ped

Just watching Olivia Dean on iplayer. Very good band, and audio mix is pretty decent. Worth a watch - not sure about anyone else!

Haha well I make no promises. I got the Fuzz first (grey one) because I read about it somewhere and saw a video on YT. KGB stands for Keys, Guitar Bass (as I believe it did in the former Soviet Union). This video gives a pretty good demo, although his 'clean' sound is pretty gnarly already. But the fuzz is super thick and sludgy, and infinitely tweakable. The impedance control is soooo useful in changing the response. I liked it so much that I wanted the Distortion version, which the founder old me would suit my lower gain needs. This has selectable diodes, and each sounds very different - the Germanium circuit can slightly overlap with the fuzz if cranked. Where it excels is in breathy, cutting and warm overdrive - for that I use the silicon circuit and again the impedance control alters the way the clipping interacts with your playing. I think the pedal in the video above must be an earlier model as it doesn't have the polarity switch. I find that really useful, I run the fuzz at 180 so you get some massive cascading fatness without ever getting wooly or indistinct. When I had my tall font Sovtek Big Muff I was able to exactly match it's sound using the valco (voice 1, 110k, fuzz on full, tone at 9 o'clock and mix full). He gets nearly there in the video at 9:15 I don't think there's a decent bass orientated vido of the Dist on YT. I actually have the loop pedal, too - but don't currently have a use for it. What's also cool is that on the fuzz you can add tone, which is what you need to cut through, and on the dist you can cut top end, which is what I want at lower gain to add warmth. They're very well designed IMO. The more guitar orientated pedal the 'Bloodbuzz' is a clone of the Lovetone Cheese Sauce. I think that was their first, and probably why they use these enclosures. Honestly it's happened by accident that I happen to love the Valco and the Lovetone pedals over anything else!

Cheers mate I've never been happier tbh. I never thought mustangs would be my taste in all honesty but I'm a total convert.

Sounds almost identical - I presume you can adjust filter parameters using the knobs?

I’ve been playing mine in all sorts of environments for a while now and I’m 100% chuffed with it. Sounds amazing 🤩

I mean, if I could afford it

It looks like it’s original yeah, although normally there’s a bit more shrinkage. Tempted to have it for flats and keep rounds on the other 🤔

I'm trying not to buy this at the moment https://reverb.com/uk/item/82944354-fender-mustang-bass-1966 £2880 isn't too bad, the only thing is that I'm not wild about tort

You’ve got to know when to quit when haggling. It should be good natured and respectful but when it gets to this point I agree it’s a massive red flag and becomes really irritating.

Here's a search for Vigier, most recent results first. You can use this to change the search to whatever you're looking for. https://www.basschat.co.uk/search/?q=vigier&quick=1&type=forums_topic&nodes=19&updated_after=any&sortby=newest&search_in=titles

I’m afraid that leads to speed posting and although normally obvious it is a lot of work to weed out and compromises the quality of the discussions. I suppose one way to look at it is that by supporting the site we are able to support you too.

No because that would stop people joining to buy things people have posted for sale. This penalises paying sellers and the new members too. It’s not ideal but it’s not safe to have wanted ads out there in the public domain for catfishing. Happy to remove your wanted ads or edit them if you like. Cheers

Yes I can understand that. But I hope people see that a supporting membership supports the site and helps us keep our community safe.

You should be able to see it in the forum index but not view the contents

Yeah that’s why, for the time being

That's probably because we didn't allow replies to posts, or a bump function. Mostly because it would otherwise have become a place to trade and sell without placing an ad. I agree, it wasn't a great solution. Now it's for supporting members only, it's all allowed. You can reply, sell, bump etc in there, plus the wanted ads aren't visible to scammers who are using them to offer items that don't exist for sale. The same has happened at Bassic.de and Talkbass, too.

I've spent a lot of time with the Meatball over the last few days and I'm really getting to know it. It's great being able to control the attack and decay. You can get bubbly sounds or more swelling sounds by adjusting how close together they are. I have found that a tiny bit of attack (up to 9:00) with a decay at about 2:00 gives a really deep filter sound where dynamics control the filter in a really 3D way. I think compared to the Mutron the band is wider and means you can use it more dynamically. The other observation is how differently it behaves with battery, 9V or 12V supply. Using a fresh 9V battery it sounded great but there was some distortion at higher colour settings. I wasn't sure if that was due to the peak overloading my interface or preamp but this is almost gone on a 9v supply. Switching to a supply cleans up the already minimal noise that the pedal introduces, just a slight hum in bypass (this could be a peculiarity of my setup/location). Otherwise the frequency response seemed to shift to bring everything up slightly. Changing to 12V from my Cioks, it's absolutely silent, so much so that I couldn't detect any difference when it's on or off. This was especially pleasing to me because I like a super quiet noise floor, something which the TC Spectracomp has helped with a lot. In contrast the Haz Mutron has a fairly noisy floor when engaged, but it's never that noticeable as it's quite smooth sounding, but it's there. In bypass, the pedal seems to leave the signal untouched - it certainly doesn't buffer it (the pedals after have an impedance control which still works) but I'm not sure if it's true bypass or not (I guess it must be, but the input signal light still works in bypass, so?) I'm getting to know the controls well so that I can quite quickly adjust the pedal to suit what I want, so that the decay fits in perfectly with the groove. I particularly like playing with a muted groove and letting occasional notes pop out. You can't help but make a face when that happens. I haven't explored down mode much yet, but I did put an octave and fuzz through it quickly yesterday and made a really doom sounding synth. So yeah it's fantastic. Although it can get wild, or not respond at all if you set things wrong, it is never harsh or brittle sounding. I'll do a video this weekend, hopefully.

Ah I’ve been playing with it. It might be back soon or there’s a chance we might make it visible to supporting members only to stop people trying to scam people (we have found a couple of people who have messaged saying ‘hey I have that thing you want’ then used pictures from the internet (I.e not their own)). Watch this space, it might be up and down whilst we discuss it. Making it for supporting members only would also mean we can allow replies to posts, which will make it much more useful.

You can keep my jealousy in there!

Yeah same, I tried it on a whim and it's my fave. Worth a go for 50 sovs

I think some of the spectracomp toneprints are fairly dirty, and you can make your own through the editor which has more tweakability than basically anything else out there

There's no bloody way I'm taking it apart again 😄 I've found the EBS ones to be brilliant actually, the whole board is noise free.

Cheers yeah it's a bit like a school science bench or one of those tape players we used to use in languages 😄 It's honestly coincidence that I love the Valco and Meatball pedals that happen to have the same type of enclosure. I bought the Valco fuzz first and just loved it. Maybe the looks factored into the decision to buy initially, but it's cool that they all sort of match.

I've put the Meatball on my pedalboard (it JUST fits!) so I can do the final phase of testing against my Mutron. I might need to move the tuner sideways a bit but I stuck it down with that ridiculously strong dual lock and might leave that fight for another day P.S I sometimes like an octave or fuzz in the Meatball loop - I tend to use an OC2 but I might make another board just for the loop with another fuzz and phaser on it too.

Consider it your civic duty to try one and report back