I'm not shooting for five, as I will end up having to get creative in finding reasons to criticise what are probably perfectly good pedals. Off the top of my head:
1) Boss ODB-3. Probably a historic curio by this stage of the game. It must be one of the first dedicated bass overdrives, right? Only, it isn't an overdrive! Instead it is a pretty generic distortion pedal, with an EQ section to let you add static fizzle or girthy untenable low end, neither of which help you be heard in a band setting. The temptation is to always back off the wet mix and end up with a constant background sizzle, rather than an integrally driven bass tone. Pretty much the opposite of a hot tube driven tone. Not bad for a first attempt, but definitely best used for those '90s metal tones, from a period where they had just finished chasing distortion out of bass rigs and were totally green about how to add it back in. I did all the pretentious Wampler mods and things to it, swapping out caps, resistors and diodes to try and sweeten it up. No dice, the pedal is rotten in any configuration if you want a cranked SVT tone or similar. Also, and once more with feeling, it isn't an overdrive!!
2) EHX Bass Big Muff. Unreliable. The best use I ever got out of it was thickening up a bass tone in a recording session. In the final mix you cannot hear the fuzz, simply that there is a bit more mids thump to the tone, for which you would have to know my bass was deficient in in the first place. Otherwise a mystery magic pedal; loud but inaudible. Shoveled frequencies in wasteful corners of the audio spectrum, that meant I would end up running a gainy rig that was still totally lost once the drummer kicked in. Again, the temptation was always there to mix in tonnes of dry signal and, again, get a background fuzz soup going on. The wee switch broke on mine pretty quickly.
3) Digitech Bass Squeeze. A compressor without any of the useful controls. Very digital sounding and prone to getting noisy quickly. Could be made to clip quite easily. The paintwork also picked up scratches and chips simply by sitting on a shelf. No idea, other than that Digitech didn't formulate especially good metallic paint, and painted it an ugly bronze shade for whatever reason. Heavily dining off a totally unwarranted DBX collaboration, limited in functionality and noisy. No attack, release, ratio or input controls, just an underwhelming crossover control with two knobs to control the level of compression either side of the crossover. Also had a slight latency which was audible if you side-chained it, which isn't a ridiculous thing to do with a compressor surely?
4) Ashdown Drive Plus. The VU meter is cool, but there is a bit of befuddlement about setting up the Balance, LF Drive and HF Drive controls. Basically I always thought the controls had an inherent level of redundancy to them, as you could get identical tones from different settings simply by altering the balance and levels of the two drives available. All of this with knobs with teeny tiny little dots on the top, so you could barely see where they were set. All that, and you still got a fairly blah mid-gain fart distortion at the end of the day. Also, a pedal this big should probably have a DI output, cabinet sim and all those sorts of goodies. A big red disappointment.
