Damnation Audio MBD-2

I turned everything at noon, plugged it in, played a bit, loved it.
Tweaked the knobs, hated it.
Tweaked some more, hated it even more.
Went back to noon, and tried to understand the interaction of the controls. I’ve set it now with tone and deep dimed, shift in the upper position, gain in the lower regions, which sounded sweet again.
It certainly is a pedal with a sonic range. Lots of tones in there, but the higher gain tones sounded too artificial to my ear.

I like the MBD-2 because it is beefy. Even at mild settings, playing it feels a bit like listening to a big V8 engine idling. It gives off the vibe that it can roar with a deafening sound, but currently, it chooses not to.
Here’s a short run down of what the controls do:

Volume is volume.

Gain is gain.

Clean lets you inject a clean signal into the output – the clean signal is lowpassed at 1k, so you don’t get fret clank or finger noise, but clear low end, which makes it useful for low tunings. It is very well implemented. When you have it at zero and then slowly rise the level, you don’t get the impression of having two separate signals. You feel like your signal gets more heft and more bottom.

Depth decides how much low end enters the clipping stage. Noon feels like neutral, CW feels like boosting, CCW feels like a cut. This works great in tandem with the clean knob and invites experimentation.

Tone is a tilt EQ that only affects the dirt channel. The Shift switch lets you choose the corner frequency. Lower position is 300Hz and upper position is 600Hz. The EQ will have a slight scoop at the chosen frequency.

20dB does what it says. You get a +20dB boost up front before you enter the clipping stage. Massive gain boost. Use with caution 😉

Even though I did not like the higher gain settings that much does not mean you would, too. It is a pedal that does lots of compression at mid to high gain and it is a pedal that has a lot more versatility than you would think at first. It can take a clean sound and make it a super beefy, steroid injected sound that is slightly breaking up around the edges but stays clean in the center, and it can also go full on distortion. You can set it to blend in with the guitar(s), so your bass does not sound very dirty in the mix as long as you play unison, but when the guitar plays lead parts, you get to fill up the space nicely.
You can also set it so it rips, even in a mix.
It’s a great pedal for harder high gain sounds that works surprisingly well for low gain, too.