BJFe Blueberry Bass Overdrive (BBBOD)

I plugged it into my test bench and fired everything up, then played a bit on my Music Man Bongo 6 to get used to the clean sound and adjust my ears, then I hit the foot switch and tried the knobs:

Upper left, labeled V: Make a guess. Yes. Volume. No surprises here.

Upper right, labeled D: I’m gonna go with “Drive”. Still passes signal with the knob at 0, but increases the crunchy bits when turned CW, also slightly raises the volume. This is a drive knob, at least I hope I got that one right.

Lower left, labeled B: Now we’re getting to the less obvious. Just from listening, I would suggest that this knob decides how much low end is fed into the clipping stage – or how hard the low end is allowed to make the clippers clip. When you have everything about halfway up and then sweep through the B knob while playing an open E, it acts a bit like a gain knob, CCW is clean and CW is distorted. The distortion gets a bit unpleasant within the last quarter of the turn, quite fizzy and artificial sounding.

Lower right, labeled T: Since I had some email correspondence with Björn and he said that the 4 knob BBs have a treble knob that is boost only and out of the circuit when fully CCW, and none of the other knobs did anything like that, I’m gonna go with Treble. It is not super obvious and a far cry from that knob that turns up the topmost range to amplify finger noise and such, it is indeed quite subtle in my setup.

Twisting the knobs a bit, I quickly found a sweet spot with the drive set fairly high, the B knob set to around 11 o’clock and the T knob maxed. There is a solid amount of dynamic response, but … let me try and explain it like this: One of the most touch sensitive pedals I ever played is the Origin DCX Bass. This reminds me of polished steel (the kind used in hospital gear). Highly accurate, like a scalpel (to remain in the hospital context). While the dynamic response of the Origin feels like cutting tissue with a scalpel, the dynamic response of the Blueberry feels like fist-punching a sponge. Or maybe a bunch of very ripe blueberries wrapped tightly in a bag made of the finest silk ( Disclaimer: I have cut tissue with a scalpel, but I’ve never actually put a bunch of over ripe blueberries into a silken bag and punched it with my fist. I would like to, though).
The range of gain that is available is somewhat limited with the pedal placed early in the chain and fed an instrument level signal. The Bongo with its 18V preamp punches hard enough, but with my Le Fay I could easily max out the drive knob to get ‘there’.
How does it sound? It sounds great. You’re looking for that subtle hint of drive, reminiscent of a tube amp that is turned way up – when you want a super loud clean sound and have to sacrifice a bit of clarity to gain that last bit of volume before it breaks up completely – this quality that is achieved through the power amp tubes rather than overdriving the preamp stage? Yeah, you can expect some of that.
The low end refuses to drop out, but there is something happening in the mids.
They get agitated like a bunch of kids who woke up at 5:30 on Christmas morning and know that it’s too early to wake the parents but it’s too late to go back to sleep. So they lie in their beds, quietly trembling, counting off the seconds. This brings forward the whole of the tone and if you match your boring old clean signal and the glorious Blueberry signal by ear alone, you might go a little low on the BB signal and then think the lows are dropping a bit.

For a complete and exhausting description of all the treble stuff, a single word is sufficient: Smooth.

So, a velvety smooth low gain drive that has the midrange shaken up like a piñata on Pete Rose’s birthday party. What makes it special? Well, special’er than that? I have amassed a modest amount of cork sniffer’s delight drive pedals since I started this project, so what has this Björn Juhl soldered together on a long Swedish winter night that cannot be easily replicated in garage boutique workshops around the globe?
Remember I said it’s like punching a sponge? There is that juicy, spongy feel of how it responds to how you hit and release a note. Even with no audible distortion, the note you hit somehow transforms and it feels like there is MORE of it. You hit it harder, it squeezes out more of the sweet juice. But it’s actually more like standing in front of an infinite line of freshly packed silken berry packs, because every time you punch, you get the feeling of punching that bag for the first time. No sloppy seconds.
The very thing I was drooling over when playing the Fake Plastic Trees, that is absent in most other pedals is to be found here again. Did I say the very thing? That is absolutely not true. The FPT feels completely different to the fingers, but that idea, that quality is there, and it’s the same amount of it, even though it manifests in a different way. Your fingers dig a new channel to your ears and connect in an unfamiliar, yet pleasant way.
You feel your dynamics shift and transform based on what you hear and you want to squeeze the perfect amount of saturation out of every note. When playing for a few minutes without toying around on the settings, the feeling gets familiar and the response is more than predictable; it becomes second nature playing that pedal.
Switch it off and you feel like you come from the German Autobahn (that road with no speed limit whatsoever) and have to drive city limits again.

I’m off to the garage now – looking for scrap wood. I need to build two shrines. One for the BlueBerry Bass OD and one for Björn Juhl.