, you get a bit of spluttery fuzz sprinkled on top. The foundation of your tone is still an angry chainsaw that's running itself blunt by being driven into the side of a giant cauldron filled with rocks, but the uppermost harmonics are what you get from a muff when you set it to kill.
That's actually quite nice. You can toy around with the settings of the treble and bright knobs, running bright gain a little higher, but cutting some treble to smooth the harsh top end a little - or you can ride the bright gain a bit lower, compensate with normal gain and then boost the top end a bit. It's fun to experiment.
The mids give the signal a throaty growl. Imagine a large dog. I mean large. Larger than that. Even larger. Now imagine sneaking into that dog's home at night. The noise that dog might use to make you aware of it's presence. The one that weakens your resolve. When you look down you realize you're standing in a small yellow puddle. That's what the mids do when you set a growly tone with the gains and then turn the mids knob up.

I settled on both gains around 1 o'clock, the treble set to cut a little and generous helpings from both mids and bass.
My P bass into the Burning Sunn into Cali76 / Bassrig Super Vintage. What I got really felt like something I have not encountered before and that is in itself something to be treasured. This pedal tries to rival the feeling you get with the Fake Plastic Trees. there is an extra nerve wire running from your fingertips to your ears, going direct and omitting the usual path through the brain. You really feel the dirt. You push it and it will both add dirt and push back.
I needed to watch the treble content. Too little and it sounds muffled, but take too much and it sounds too artificial. But there is a path in the center, where it works great. I feel like this could be a great sound to play with a guitar that uses a high gain amp or distortion pedal that compresses a lot. The raw and dynamic signal could really bring some life to a mix. I tried it out playing to a few recordings and it really sat nicely. I think I want to try this out with the metal band. this could be something that works even better than the DCX.

Great write up!

Next play session: back it off but stack into it your favourite aggressive dirt pedals. Explore pick playing on rounds if you have that option.

I have the eae model fet and it's niche for me is the above. I don't like semi clean finger style with it but anything dirty is a blast.

 

[el murdoque]

Great write up!

Next play session: back it off but stack into it your favourite aggressive dirt pedals. Explore pick playing on rounds if you have that option.

I have the eae model fet and it's niche for me is the above. I don't like semi clean finger style with it but anything dirty is a blast.

I know what you're doing there.
The Sunn Model T is famous for having that clean'ish mids voice that somehow manages to sound more brutal than full on distortion.
This does stack really nicely with other dirt pedals that have their focus there.


I did some comparison of the DCX Bass and the Burning Sunn as the dirt pedal on my metal board.
I managed to set them quite similar, but there is one massive difference.
On my DCX I have the selector switch set to OD and the other switch set to flat. All the knobs are fairly high.
Imagine biting down on a Magnum Ice cream. And now imagine someone replaced the popsicle stick by a similar shaped object, made of stainless steel, with sharp edges. That's the taste of the DCX I'm using.
It reminds me of the sound of banging two metal things together in a menacing way.

The Burning Sunn does not have that. It sounds wooden, keeping more of the original bass timbre intact, but adding some aggressive top end plus the ripping lows. It's hard to pick a favorite here, because they both are great at touch response and both have a good amount of feeling to them. The DCX has some more touch response - it's really the most responsive pedal I ever played, I think. The Burning Sunn pushes back better and it feels like it's sitting closer to my fingers.

I really must hear both pedals in a real mix at the (brutal) volume the band plays to make up my mind about this.
I certainly know which pedal Josh Homme would pick.

 

[el murdoque]

I finally was able to try out the burning church pedal in a real life band setting.

I tried to match the function to the Origin DCX I use in that setting - so I was using it to hit the preamp a little harder and add lots of gain and grit.

What I found was that the DCX does add a fair bit of ... I wanna call it "Non-Darkglass-Metallic-Thunder".
A good amount of presence and a gnarly texture. The Burning Sunn does not get into that range, it stays more mellow and has more of an organic sound in the mix. What I found was that that pedal can really increase the sustain and it's easy to coax some (wanted) feedback from the amp, even though it sounds quite clean in the mix. It was a lot of fun playing that.

This pedal is a great platform to play another drive pedal into, but I used it at the start of the chain.
I currently struggle a bit on if and how to incorporate that into my board.
I don't want to replace the DCX with it, because the DCX has the perfect treble amount for my taste and my mix - I can see that having it certainly brings something to the table. I'm very unsure on how to proceed here.

 

[mouthmw]

DCX in flat position is my favorite drive tone for that “cut through crunch”.

 

[el murdoque]

DCX in flat position is my favorite drive tone for that “cut through crunch”.

Yeah, I have the switch set flat, the other to overdrive and then lots of treble to make up for the flatwounds.

 

[el murdoque]

It's a bit weird that the boring pedal with the sober name is driving a meaner voice than the pedal with the burning church on it ...

 

[Ritter667]

It's a bit weird that the boring pedal with the sober name is driving a meaner voice than the pedal with the burning church on it ...

Shows where to look for the truly diabolic and satanical in this world.

 

[el murdoque]

Shows where to look for the truly diabolic and satanical in this world.

Phew, that's deep!

@sloppy_phil ... thoughts?



But on the other hand, the DCX is made from steel, while the Burning Sunn is housed in a standard Hammond 1590 series enclosure which is aluminum.
And there's no debate about what's more metal when you have to pick between aluminum and steel.

 

[Mr. voodoobass]

Got intrigued about the bjf designs after reading about your liking of the blueberry.
So got my hands on two one control pedals, blackberry and hookers green.

First impression is they both sound great for a vintage vibe lo gain overdrive or preamp. Loads of volume on tap but just a little dark. Have to test later on loud with the band to really decide on it.
But I could see myself using the blackberry as a warmer gritty preamp by itself.
Now I got even more interested in the original bjf to compare them lol

 

[el murdoque]

Got intrigued about the bjf designs after reading about your liking of the blueberry.
So got my hands on two one control pedals, blackberry and hookers green.

First impression is they both sound great for a vintage vibe lo gain overdrive or preamp. Loads of volume on tap but just a little dark. Have to test later on loud with the band to really decide on it.
But I could see myself using the blackberry as a warmer gritty preamp by itself.
Now I got even more interested in the original bjf to compare them lol

I never tested the OneControl directly against the original, but as I wrote somewhere in this thread, the Bearfoot version was a disappointment when your ears are adjusted and calibrated to the BJFe version - given that there should be virtually no difference between the two. Comparison is made hard by them pouring black epoxy on their boards - but as I said, the BJFe Blueberry does that thing to the mids that I have yet to hear in another pedal.
It easily becomes an always on pedal for all kinds of music with dirty guitars.

 

[el murdoque]

How did you like the Hooker's Green?
I've had this in my shopping cart a few times, but never pulled the trigger.

 

[GrowlerBox]

How did you like the Hooker's Green?
I've had this in my shopping cart a few times, but never pulled the trigger.

I don’t think you were asking me, but I really like it. It isn’t a million miles from the Barbershop in tone, although it’s darker, and responds to heavier dynamic playing with a sort of “sag” that I enjoy. It’s tiny, which makes up for the side jacks, but somehow, there’s still room for a battery! It’s quite low gain (but never quite clean) with instrument-level input, but can be boosted into significantly higher gain without becoming harsh or brittle, and stacks well as a result.

 

[Mr. voodoobass]

How did you like the Hooker's Green?
I've had this in my shopping cart a few times, but never pulled the trigger.

Yes like mentioned above, there’s sag, great lo gain but maybe a little dark. If you keep the lowboost way down, it gets brighter and sounds great pick playing.
Bringing it up all the way got it closer in tone to the blackberry, but with more gain on tap.

 

[Mr. voodoobass]

Oh and I play with flats, so that could also be why I find both pedals on the dark side of things.

 

[johnk_10]

Oh and I play with flats, so that could also be why I find both pedals on the dark side of things.

with flats (which is what i mostly use), or rounds the Hooker's green is a little dark, but it does sound great

 

[Charlie Tuna]

I know some of y'all will like to try this out: Bass Jive

[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]

 

[Sugarbear08]

Has the iron ether oxide been discussed in this thread? I recently acquired one and it's a blast. Very versatile... raunchy even.

 

[Charlie Tuna]

Has the iron ether oxide been discussed in this thread? I recently acquired one and it's a blast. Very versatile... raunchy even.

I'm pretty sure it hasn't since the jounal has been a bit more O/D-sided than fuzz-sided.