Darkglass Vintage Microtubes & B3k

Disclaimer: I am not a fan of Darkglass products in general. Every single one of their Items I experienced in the past had a certain color to it, which I started perceiving as the Darkglass tone, and I can’t bring myself to like it.

When I plugged in the Vintage Microtubes, I sat there for a moment, clearing my mind of all prejudice as good as I could.

The Mix knob was what I touched first, to determine which way is which and set it to 100% wet.
Then I started playing. And what can I say? The first thing that hit my ear, the first thing that came to mind was:
“Yup, that is it. The Darkglass sound I dislike so much”.
[Determined Darkglass fans might want to stop reading here because this might turn into a rant]
Luckily, I had bought the unit with the Era knob as was recommended to me by people with more experience with the Finnish pedal makers. This knob sat there, at noon, untouched. The manual told me that turning it down gets me 70’s rock while turning it up gets me the metallic clank of the 80’s and 90’s, so there surely will be some wriggle room.
One thing I want to say about the Mix knob is that while I generally don’t like mix knobs, this one is very well done. You don’t really hear where the clean signal ends and the driven signal starts, it’s blended perfectly.
The gain knob starts (in my setup) clean as a bell and audible distortion starts around noon. The pedal is touch responsive and will give you a slight crunch when digging in but stay mostly clean when playing softer. With the knob dimed, I get a solid drive sound.
The texture of that drive is, to my ears, best described as two dimensional, flat, bland and boring.
There is very little dynamic, I get the feeling that the signal gets compressed like in a higher gain distortion pedal. What I am missing is upper harmonics that come in a musical way. I kinda feel reminded of one of those 8″ guitar amps that come with a beginner’s set, but do have a drive channel.
So there still is that Era knob. I kinda feared that it is a simple treble cut, getting you the mostly tweeterless sounds of cabinets in the 70’s when turned down and keeping the trebly bite of more modern cabs when turned up. But there’s more to that switch. The annoying bite that I associate with Darkglass products seems to shift its presence down into the upper midrange when you turn Era down, plus you lose most of the treble. Turning it up opens up the top end and shifts the annoying clank up a few notches.
I quickly tried to play through the BJFe Blueberry, which I kept in the signal chain, and instantly was rewarded by a much richer sound with lots more going on, dynamic and grainy. Back to the VM, it was flat again. The connection between my ears and my fingertips felt numb. While the pedal does react to touch and I can clearly hear that, I can’t feel it in my fingers like I do with other pedals.
To me personally, this feels like a puddle of mediocrity with a brass umbrella stuck in it that has loose parts and makes annoying clanky noises when you touch it. The pedal seems to work well when you play fresh rounds with a pick, I can guess that the amount of compression that is going on can really help even out pick attack, but I’m a fingerstyle player whose hand rarely ventures south of the neck pickup. I am fairly sure that Darkglass has hit a nerve with lots of other players, hence the popularity. Today, I read on the internet that someone called Darkglass “The iPhone of bass playing” and I really felt that. I don’t have an iPhone, don’t particularly like iPhones and don’t want to have one. Even though they are pretty popular with a lot of people, I am firm in my belief that they are not for me.

In a way, the B3k gave its best to make up for that disappointing session with the VM.
Those switches give you a different kind of control over your tone. The treble switch has a choice between flat or two different treble boosts, while the bass switch can boost, cut or leave raw. Those are located before the clipping stage, but the bass boost is quite massive, so lots of low end comes out the other side of clipping. I liked playing with the bass flat and the treble boost in the upper position, which gave a nice punch to the sound of my fingers leaving the string when plucking, as soon as I plucked harder, the also touch sensitive B3k (I’d even say it’s the more touch responsive of the two) would start clipping and present me with …. that annoying Darkglass sound already described in the part above.
There is a bit more texture to the drive, and when I balanced it carefully, I could get a useful tone out of it. Changing over to another drive pedal was like stopping to try to ride a unicycle across a slackline and instead getting on a bicycle to drive down a paved road, though.

This was an experiment, and it succeeded in a way by failing. I expected not to like the pedals, nonetheless I tried to approach them with an open mind. Their inbuilt trademark sound is something I dislike and I was not able to overcome that. What surprised me, though, is that I was not even able to say the Vintage Mictrotubes is a good drive pedal, just not good for me. I think it’s bland, flat and two dimensional on top of having a baked in sound that I dislike. The B3K fared much better in that regard. I do not like the sound I get from it, but at least I would say that it might be something worth looking at if you’re into that kind of thing.