Bearfoot FX Blue Berry Bass Overdrive

It might sound weird to those not familiar with German proverbs, but I have a chicken to pluck with the Bearfoot pedal.

The internet says the Beafoot and the BJFe versions of the BlueBerry are identical. One is handmade in Sweden, the other is handmade on the other side of the Atlantic.
My BJFe Blueberry is a four knob version, but the Man himself assured me that with the fourth knob completely CCW, it sounds and behaves identical to the three knob version.

I set up the Bearfoot pedal for an A/B test with the OG Blueberry.
Twiddling with the controls, I quickly learned that while the knob that is labeled with B on my unit and ‘Nature’ on the Bearfoot do something similar, the effects of their working are mirrored.
With the B knob on the Blueberry, I get less distorted bass frequencies when turning it back (CCW).
With the Nature knob, I get less distorted bass by turning it up (CW).

I tried for a bit to match the two as closely as possible, but could not get them to sound the same. The Bearfoot has more gain. My Blueberry has the gain set around noon, the same level of breakup happens around 9 o’clock on the Bearfoot.

Apart from that, it gets hard to describe it, but this excitement that happens in the mid range that makes the Blueberry so special in my ears is completely absent in the Bearfoot, at least after the first session of playing it.
The BJFe Blueberry lends the sound a certain depth (as in deeper in the room, not deeper in pitch) and you get the feeling there’s more of it. You want to run it at a very mild gain setting as an always on pedal.
The Bearfoot feels like yet another bass overdrive. Don’t get me wrong. It’s good!
But it bears the likeness of the original pedal and one might think they are very similar pedals, since they have the same decor and name. But my ears only found an absence in the most crucial section. That deepening, that feeling of the same tone, but lots more of it, was just not happening.
I will try to find it somewhere in there, but from the first test drive, I came back disappointed.

So I gave it some time, getting acquainted more with the Bearfoot before trying another A/B session.

This time I did so with a different mind set. Instead of expecting them to be (close to) identical and trying to get the exact same sound out of both units, I set the BJFe Blueberry to the settings I like (the fourth knob maxed, the weird tone knob around 10 o’clock which would be around 2 o’clock on the Bearfoot) with the gain set so it does some exciting to the tone and you can hear double stops blending together and blooming, but for audible distortion, you need to dig in.
On the Bearfoot, I did not use the dials of the Blueberry to approach a setting, but only my ears. I have the feeling that pedal has more gain on tap. When the Blueberry felt good with the gain around noon, the Bearfoot seemed to reach about the same at 11 or under.
With a gain that I liked I set the tone knob so the effect is spread evenly and then I did some fine tuning.
The result was, once more, like two very different pedals.
As I said, my BJFe Blueberry can do some sweetening in the mids that is so great and special that it easily made it to the current issue of the “I’ll never ever part with that pedal” list of mine for that feature alone.

The Bearfoot does not really do that, but I was able to milk a sweet and creamy drive sound from it.
I want to say that when you listen to the demos of the SolidGold Beta pedals, you often find someone playing flats and going for an oldschool tone. The Bearfoot sounds like the tone the Beta would like to copy but falls (a bit) short of the mark. It is more organic and creamy sounding than any of the Betas I ever played.
I also feel a bit reminded of the Way Huge Pork Loin, but more in a sense of what I would have wished the device was more capable of.

However, compared to my BJFe Pedal, I want to quote:
“Good gets the job done. Great makes a difference.”