here's an update for my dirt/orverdrive pedal quest............
i've been experimenting further with trying to get my perfect overdriven bass tone and i'm ALOT closer, and possibly have acheived exactly what i i was looking for.
i used the Catalinbread SFT on the gig last weekend and it worked really well. it was very smooth and syrupy, however it did slightly alter (cut) the low end, and i used it in front of the amp since i used the red ripper in the loop of my SVT7Pro for another song. i did miss having a blend control for the SFT, since i would have liked to have been able to dial in a little clean low end punch but it did work well regardless. sometimes cutting a little lows can help you cut through in a mix, but i still missed having them.
so today, i wanted to see if i could try the SFT in the loop. what i found out is that when it's in the loop, it's out of phase with the dry input signal making the blend control unuseable since when it's set at 50/50 blend the signal drops way down. and even blending it in a little wreaks havoc with the girth and punch of the tone. i've found that many, if not most, distortion pedals make your signal out phase. now i could build a tiny active buffer that would invert the signal but i decided to try something else. i pulled out my aphex bass exciter pedal and found that it also reverses the phase, and while i could use it to just reverse the phase back to match the dry signal without adding any color by keeping the blend controls at zero, i used its exctier to restore the low end of the SFT by dialing in the frequency and amount of low end that the SFT cuts.
to do it, i just patched the send into the SFT's input, then went out of the SFT into the aphex back to the return of the loop. by turning the blend control to hear the dry signal only and then rotating it back and forth to compare it to the wet signal, i set the SFT at the minimum drive (clean) with it's treble and bass controls at noon and used the aphex to restore the low end so the dry matched the wet signal's tone exactly, and the aphex actually did a better job of it than using an eq in the loop. then i dialed in some gain/grit of the SFT to have a bit more dirt that i'd use and adjusted the blend control to dial in the amount of SFT into the dry signal. it worked perfect and sounds awesome now!
i also got a Seymour Duncan SFX-11 twin tube on friday, and i really like how it sounds on a guitar. on a bass, it also cuts some of the low end (as almost every guitar distortion pedal does) and it is also out of phase in the loop. so i did the same thing by running the SFX-11 into the aphex and WOW, it really sounds nice, with either of it's two distortion modes, and i actually prefer it over the SFT. right now, when used with the aphex, i'm thinking that this just may be the perfect overdrive pedal for me, although it is somewhat more of a hassle since it's big, and i have to run it into another pedal to get what i want, but man is it good.
another pedal that i messed around with was my old TS9. now these pedals are known for really cutting the lows and boosting the mids, but i modded mine last night with a switch to make it both a bass overdrive and have the option of running it stock. it sounds pretty darn good with a bass after the mod, and the funny this is, it ISN'T out of phase in the loop.
in my fuzz/OD quest, i have a few of other pedals on their way to me including a Bad Monkey (which i'm going to mod for bass like i did the TS9), and an MXR blowtorch (since i liked it when i demo'd one a while ago), but what has me the most excited is the Greedtone overdrive that i purchased this morning. i considered getting a darkglass B3K and i still might get one (once my budget recovers) to see if it's my cup of tea, but they seem a little brighter (and more scooped) than what i'm looking for and the Greedtone appears to be the one that i'v always been looking for, but i'll have to wait til the end of the week to know that after it gets here..............
sorry for the long read but that's what can happen when one talks about tone and overdrives.
To note: I demoed my OD's on my sound cloud account, Fuzzrocious Rat Tail and DOD 250RI.
