So I picked up the Way Huge Saucy Box on a trade recently and have been putting it through its paces for the last few days. (I play passive j style basses, Fender J mim and Lakland Skyline Decade.) The controls are pretty straightforward: Volume, Tone, Drive. As with the Pork Loin, the Saucy Box has discrete clean and dirty signal paths, the difference here is that there aren't separate controls for them, and the SB doesn't have internal trimpots.
The Drive knob has a fixed clean to dirty ratio across its sweep. So fully CCW will yield no drive and instead a sweet clean boost. As the Drive goes CW, clean decreases and dirty increases. Once fully CW, the signal path is basically dirty only. And the Tone knob is passive.
In the neck position, with the tone on the pedal at noon or lower, the low end was present. At the bridge position, low end was harder to come by no matter what the setting on the pedal unfortunately. Mixed neck and bridge had strong low end presence. Once I got the settings right for my set up, the pedal shined. The clean/dirty blend was easy to balance and the amount of dirty that came through was smooth and touch responsive
It sounded great running an octave before it, and was fantastic at pushing a fuzz down the chain.
I read up as much as I could on the SB and have read folks describe it as Klon-ish and not. Based on this people say it has the Klon architecture of balanced clean/dirty paths on one pot, but that the circuitry more resembles a simplified Pork Loin. Gut shots are included in the link.
Overall, the SB is a versatile transparent overdrive that plays well with others. It won't transform your tone: your tone will be there no matter what with the SB, so getting a sound you like from it if you aren't satisfied with your dry tone won't be possible imo. It won't unseat the SSBS Mini on my board (don't think anything can, to be honest), but it's a fantastic piece of gear, and can play many roles depending on your needs.
The Drive knob has a fixed clean to dirty ratio across its sweep. So fully CCW will yield no drive and instead a sweet clean boost. As the Drive goes CW, clean decreases and dirty increases. Once fully CW, the signal path is basically dirty only. And the Tone knob is passive.
In the neck position, with the tone on the pedal at noon or lower, the low end was present. At the bridge position, low end was harder to come by no matter what the setting on the pedal unfortunately. Mixed neck and bridge had strong low end presence. Once I got the settings right for my set up, the pedal shined. The clean/dirty blend was easy to balance and the amount of dirty that came through was smooth and touch responsive
It sounded great running an octave before it, and was fantastic at pushing a fuzz down the chain.
I read up as much as I could on the SB and have read folks describe it as Klon-ish and not. Based on this people say it has the Klon architecture of balanced clean/dirty paths on one pot, but that the circuitry more resembles a simplified Pork Loin. Gut shots are included in the link.
Overall, the SB is a versatile transparent overdrive that plays well with others. It won't transform your tone: your tone will be there no matter what with the SB, so getting a sound you like from it if you aren't satisfied with your dry tone won't be possible imo. It won't unseat the SSBS Mini on my board (don't think anything can, to be honest), but it's a fantastic piece of gear, and can play many roles depending on your needs.
