Well done, I absolutely love it! I love DIY pedalboards. Like, way more than expensive big-name pedalboard frames. That just oozes cool.
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Dude! Cool use of an old skate board!
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Had the Downtown since starting the course but added a few bits as a treat for completing the course a few months back.
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Nice board! Fender Downtown looks cool 
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I decided to give my guitar pedal board a try with the bass.
Unsurprisingly, the Ditto looper worked perfectly. The SP compressor works just fine which was a pleasant surprise.
The overdrive/distortion worked but are a bit “meh” with the bass so a bass specific fuzz/distortion is now in the crosshairs.
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Thanks Eric. I have seen that one too! If it’s as half as good as the DB 925 then I’m interested for sure.
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Okay, after half a dozen incarnations of my pedalboard over the past year or more, here is my newly streamlined version. I’ve eliminated a lot of useless pedals that were just crowding up the board. I had thought about getting rid of the entire board and all the pedals, but I reconsidered and plan to become more intimate with the pedals I have.
Clockwise from lower left (and in this order): Polytune3 tuner, Donner compressor, EHX Micro POG octaver, Ibanez TS9b tube screamer, EHX Bass Clone chorus, and Flamma FS02 reverb. Not on the board is my Tech21 VT Bass DI, which I keep next to the amp head and cab. The dual foot switch is for the drum machine and is not in the effects chain.
The reason the skinny compressor pedal has so much elbow room is because I wanted to reserve the space for when I upgrade to a grown up compressor like the SanJune that @T_dub has.
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Thats a great compressor. I can’t think of anything better for the price, it is ridiculously cheap.
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@T_dub I was just watching this video. Can you do the things he’s talking about with the SanJune, or is he referring strictly to software compressors?
The cheap Donner one I have has just a couple little knobs and a switch, none of which I have any idea what they do.
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I have the Darkglass Hyperluminal, with several little knobs and switches that I am still figuring out. I can also go into the pedal with Darkglass software and set the high and lows of some knobs for things like attack and release, etc. or just dial them in to specific settings.
The big difference between what he showed and the pedal with knobs versions, is that there is no visual graphic for you to go by like in the DAW.
Instead you have to train your ear, and/or, look at the recorded waveform and listen and check.
Depending on what knobs you have on your pedal, you can vary all or only some of the same settings as he showed. The SanJune appears to have all the same parameters. The donner only has compression level, and some tone charater settings (which don’t seem to have an effect on compression exactly, but maybe set some of the other settings you cannot access to setpoints.
The San June looks like a great one for the price.
You can of course just put a plugin in your DAW for recording and skip the pedal, but then you are compressing your final signal, with effects, vs. polishing up your signal to your effects. Can do either way, depending on what you want.
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Unless you do all the effects in the DAW too, like me 
Come on over to the Dark Side!
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Yes, they have those controls, but you don’t get the visual, so you need to learn to hear it to see it.
If you had this pedal, and you watched that video on your TV, and paused it and played with your bass and each dial hi is using for adjustments you could start to hear it.
OR, you can use your drum machine, so you are comparing apples to apples, for the purpose of LEARNING how the software translates to the pedal.
However, IDK if the drum machine would play with an uneven sound that could benefit from compression, unless you had a touch sensitive drum machine to program on.
IDK
I don’t have any experience with the drum machines, beyond playing with 808’s back in the mid 80’s
As far as the compressor, Slope is ratio, it has attack, release, compression, threshold, so it has all the same controls that that video uses.
And this is why I like a compressor like this, for that extra ability to dial things in seperatly, instead of having the factory tie and combo the controls to 3, or 2, or even 1 control.
Some will combine the attack and release, many will just set the ratio or threshold, and some even tie all 6 to one knob, so they are on a sliding scale and adjusting one adjusts them all. And that is fine, it all depends on what you like to hear, if you get a pedal and everything is set they way you would normally, and you have one control, and it sounds good, then that would be considered a WIN.
But if you want a little more control, and not to be locked into things that the manufacturer decided would be best, then you would like a compressor like this.
The BEST compressor I have ever used, which has all the controls is the Mark Bass Compressore.
This one is awesome for a standard compressor.
I love my Keeley because it is SOOOOOO easy to dial in, and it is a little better as a limiter then the San June, and it only has 3 controls.
The boss BC=1X is great, but more of a BOOST or ENHANCER, like the Boss LMB - Limiter Enhancer, but with less limiting. Overall, sort of similar with teh BC-1X being superior IMO
But
The only compressor I own that has all these controls is the SAN JUNE, and for the price, it is AMAZING. I would be alot more critical of it if it were say $250, however, I would still love it, but I would highly expect nothing less from a $250 or higher compressor.
The MarkBass has one GLARING FLAW, and sadly, I sold mine, but I seriously regret doing so now.
It is easily the footprint of your Tech21 VT Bass / DI, and it is taller and heavier, along with being brite yellow, like MarkBass stuff is.
The height and weight never bothered me, it is the size. i simply had no where to put it, and back then, pedals were flying in and out of my hands, sometimes 3-5 ones a week (thanks to Amazon and Offer Up), so I didn’t put much thought into it, beyond, it doesn’t fit the board (at the time), and I let it go. Now, many months later, with things settled down, and not bringing any pedals IN, and having had a few more go OUT, I probably could have fit it, and now I am sorry I sold it. I have plenty of compression however, but one day I may sell a couple and get another MarkBass, it is that good.
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Another complicating thing there is that the drum samples on her drum machine are already compressed.
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Hello everybody!
I was rethinking my preamp pedal. Can you please help me with what is the real use of a preamp pedal when using an active bass? It looks like it takes the tone off the bass and since I’m able to EQ my bass I always leave the preamp flat.
I was reading this post but since we have 770 messages, I skipped straight to asking you all.
This is my current pedalboard, powered by a MXR iso-pedal.
Thanks!!
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Well, the preamp pedal is usually used to emulate the preamp section of an amplifier. It offers different possibilities to shape the tone of your bass, giving you quite often more choices than simply using the EQ of your bass.
I don’t know that specific preamp, but it should work to set your tone like with an Ampeg amp head. It might be helpful to search for video demos and find some interesting settings.
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any pedal with Bass, Mid and Treble, technically has an EQ on it.
There are many points from where you can EQ your sound.
I prefer to leave the bass flat, and the amp flat, then tweak the pedals for a sound.
Then if I were to need to change for a song, or mid song, there are the easy controls on the bass, being the first place you can tweak, then the amp, and this lets you keep the pedals set the way they are.
This is just an easy logical way to look at it, there are many arguments for, and probably against maximizing EQ points. I am sure others have a better way to explains it, but I was just giving a quick answer since there is not another explanation for you as of yet.
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The EQ on your bass modifies the tone coming out of the bass, before going in to anything else. The EQ on your preamp there (assuming it is at the end of the chain) modifies the tone of all the other pedals too, as if it were the EQ on an amp’s preamp.
So I think of it like this - the active EQ on the bass makes the bass sound different. It changes the tone of the bass. The later EQ on the preamp changes the tone of the whole effects chain.
As an example, one of the main tone qualities of the Big Muff is that in addition to fuzz, it adds a lot of higher tone harmonics into the sound. It’s part of its signature sound. Assuming the SCR-DI is the last in the chain (which is where I would put it), you can choose to emphasize or degrade those harmonics with the SCR-DI’s preamp, but not the one on the bass.
If I were you I’d also put the Alpha/Omicron after the Big Muff as well but that’s just me. I would want its darkglassy tube-like sound at the end of all the dirt pedals, not the start
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