Free The Tone Bass Blaster BB-2

First impression: Touch sensitive, and even with the active EQ controls (pretty sure they are post clipping) it is somewhat on the mellow side of things. The dirt itself sounds a bit … I want to say farty, but I need to elaborate. I don’t mean the ripping kind of a semi wet fart that only a small percentage of people enjoy hearing while others find it disgusting. I mean the more family friendly humorous fart that sounds dry and has a certain honk to it.

I was able to approximate the sound of my currently installed pedal, the Xotic BB Bass Preamp, with the Bass Blaster. In fact, I got so close you’d be hard pressed to tell them apart in a blind test.
The Bass Blaster was not able to get me more of that same sound, though. It’s that bit of touch sensitive dirt that’s just enough to be noticed in a not-so-dense mix and makes notes played higher up the neck bloom in a very gentle and musical way.

How does that make me feel?
I used to say I’m a simple man. I drop the pedal in the slot, turn it on, twist some knobs and when the result sounds better than it did before, I’m happy.
Now I dropped them in the slot, twisted some knobs and got slightly different flavor of the same thing – tiny differences that are so hard to make out, it’s barely worth mentioning.
So I changed the test bench: I switched over to my metal band board.

On the metal board, I’m not gunning for a mild organic tone with singing overtones. I want something that rips and roars angrily.
So the gain knob went up a fair bit. I’m currently using the Origin DCX Bass into the Super Vintage. The gain on the SV is just on the brink of breakup, so there is something going on there as well when I hit it with a hotter signal with more gain.

The Bass Blaster does not get overly bright even with the treble knob running high, and there is a metallic clank in the upper registers, not unlike the Darkglass Vintage Microtubes with the Era knob turned down. I was annoyed a bit at first, but I quickly realized that I’m not as much opposed to that than I was on the Darkglass. It’s actually quite pleasant and lends a certain heft to finger attack that smacks your ear in a good way.

Some things the Bass Blaster does exceptionally well:
Balance. When you set it to hover just on the edge, which makes it possible to get clean notes through with enough volume but it emits a solid growl when you play hard, you get the same result on the open B string and when playing chords beyond fret 12. It really is completely balanced to perfection.

The texture seems to change a bit when you turn up the gain. As long as you’re in that mostly-clean-with-some-harmonics-and-saturation area of the dial, you get pea gravel mixed in. Nice and smooth, easy on feet and tires. When you get towards Moose-In-Heat, the texture gets much rougher.
However, as stated before, the top end never gets really harsh. It is a drive that is designed to sit in the mix, not to cut through.

It’s certainly super useful in a power trio where you want something that does not sound too harsh in the mix, but will give you a lot of drive when playing solo. That way, you can fill out the space for a guitar solo, but when the guitar plays rhythm with you, you blend together and the bass dirt is less audible.