I had to modify it a little bit to rescue the PCB after a small mistake, and to make everything fit in this small reclaimed aluminum box. So, the soldering is not really an artwork.
I tested almost all my overdrive pedals and I must say that, overall, guitar overdrives don’t work so well with basses even with the added blend knob. The blend knob helps a lot, of course, but I still prefer my modified ODB-3.
Can you say what the difference is that you’re hearing that you don’t like? I mean from a technical perspective, what is the difference between what is going on with this box versus what is happening with the modified ODB-3.
the difference is that guitar overdrives are mostly made to sound fat, mellow, compressed and kinda focused in the midrange. bass overdrives tend to sound more “straight”, agressive in the high range, and with a wider bandwidth. that’s more a tendency than a hard rule, of course ! and anyway the parallel loop with a dry/wet knob is still really interesting
Okay. I think I understand. It’s not about how the parallel loop box functions, it’s about how the individual pedals are voiced and what their originally intended use was.
That pedal looks cool Terb. Would be nice to hear a sound clip
Fully agree! The other day I tried my BOSS OD-3 and DS-1 on my bass pedalboard and it just sucks the low frequency out of it. Even using EQ before or after doesn’t work that well imo. I guess you really have to know what you are doing when using guitar pedals. I’m not that knowledgable so I rather use pedals that are meant for low freq
Yeah, using guitar pedals on bass is not really optimal way to go. Any decent pedal that’s marketed to bass players should have 2 mandatory knobs:
Blend (to blend clean DI signal with processed one)
High pass filter (to filter out frequencies you don’t want to be affected by pedal)
This will give you maximum flexibility and will retain unprocessed low end. Some pedals have great bass response even without extra bells and whistles but they are rare. You could still accomplish this by using DI’s or some AB spliter box and Bi-amping but it costs more.
I have one of these pedals just for this trick. It has an FX loop with a high pass filter for what I send to the effect and will blend back in everything below the filter point. It lets me experiment with using any guitar pedal on bass.
I lamented about this for months on the forum and found several not-quite options. I even went so far as to start researching what filter topology to use in designing my own. Then @eric.kiser came through with the Sugar Britches.
Another large and more expensive but also more featured contender was the Tyler. It has filters and sends for both the low and high.
There was a pedal kit named something like pro-cessor, but the crossover point was fixed. I think @terb may be building this one. He recently polled the forum about best effects send filter point, so I’m suspecting he may possibly mod the one it ships with?
actually I already bought this kit. there has been an error on some parts, so then sent me back the right parts and for some reason they added a second PCB, so actually I can build two Pro-Cessor. I will very probably mod at least one
If you look at the build Doc’s, it pretty much shows you step by step how to build it and what level of difficulty it is. I didn’t read thru this one, but when I was looking at the VMT clone, it specified what parts were really tricky, and they may be beyond my skills, but everything else looked pretty easy to follow.
EDIT: This one says build difficulty = Average, so I think it won’t be too hard.
Taking a quick look, it has one tricky bit (the SMD J201’s) but says it is also drilled through-hole if you can find TO-92 J201’s instead. So maybe not too bad.
