Origin Effects DCX Bass

I bought the Origin Effects DCX Bass the day it came out without a second of hesitation. I’m a fan of the Origin stuff and when I heard they were doing a bass drive, I was hyped enough to pull the trigger.
Admittedly, the unit you see pictured is my second DCX Bass, because I returned that first one after a couple of days.
True to the Origin Effects tradition, the DCX Bass is a solid brick of bent sheet metal with reassuring weight and heft to it. Play it, unplug it, use it as a weapon, then plug it back in and play on. Just watch out that no bodily fluids or squiggly bits get in the jacks.

The controls look simple, but there’s more here than you’d assume after a brief glance.
Four knobs. Gain, Volume, Bass and Treble. Easy. However, there are two switches.
The first one switches the pedal from the mode ‘EQ’ to the mode ‘OD’, the second has three settings: Dark, Flat and Medium.
The party trick of this pedal is that with the second switch, you can apply a treble roll off that engages when you cross the line between clean and gritty. The roll off will start gentle, but become stronger, the further you venture into dirt territory. You can choose between “No, thanks” (flat) “Just a bit for me” (medium) or “Yes, please!” (dark). The other switch selects whether you want an amp-like feeling and tone, or an overdrive pedal tone. In the amp-like setting, you can use the pedal as a preamp, running it completely clean and only making use of the EQ functions, or push things just a little bit, or get some drive that will clean up nicely on the decay of the note. In this setting, this pedal is maybe the most sensitive one I ever played. The reaction to playing dynamics is phenomenal. Other pedals have that sweet spot where you can go from clean to drive with the amount of force you apply with the plucking hand. On this pedal, you get a vast area in which that works to varying degrees. The walk on the edge becomes a walk on a paved road, two lanes in each direction. Let’s look at the EQ. Origin did not label the knobs bass and treble. They use L.F. and H.F. which, I guess, means low frequencies and high frequencies – and that name is aptly chosen. I can’t really tell you how these knobs work, they feel like magic. They are active controls, noon has a center detent, left is cut and right is boost, even though I cannot imagine why anyone would use those magic knobs to apply a cut. Turn up the bass L.F. knob and you get more booty. However, you don’t really add mud to the low end, its just more of it audible. The same goes for the treble H.F. knob. It adds the magic sparkle treble stuff that’s so good on your ears, but lacks most of the harshness that usually comes with that.

I’ve repeatedly said that the DCX Bass can make your rig sound $1000 more expensive. That is in large parts owed to these two knobs. Turn them up and your bass sound becomes more sophisticated, elegant and so educated, you gotta call it Doctor. That mixes so well with the subtle and super dynamic drive you get when you raise the gain a little – this could easily become your always-on-tone-sweetener-pedal.
The texture of that drive is also well described with the word expensive. It’s rich, harmonic, well behaved and well balanced. After a short period, you develop a feel for the drive and can use it at leisure.

But that is not all. When you flip the upper switch over to OD, the whole nature of the drive changes.
They could have named the switch Jekyll / Hyde. Educated mannerism makes way for brute force.
Well, maybe not as crass as that, but there is a switch in character. The gain knob gains a lot of gain.
There is no clean playing any more, and the drive gets a bit rougher and a bit throatier, more grizzled.
Note decay is something it fights against now, holding a long sustain with lots of dirt. Even at higher settings, there is some note separation to speak of. The tone is quite dense in a mix and it even feels a bit louder than most other pedals, even when playing into a fixed limiter. It’s mean, but not feral.
I remember writing of “Whipping a metal sheet with elevator cable” in another review and I feel like this is a very fitting description of what you get with the DCX, too.
This pedal is my go-to drive for my P bass loaded with Chromes, playing in an 80’s metal band.
It can totally get a tone that works well with an 80’s metal vibe. A Darkglass pedal, apart from sounding unpleasant to my ears, would have that emphasis on 2-3kHz, delivering that trademark clank. That sound that feels like biting down on tin foil while having amalgam fillings.
The DCX gives you a healthy slap around the ear and does none of that nasty stuff.

So you get a pedal that is well made, has a range of tonal options, from clean to gentle, to full-on, with a rich and unique EQ that can make your rig sound more expensive. Okay. So what is no to like?

I can tell you that I can be quite the critic and I will usually have something to get worked up on.
On this pedal? It is super well made. It has top jacks that are wide enough apart so you can even use pancake plugs. The knobs feel super solid. The LED is bright enough to see in daylight, but by no means blinding. The manual for the thing is very well written. You have a relay powered bypass, so activation and deactivation happens without an audible pop. Very well made – or is it?
When you disconnect power, the device does not remember the state it was in and as soon as you power it up again, it will default to the ‘on’ state. That is perfectly fine on my Cali76 compressor, but I would have preferred my drive pedal to default to ‘off’. That’s my only critique. Other than that – great pedal. Get one!