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My quest for a heavy distortion continues.

nad

nad

60 Cycle Humdinger
Sep 22, 2005
5,645
46
#1
I've gotten close a few times, but I stiiiiiiill haven't foooouuuuuund, what I'm lookin' foooooorrrrrr... Ahem. Sorry.

I'm looking for a very heavy distortion that mostly adds girth, but doesn't get totally buried in a loud rock mix. It doesn't need to cut through completely, just needs enough to be heard while not losing the ability to rattle ye olde bones. The following examples of my journey so far:

BJFE Blue Berry
A legendary pedal, and rightfully so. I loved this one for recording purposes, you could go direct and it sounded like you were cranking a vintage tube amp hooked up to a sealed cab complete with beer/smoke stain/smell. Unfortunately in a band mix, eh, not really what I wanted. More low end than I needed while mellowing the mids and killing too much treble.

3Xfx Fatman/V2
Really close to what I'm trying to acheive, if this pedal had a tone knob that I could tame the treble with it would have been perfect. The oscillation mode was neat, but I didn't really use it except for during Big Rock Endings and while trying to annoy the neighbours.

Tech 21 XXL Bass
One trick pony, and while that isn't necessarily bad, I didn't think the trick was all that great. Although the concept of this pedal was good, and it did cut through a mix relatively okay, I never really bonded with this one. Maybe because the volume knob pissed me off, it was either on 2 or 11 with seemingly no real way to find the middle ground.

Z.Vex Woolly Mammoth
I guess I'm including fuzz in this list. I bounce back and forth between passive and active basses, if it were friendlier to the latter I'd probably still own one of these, but nay, twas not meant to be. Great tone for passives though, although I would have preferred a bit more control in the amount of gain it offered.

Bogdan Whatever
Great for light overdrive, and yes it gets pretty heavy, but in a tone that screams DO NOT WANT. I sold it to my guitarist. He loves it. We're happy.

Boss ODB-3
Owned one for years. Didn't hate it. I moved on.

Any suggestions? I'm thinking my next attempt will be a Supercollider, but I'm looking into Rat clones as well because hey, I was influenced by that lovely Breed bassline at a very young age. Also, I wonder, would it be completely foolish to add a Germanium B:Assmaster to my board, since I love the original version so much?

Apologies for the length. Yes I searched, read, and learned. Cheers and such.

EDIT: I seem to be blurring the lines between distortion and fuzz. To clarify, I'm more concerned with the heaviness factor than the shape/method of the clipping, so pedals of either variety are fine.
 
#2
Try the Ibanez SM7 (Smash Box) or SH7 (7th Heaven) pedals blended with clean signal (FX loop with blend or a blend pedal). I have the SM7 and it's really nice for bass, the EQ set at full Lo and zero Hi :D Drive at 9 o'clock, gate switch at level 2 and edge switch at smooth.

I haven't personally tried the 7th Heaven more than really quickly with guitar but it's pretty close to Smash Box, just optimized a bit better for 7-strings guitars.
 
#3
atheos said:
Try the Ibanez SM7 (Smash Box) or SH7 (7th Heaven) pedals blended with clean signal (FX loop with blend or a blend pedal). I have the SM7 and it's really nice for bass, the EQ set at full Lo and zero Hi :D Drive at 9 o'clock, gate switch at level 2 and edge switch at smooth.

I haven't personally tried the 7th Heaven more than really quickly with guitar but it's pretty close to Smash Box, just optimized a bit better for 7-strings guitars.
Click to expand...

hmmm I should try similar settings for the PD7... PD7 is good but not quite what the OP is looking for I don't think... my fav setting is pretty much all switches at noon all though to get mega grit I have put the distortion at full and the level at unity gain and it sounds pretty awesome,... really only use that setting for playing pulling teeth where I want it to be almost ridiculous whilst playing with a wah!

are you looking more for a distortion or fuzz or OD? to get a cleaner sound but still 'edge' in my head an OD with a bit of grit to it would be the most playable thing to me...
 
#4
atheos said:
Try the Ibanez SM7 (Smash Box) or SH7 (7th Heaven) pedals blended with clean signal (FX loop with blend or a blend pedal). I have the SM7 and it's really nice for bass, the EQ set at full Lo and zero Hi :D Drive at 9 o'clock, gate switch at level 2 and edge switch at smooth.

I haven't personally tried the 7th Heaven more than really quickly with guitar but it's pretty close to Smash Box, just optimized a bit better for 7-strings guitars.
Click to expand...

The guitarist in my first band had both the Smashbox and Seventh Heaven.
I haven't tried the Smashbox on bass, but I did play around with the SH-7.

The SH-7 is a very cool heavy distortion, but when you play two strings at the same time all went static. Not suitable for bass.

I used and liked the Metalzone, works pretty well on bass. This pedal gets my recommendation.
The old BOSS Heavy Metal gets a bit more praise around here, but I didn't try this one out.

As for RATs, I love them. Standard, modded or clones, whatever, they sound nice on bass... in my little experience: I mean I only tried out the standard one a few times, never owned one.
Perhaps a standard RAT owner and user can chime in here with experience on this pedal.


There is also the Ibanez Phat Hed, which has just parted me. (Personally I am not using any drive-pedals anymore.)
The Phat Hed has clean-overdrive-distortion modes. I never liked the Phat Hed in distortion mode, to many strange artificial harmonics when crancked up. (I assume you are looking for cranked up OP).
In this case I prefer the MetalZone to the Phat Hed for distortion.
As overdrive (in overdrive mode) the Phat Hed is a nice pedal. A bit artificial sounding, but I liked that.

All in my humble opinion and experience.

Although I did swear off overdrive and distortion pedal,
I'd like to try out a Malleko B:Assmaster someday as heavy distortion/fuzz.
It gets a lot of wonderful comments.
 
#5
C'thulhu said:
The guitarist in my first band had both the Smashbox and Seventh Heaven.
I haven't tried the Smashbox on bass, but I did play around with the SH-7.

The SH-7 is a very cool heavy distortion, but when you play two strings at the same time all went static. Not suitable for bass.

I used and liked the Metalzone, works pretty well on bass. This pedal gets my recommendation.
The old BOSS Heavy Metal gets a bit more praise around here, but I didn't try this one out.

As for RATs, I love them. Standard, modded or clones, whatever, they sound nice on bass... in my little experience: I mean I only tried out the standard one a few times, never owned one.
Perhaps a standard RAT owner and user can chime in here with experience on this pedal.


There is also the Ibanez Phat Hed, which has just parted me. (Personally I am not using any drive-pedals anymore.)
The Phat Hed has clean-overdrive-distortion modes. I never liked the Phat Hed in distortion mode, to many strange artificial harmonics when crancked up. (I assume you are looking for cranked up OP).
In this case I prefer the MetalZone to the Phat Hed for distortion.
As overdrive (in overdrive mode) the Phat Hed is a nice pedal. A bit artificial sounding, but I liked that.

All in my humble opinion and experience.

Although I did swear off overdrive and distortion pedal,
I'd like to try out a Malleko B:Assmaster someday as heavy distortion/fuzz.
It gets a lot of wonderful comments.
Click to expand...



forgot to add I usually have my Phat hed 7 in OD mode and attack mode 0 or whatever it is... I'm not sure why they added attack modes that basically add so much extra noise it makes you sound amateurish :rollno:
 
#6
Try to find an ADA MB-1 pre-amp.

It's programmable and it has 2 preamps (1 tube, 1 solid state) that can be used in parallel.

When I need full blown distortion I put the tube in its distorion mode and crank the h*ll out of it (easy on the low frequencies), and than add the solid state channel (with a nice low-end boost) to a level that it provides the clarity to cut through, but remains low enough to have the tube channel make the tone.

More info here :phttp://www.adadepot.com/

Oh, and it helps to have humbucking pickups on your bass (hey, a Les Paul has a creamier distortion then a Strat, right:smug:)
 
#7
Not to give you any ideas that would steer you away from my FKR, but you might want to give the Barber trifecta fuzz a try. It has a mode switch that lets choose between big muff, jumbo tonebender or suppa tonbender voicings. Controls for volume, tone, gain and my favorite sludge. Basically it controls how much lowend gets through uneffected. So you can dial in a nasty trebly or midrange tone and still have more bass than you need.
 
#9
theunknowndude said:
forgot to add I usually have my Phat hed 7 in OD mode and attack mode 0 or whatever it is... I'm not sure why they added attack modes that basically add so much extra noise it makes you sound amateurish :rollno:
Click to expand...

I always used it in attack mode 1. :)
So I had fretnoise.... I always used a fretless bass.
Also: overdrive mode, drive full open, EQ flat. BOSS bass eq in front of it with mid scooped, on my amp mids were brought back up again.

Attack mode 2 is just to silly.
Attack mode 1 was silly enough for me. :)
 
#11
Mark Olson said:
Honestly, active vs. passive will make a lot of good pedals unusable to you. If you could decide on active vs. passive basses to play all the time, I think that would be half your battle there.
Click to expand...

That's a very good point you bring up Mark.

I always used passive basses with SS amps. Maybe that's why for example a Metalzone works for me but may be unusable for others.
 
#14
atheos said:
SM7 works nicely even with chords on higher strings. Low string chords are a mess anyway so I really have no need to play them. I don't really play any chords on bass, they just don't work IMO.
Click to expand...

Okay, I should have said the SH-7 is not suitable for me. :)

In the stuff I play I use a lot of chords, but I only use a clean sound nowadays.

I loved the SH-7 on guitar though. IMO one of the best guitar distortions for guitar.

Nice to hear that the SH-7 works for you. I loved it a lot too, except for that interference when using more than one string, I couldn't get past that. And I didn't mean just chords, also when rapidly playing more than one string.
I did however always set the drive to max. :D
 
#19
The best OD pedal I've ever used for cutting through a band mix is my Humphrey modded Badder Monkey. I usually use it at very low gain as a boost, but it can get quite gnarly at max gain - although maybe not enough for what you're looking for, but I suppose you could always cascade it with another gain pedal. The pedal really boosts your mids so you get heard loud and clear.
 

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