funkydoug

great BCer - very smooth sale of comp pedal. Thanks, Doug

Bought a Trace Elliot combo from DeeDee that he'd modified. He was great - offered to meet halfway to avoid a courier. Lovely guy and a stonking amp! He clearly knows his stuff and cares about his gear. Thanks, Doug.

hi folks, I thought I'd share my experience with the EHX bass battalion with you. I haven't seen many reviews of it online at all and it seems to exist below the radar of many folks looking for their preamp-DI-drive-comp-box, so here goes... First things first, as the title suggests, I love it. There a few reasons: 1) It is solid and sturdily made - as one would expect for one of these things. Easily in the same ball park as the rest, despite being quite a bit more affordable 2) It clean section simply sounds great. The main things to notice about it are that the 4 band EQ has a shelving bass that kicks in at 200Hz on the bass end. This is different to most (all?) others in this category both in that it is a shelf not a notch / peaking EQ and the frequency; 200hz is way higher than most other bass knobs! the closest I've seen is the VT bass @ about 120hz, while most are at or below 100hz. That's a significant difference. The mids are low-mid @280hz and high-mid @750hz but they miss out the zone of honk (at about 500hz) meaning, in my experience, you can add some heft in the low mids and / or some bite in the high mids without the honk-factor. The treble end is smooth, glassy and ... erm ... nice! 3) the drive section is also really flexible, and can go from barely there bite / sizzle to full on distortion. It is way more flexible, and subtle, than the branding would lead you to believe. I sold a lovely vintage drive pedal because this does everything I want in one box in that regard. I was pleasantly surprised by this, didn't really expect to like the drive section much at all (I bought it mainly for the clean+comp) now .. I didn't say it's perfect... The compression end of things is fine for me, and does what I want from a comp, in fact it does subtle comp as good as my ears can hear, but that's about all. If you want something more technical / more demanding from your comp, then I would not expect to get it from a one-knob job like this, and that does seem to be the case here. Keep it subtle though (in an always-on kind of way) and the comp does a really nice job. For the compression anoraks ... the comp comes before the drive and EQ, so if your forensic analysis shows a roll off of anything you are only the twist of a knob away from addressing that ... but I can't hear anything missing from the tone. The noise gate... bit of a novelty as the pedal itself is quiet and the gate seems to be ... basic... but I just do't use it. Bells and whistles: It drives headphones really well so makes practicing with 'your tone' very do-able. All in all, I think it is highly under rated. The paint job and the price might lead you to think its a bit of a toy, or that its a bit 'rock', but I have been very pleasantly surprised. Hope someone finds this useful! Doug.

Dan bought a pedal from me. Smooth transaction throughout. Thanks

Just to add to this love fest, bought a pedal from Bigwan, one he'd assembled himself from a clone kit. It and he were marvellous! So good that I nearly bought another one... Thanks and all the best, Doug.

I've always ended up looking at compact multitrack recorders for home practice ... For example, Boss br80, br800 & zoom r8, r24 tick most of your boxes, and more. No DI though, just line level out. I've had several over the years and the modern ones from zoom and boss basically sound very good indeed for your purposes. The BR80 in particular could be used as a micro preamp. There is a tiny learning curve but it's really not an issue at all. They also cover your guitar and vocal needs too if you're that way inclined, work as field recorders and USB interfaces. Main advantage over iPhone /iPad is that they are dedicated units. So they don't get updates at inconvenient times, I don't get email, notifications or other cr@p when I'm playing and they have the required inputs and outputs without the need for a separate box. Can you tell I'm a fan??? Cheers, Doug