Sweet. Looking forward to it, sounds great on Youtube.
No tube is fine, of course. I’ll most likely end up all solid state in the end regardless
I’m kind of liking the idea of a separate preamp for both the types of sound I like, to be honest.
I’ll be selling the Battalion I think. I love a lot about the pedal, especially its various EQ modes. And for a neutral preamp it’s fantastic. But over time I have come to realize I don’t really want a neutral, transparent preamp; I want some color there.
yeah I’m with the same thoughts. for now I don’t imagine myself playing with another preamp than my primitive low-fi Line 6 modeling thing, which doesn’t sound neutral at all. (I can see myself playing with a more modern IR cab sim but it’s really a detail)
I agree with you that a tube preamp would work well in this role. tube preamp + Mooer Radar (IR cab sim in a hardware format) + pedalboard for all the effects. hum.
The Radar is a super cute little pedal. It’s very tempting. The only thing that stops me is I have an IR loader I like in my DAW and can’t justify the $100 there.
The Darkglass Element is even more tempting - DI out plus a better headphone amp than I have now. But it’s very expensive and would fit in weird in my setup because I kind of need the headphone out to be coming off my DAI.
yeah. same, I can’t justify the $100 considering that I already have a cab sim that works well. I still have to experiment with IR. anyway in the case of an analog tube preamp, and a full hardware setup, it seems interesting.
Yeah. Another thing I was thinking is that with a G-K style preamp, with lots of high end attackey harmonics, I would actually probably want a light cab sim on more or less all the time.
EBS arrived. It’s a super solid, heavy, huge pedal. Sounds good so far. It’s going to take a lot of fiddling to find the exact tone I want but it’s definitely there with a lot of tubeyness.
Clean bass:
EQ flat (mids maxed, bass/treble min):
EQ noon (huge mid scoop):
Gain was noon for those. here’s a little more gain and in vintage mode:
Really saturated and starting to overdrive in that last one. Lots of tube compression too.
Will take some playing around to find settings I like but in general they all sounded reasonable.
Haven’t quite been following the entire discussion (a bit over my head…), but why do you prefer the EBS to the Le Bass, Howard? Is the Le Bass (which looks and sounds good to me and is cheaper than the EBS) too clean and not “colored” enough for what you are looking for?
Just trying to understand better and get educated…
The EBS is a third of the price of the Le Bass on the used market. Especially the non-DI 12V EBS like I got.
I think the Le Bass looks like a much more capable pedal. I actually want one, but it is $375 new and $280 used here. I got the EBS ValveDrive for $100 used.
Tech 21 makes really good stuff in general though.
The VT Bass DI hasn’t arrived yet but I expect it to be awesome. I’ll probably be keeping it regardless but for this thread I am primarily going to compare real tube sound vs solid state tube modeling, more than looking at how good it is in general. I don’t think you need to worry about that, it’s one of the most highly regarded preamps you can buy now.
