Alright, we’ve already talked about the bass guitars and bass rigs of supercorrupter, so I suppose that leaves the pedals that have done low-end duty in the band.Īlternatively, you can customize your theme as well. In my earlier post on bass amps, I mentioned that my first amp was really a guitar amp, complete with a lead channel and a sweet on-board distortion. I had that little amp with me in my college dorm, and I played bass through it with the distortion dimed, quickly leaving the notion of “piano clean” bass behind in the proverbial dust. Nah, I wanted the bass to sound blown out and nasty! When I picked up my first true bass amp, I found that I needed a pedal to get dirty, and the very first pedal I ever picked up was a $19.99 distortion pedal called a Roadkill. I had to look the dang thing up, and was surprised to see it was made by ProCo. This was not a good pedal, but it made my bass sound distorted, so I guess it was successful at its job. Still, I knew deep down that it sucked, and wanted to upgrade as soon as possible. Eventually, the footswitch failed on my Roadkill, and I believe I sold it “as-is” at a garage sale for $5. Where do you go from a Roadkill when you’re 18 and unwise? Why, you go all in on digital multi-effects, that’s what! That’s right, I pivoted from the Roadkill to a Zoom 506II. The Zoom 506II had a plastic enclosure with two footswitch buttons (program up and down, to cycle through banks), a built in tuner (hey, that’s nice!), and – if I recall correctly – a ton of user programmable capability. I quickly dialed in the industrial bass overdrive sounds I wanted (think BILE?) and we kept making noise. In all honesty, it was an acceptable pedal. It did overdrives well enough, but wasn’t so hot at the chorus and flanger/phaser type effects that were included. The tuner was a godsend I previously had to unplug my bass and snap into a little QuickTune device, and all in all it got me through just fine with that Crate BX100. With the upgrade of my amp situation to the Peavey Nitrobass 400, I felt the need to improve my signal path. I didn’t use half of what the Zoom offered, and the plastic enclosure didn’t instill a lot of confidence, so I decided to simplify and improve in one stroke by grabbing a Boss TU-2 tuner and ODB-3 Bass Overdrive. The Zoom went back into it’s box, and was eventually sold at a garage sale in 2012 for $15. First and foremost, the ODB-3 is one of the secret weapons on Aaron Dallison’s pedal board since the Keelhaul days. It’s a dependable, sturdy stompbox that’s easy to get and affordable – awesome attributes for a touring musician. I liked that it had a blend knob to fine tune the overdrive with your clean botttom end, and the adjustable highs/lows split knob was a great feature. It was key because the highs were rather spitty, if left unchecked (in my opinion). I loved this pedal! It was used on the Re-Entry EP, the Sacred Order Of The Owl EP, and I think The Forest And The Trees LP. I wound up trading it to my buddy Dave at Bad Back Studios to pay for some mixing time on one of the latter two records noted above. ![]() I would recommend the ODB-3 to anyone looking for a solid, dependable bass friendly overdrive. Somewhere around this time, I saw Lozenge at Speak in Tongues in Cleveland. I loved their bass sound and saw he was running a Boss DS-1 into an EQ pedal to blast the low frequencies squashed by the Distortion pedal. ![]() I had to try it! I picked up my own DS-1, and a $20 Arion bass EQ pedal. It was alright, but just not the same as what I’d seen from Lozenge. I kept the DS-1 but sold the Arion a few years back for $15. I also briefly experimented with a ProCo TurboRat. That one was cool, and we did record a couple of tunes with that in front of the Nitrobass. It’s a neat pedal if you dial it in just right, and I’ve still got it. ![]() Thanks to Erik from Turbo Gerbil for giving it to me so many years ago.Īlright, back to the matter at hand, if I loved the ODB-3 so much, why did I get rid of it? I had picked up a black Russian Electro Harmonix Big Muff from a kid in Geneva for $25 on Craigslist, and I fell in love with its sound. By then, I had the Acoustic 370, and the Big Muff and the 370 loved each other long time, doing plenty of shows together. I then found an EHX Bass Big Muff for cheap and picked it up because it was smaller and easier to power with a power supply (the Russian only has a nine-volt battery connector). I retired the Russian Muff from live duty, but there’s no chance I’ll get rid of it anytime soon.
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