Jad Freer Capo

I can tell you there is a learning curve attached to the Capo.
When I plugged it in and ran bass -> Capo -> LA-1A -> Mixer (headphones), for the first five minutes, I simply hated it.
The first impression was that the dirt you get sounds more or less like that one time you thought your cabinet was broken because it farted out on certain notes and you started troubleshooting and at one point you found out that there was a sheet of paper on the cupboard next to the bass amp that would resonate with those frequencies and made a weird noise.
Not at all like beautiful dirt, but much rather unwanted noise you’d like to get rid off.

So, let’s start properly. There must be some good stuff in there. It’s a $500 pedal with a 10 weeks waiting list, after all.

I set the parametric knob to around 800Hz and then dimed everything else. In that setup, we’re getting heavy overdrive. Not distortion and not fuzz. It’s still overdrive when you max out the EQ and both gain knobs.
The first thing my ears told me is that the EQ section sits in front of the clipping stage, at least that of the A side. The B-side is switchable and I will have to determine if the EQ comes after the B side clipping if you run B into A.
That all important knob in the middle, the one that lets you seamlessly blend two different preamps or something remained a mystery. Something of a “hey, that position sounds slightly less bad, so it must be the sweet spot”.
After a lengthy bit of knob twiddling, I ended up with a sound I kinda liked. The treble content is just shy of getting pearly. When I run the Broughton RFE into the Noble, I can be generous with the treble knob and that makes it sound like pearly fingers caressing pearly strings with the finest silk you’ve ever heard.
The Capo does not get there, even with a little help. But it gets pearly.
However, what I kinda missed was a the rich choir of hungover angels, singing overtones to the roots I provided.

The touch responsiveness is a bit wonky. It totally works, but it kind of feels numb. There is no push back to speak of (something the Fake Plastic Trees excels at) and it feels like some very mild and cleverly designed compression sets in. The best I can do to describe it is that I could not feel it in my finger tips without concentrating on my ears.

Session one conclusion:
There is probably something really good in there, but it’s hidden well.

I set to experiment with the knobs and find out what everything does, and the signal routing is quite interesting:

1. The blend knob does not blend between dry and wet. It blends between a fixed gain preamp stage and the A Side. When you set it to 100% “dry”, you still get the EQ. So if you want to clip the B side only, you can actually use the A Side with the blend fully CCW and then you can choose if you want to run the clipping into the EQ or the EQ into the clipping.
2. The Controls for the B side include the Level knob. You can run B into A with the level very high, which increases the Gain on the A side a LOT because it sees a much hotter signal. This can be compensated with the Level knob of A, but only if you’re permanently running B into A.

I found that I like the B side grit a bit more than that of the A side and that it is possible to use A to get just a bit of saturation and B to kick in some more Gain to send it to drive.

In my current and humble personal opinion, that pedal somewhat lacks character and I actually feel a bit surprised about how there is such a hype around it.
I have not put the two FX loops to use yet, and I can’t really see myself doing that, because I don’t really understand the benefits.
(I do understand how FX loops work and how they are utilized).

However, in my current state of mind, with my limited experience, I can’t say that the saturation you get from the A side can easily rival that of a BJFe Blueberry, Fairfield Barbershop, Hudson Broadcast or JPTR FX Jive. These are from the top of my head, but I’d attest each of them a little something that is more lively, more organic and provides a better feeling when playing through them – all head and shoulders above the Capo’s capabilities.

I was able to approximate the sound of the Xotic with the Capo. In fact, I got so close you’d be hard pressed to tell them apart in a blind test with the Xotic BB Bass Preamp, the Free The Tone Bass Blaster and the Capo. One thing I did not understand about the Capo in that scenario was that as soon as I added the B side for more gain, it sounded like the lower mids dropped out.

After spending a while with the pedal to get my head around the routing options and what everything does, I realized that I needed to spend another while with the pedal to get familiar with that overwhelming amount of options.

I tried copying a sound I got from the Bass Blaster, and let me talk you through the process:

The Bass Blaster was set with the gain super high, lots of treble and a good bit of bass boost. Roaring chainsaws grinding on the exhaust pipe of a running Harley.
To get there, I needed gain. The A side by itself falls short. The B side by itself falls short, too. So these two will have to be combined.
I ran B into A, so I had clipping stage, then EQ, then another clipping stage. In that setting, B can influence A in two ways. You can raise the gain to get more of the B clipping and send a heavier driven signal, or you can raise the B level, to boost harder into A to raise the A gain. I now had enough gain, but I felt the bass frequencies were lacking, it was not ground shaking enough. The problem here is that when you raise the bass knob, the bass frequencies clip more, but you don’t really get a more bass heavy sound. The remedy for that is using the third preamp via the blend knob, by raising the bass and dialing back on the blend to get some ‘clean’ signal in there. Also, the Deep switch helps. satisfied with that, I tried to get the sizzle right, by using the treble knob and the Bite switch.
To get the clank right, I also needed to push the upper mids north of 1k a bit with the parametric mids controls. I was not getting the exact same sound I got from the Bass Blaster, but I was very close now.

You really get a sandbox to toy around with to shape your sound to whatever occasion you find yourself in that requires overdrive, EQ, or both.
I felt a bit reminded of the Subspace, but the Subspace is a bass dirt sandbox that feels most at home in the distortion category but will do both overdrive and fuzz if you ask it, the Capo is only capable of overdrive, which is not a bad thing. You get even more options to shape overdrive sounds.
Whenever you pluck a note and something hits your ear that is not to your liking, a little thought followed by a little experimentation will most likely lead to a way to shape the drive differently, so you can either get rid of the offending signal part or reshape it into something more pleasant.

Not to split hairs here, but on a pedal with that many options, I would have loved an option for having one or three favorite settings to save and recall by some means. I could have done without the FX loops if the free room was used to add MIDI.

All in all, it’s a great box. Put it on a small pedalboard along with a Noble Preamp, a big box Cali76 and the fanciest tuner you can find and you’ll not only sound exceptional, but also can show off massively to the plebeian masses who cannot afford a $500 drive pedal (or $1200 preamp / $1500 compressor).