My First Pedalboard!

Grats on the DG pedal Howard! I’m curious how it will sound in your setup :wink:

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Thanks! You’re prescient. I didn’t actually own a Darkglass when I posted that. The sample above is the Battalion and BDI21.

But then you’ll never guess what happened next. Ok yes you already did. I am so predictable.

(I found a new in box, unused Microtubes X for the same price as they sell for used, about $50 off new. Could not pass that up.)

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So I’ve been AFK for a bit recently as work picked up a bit. I’ve also been doing research for something I’ll be making a post about soon…

Anyway while I still would love a Zoom B3n, the initial $200 plus the cost of a volume/expression pedal on top. Put it out of the range of money I want to spend at the current time. So I found this oldie but a goldie on FB Marketplace for $30.

At minimum it gives me a floor tuner and volume pedal. The volume pedal is especially useful to me as the entirety of my gigging is playing on the worship team at my church. Worship music it’s self tends to have the bass dropping in and out regularly, plus my own personal style causes that even a bit more. Again either way it fulfills my minimal specific need as well as gives me the opportunity to manage: EQ, compression, & a touch of distortion. Oh and it allows me to lie to myself and believe that I own the amp/cab holy grail of coolness. The Ampeg SVT810. The back massager whose nickname makes you think there are drinks inside. :heart_eyes:

Side note. In looking online for a list of patches the user community has made, I found this article where a guy rated the top 5 multi-effects pedals for bass in 2020. The BP90 was on it amazingly enough even thought its 10 years old. :rofl:

SL500_AC_SS350

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pretty cool old treasure you found ! for $30 it’s a no brainer.

old digital gear always has a bad reputation (and it’s true that CPUs were way less powerful than what you find now in a toaster) but some are still really cool. I myself use an exactly 20 year old digital preamp and it works not so bad :grin: it’s somewhat like retrogaming :grin:

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Yep old doesn’t necessarily mean bad for digital. My reverb pedal is digital and was made sometime before 2003 and still sounds awesome.

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My Microtubes X arrived and of course sounds amazing. I’ll upload some samples later.

The big question is was it worth the hefty price tag given what I already have. And initially I would have to say… probably not in my case since I was already getting close to a Darkglass tone with the Battalion + BDI21, and the Battalion is a lot more versatile.

The Darkglass initially seems to me like it does one thing and does it very, very well. It has a pretty wide variety of tones all along one axis.

One thing I do love and will be nice to have even with a clean signal is its low and high pass filter pots. It’s basically going to pull double duty as a tone-coloring distortion pedal and a filter, which is definitely nice to have.

So, no regrets on buying it (especially at the price I got) but this one was definitely a nice-to-have and not a necessity.

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This pedal is cool. It’s useful even with just the clean sound.

Me -> TRBX (eq flat) -> compressor (moderate) -> Microtubes X -> Reaper (clean, no VSTs).

Pedal bypassed:

Low pass filter (wide open) only:

love that already.

Add a little drive:

Mix in the Hi Pass filter a bit:

Bring in some mids:

Killing the drive back off makes it sound like a high-presence tube amp:

And finally, let’s get dirty:

Love that low end.

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Sounds like one happy camper :smile:

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Holy shit! Microtubes - 08 - Dirty sounded really good.

I went back and listened to some of your other samples. All good stuff. All very different sounds to my ears. Just goes to show how hard it’s going to be to find my dirt sound.

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Or my clean sound :joy:

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Yes. I need a clean sound to come back to after I get all dirty. I really like the EBS MicroBass 3. A ton of connectivity options. Sounds very clean and I’ve never seen a bad review. I like that it’s just one little box that you can use to carry your tone with you. More than a little out of my price range right now (I have to get an amp) but it might be just what you’re looking for.

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That thing looks fantastic. Two channel, dual parametric mids, comp and drive, wow. It’s like the Battalion’s big brother.

EBS has a super good reputation too.

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Yes! If I could afford it. I would start with this as the foundation of my rig and build everything out from there. It’s the only piece of equipment I’ve come across that I can’t imagine ever needing to replace. Largely because it’s so clean and so versatile. It’s like a blank canvas you can come back to and build whatever you want off of it.

Oh yaeh, and it looks cool. :smiley:

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That’s a really great post, @howard . . . :+1:

All those effects in one place makes it easy for a pedal newbie (like me :wink: ) to compare the differences between them and gain some understanding.

Thanks and all best, Joe

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You might really like the Battalion. Same concept but not as high-end. Also a quarter the price :slight_smile: . I love mine and if I had to choose just one pedal on my board to keep, it would be it.

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My pleasure! I overdrove my DAI in a few spots, wasn’t paying enough attention to levels; sorry about that :slight_smile:

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Ah, so that is what I heard… I really wasn’t sure what it could have been I was hearing (just not too familiar with all these gizmos and the artifacts they might or might not create), but this makes a lot of sense now! Thanks for clearing that up :smile:

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Yeah you can hear it on the clean bass track pretty clearly. Embarrassing :slight_smile:

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hey @howard, at least I had the time to listen to all your samples carrefully on the VXT8s. to me everything sounds a bit “too much”, but I suppose that’s mandatory to show (to us but also to yourself) the range of the preamp/pedal.

what’s interresting to me is that it keeps a pretty clean and deep low end even with the relatively high gain saturated higher frequencies. that low end is really only a low end, with no low mid content, and I think that’s a big part of what gives this distinctive modern sound.

I’m pretty sure you will find an excellent tone !

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Yep I was more or less min/maxing some of the knobs there. The low pass filter is wide open the whole time too.

I kept the mids down for most of it as well, good ear :slight_smile:

One thing I did not do was roll the hi pass on a lot while it was overdriving - that results is a huge ton of nice distortion but wasn’t what I was looking to illustrate.

It’s actually really flexible. The low pass filter controls the clean signal while the hi pass is what gets diverted to the drive. There is a huge mid scoop that you can undo with the mids control. The Mix knob conntrols the low/clean vs hi/dirty balance. the top two are level and drive, as you would expect.

The only thing missing is the dual distortion circuits like the Alpha Omega/Omicron - that’s what differentiates them from this. This one is more like a new take on the B3K.

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