Oats And Molasses VB-2

What we got here is a very simple thing – two knobs, Gain one and Gain two. Then we get two more knobs labeled Bias one and two.
I wanted to abuse terms in such a way that you electrical folk curl your toes – but not in the good way, but I found that the maker of the pedal does a much better job of explaining the whole thing:

Bias. There are also two of these. The first one controls the bias of the first transistor. The second controls the bias of the second transistor. Easy enough. What’s really going on here is we are changing the resistance (and therefore the current) on the emitter side of each of the transistors. When we change this value, the voltage on the transistor changes, and therefore the cut-off and saturation points change as well. If we wanted to be really nice to the transistors (and our ears) we would find a nice safe spot in the middle between cut-off and saturation so that the signal didn’t clip or cut out or sputter or do anything weird. However, I have a feeling you might want to try some other things with them. By changing the bias, we are essentially changing the gain as well, so turning up the bias knobs will add volume and saturation. Turn them up high enough and the transistors will start gating and getting extra fuzzy. Try turning up both bias controls all the way and notice that it will actually act as a noise gate. It will only allow a signal that is large enough to pass, and it will mute anything that is too quiet (the humming of your pickups for example).

At one end of the pedal’s spectrum, we get a clean boost. Just turn down both bias knobs and ride the gain low and the volume high, easy enough.
At the other end of the spectrum, we get an acoustic chainsaw massacre but all the gore is electric, not actual guts.
The sound gets very fuzzy – some angry hornets trapped in a tin can, that unpleasant upper harmonic content that is set out to kill your ears. It also gets spluttery and, as the manual suggests, gated. It might be a good idea to send an OC-2 set to -1 only into that pedal to get some synth madness going, but I don’t have any octave pedals with me at the moment.

Now the thing is, you can basically select how much stress you want to put on either the front or rear transistor and how these cascade into each other, which gives you a mind boggling number of options. Imagine you set everything to 2 o’clock which gives you an audible overdrive. Now you decide that this is not the right amount of overdrive. To get more drive, you can increase Gain, Bias1, Bias2 or you could also manipulate the voltage you feed the pedal.
Everything has a slightly different impact on what happens to the output signal. I also have the feeling that the volume knob also impacts how the second stage is hit, but I’m not entirely sure about it – and after all, you need at least one knob that will reign in what you did to the signal as not to overpower the following signal chain.

There is a vastly different approach in this pedal, I have the feeling that those bias knobs are usually fixed values carefully selected by the maker of the pedal, and here, they’re out front for the end user to manipulate. This shapes the very nature of your drive and gives you access to what is normally well hidden within the guts of the dirt box. It is a nice experience to further your knowledge about how a bias knob works and it is a totally different kind of sandbox.