The bass overdrive for people that didn't like bass overdrives

Designed to work with most basses, and styles, from clean to medium-heavy distortion.

the circuit is based on a CMOS inverter chip, like the ones found in the Way Huge Red LLama (R). We've been building pedals based on this chip and love the touch sensitivity and the slightly fuzzy character of the drive. We carefully designed the control set to help you fit the pedal to YOU, without sacrifying your base tone, while still sounding lively

The signal is split at the input, one side is distorted and the other one is a fully-transparent clean path. Both signals are then mixed toward the end of the circuit, right before the TREBLE control. We've decided to not include a BLEND pot, as there is only a small sweet spot where we like the mixed sound, so we chose a blend percentage where you just feel the added clean signal, adding weight to the driven tone while still hearing mostly the overdrive circuit.

CONTROLS

DRIVE

Sets the amount of saturation of your signal, from almost clean to near distortion. you will find the drive section to be very reactive to your picking style.

CONTOUR

scoops the low-mids around 500Hz before the drive circuit, like the LOW CUT filter, the clean signal remains unaffected. cutting those frequencies helps rounding out the tone for some basses. V2: deeper mid cut when maxed out

LEVEL

Sets the output level of the pedal, unity is somewhere between 11 o' clock and 1 o' clock, depending on the DRIVE setting.

LOW CUT

filters the low frequencies before the drive circuit. the clean signal is not affected. this focuses the low-end when the gain is turned up

NOSE

narrow midrange boost centered at 1Khz. this is also going only to the DRIVE circuit. this shapes the tone from flat to very colored. pushing this control yields some interesting RAT or HM2 like tones.

TREBLE

Active shelving filter, allowing to cut or boost everything above 1.2Khz roughly. the shelving control will allow you to balance the level of high mid/treble content in the signal, whilst still letting the high frequency through to maintain clarity.

FEATURES

This is Version 2 of the circuit, with several refinements

V2:Internal voltage booster for more headroom to handle high output instruments.

V2: Added polarity protection for the Power supply

V2: slight revoice of the CONTOUR circuit , allowing a deeper mid scoop

V2: slight improvement of the drive circuit, for a smoother drive tone

Relay-based true bypass with MUTE circuit to minimize switching noise. FLEX Bypass option, to allow momentary operation when footswitch is pressed for a longer period of time.

Custom made enclosure with long lasting UV printed labels.

Made in Belgium.

CMC Audio PROTO TYPE