Beetronics FX Fatbee

This little fellow looks a bit weird with the knobs on the top and the unusual form factor, but looking at the Beetronics catalog, there are even more unusual designs available. This is the “Babee” series, and even though it is a tiny pedal, it is called Fatbee. It’s a simple layout. Three knobs called Weight, Flavor and Honey, side mounted input, output and power jacks and a footswitch dead center on the otherwise empty front face. It has dual LEDs, but that’s just for symmetry in case you wondered.

Opening it up reveals two things:
1. There are no hidden options on the inside. No dip switches or trim pots allow for further adjustments.
2. The PCB design is something different. Here’s another pic:

It is light as a bee, even a fat one – weighing it in the hand feels like it’s half as light as a normal pedal.
Looking at the edges, one can see that it’s not die cast aluminum, but bent plates. It feels solid and well made, though. Looking at the Beetronics website to find any hints on what this might be based on, I found out that the design is a JFet overdrive created in collaboration with Howard “Mick” Davis and seems to be an all original idea, not the (modified) copy of anything that already exists.

With not much more to tell you about how it’s made and how it looks, let’s dive into how it works and how it sounds.
The three knobs are Volume (weight), Tone (Flavor) and Gain (Honey), it does not really get much simpler than that.
Plugging it in with everything at noon, I tried to find out what the tone knob really does.
What I can safely vouch for is that it is a treble control. What I’m not so sure about is whether or not it is an active control or just a passive blend. With the knob fully CW, my ears tell me there’s more treble in my signal, maybe even the high mids are influenced, depending on what you call the 1kHz area. I feel there is more definition to the sound you get when the string leaves your plucking finger, and there is a bit more fretting noise. This could be because the treble area is boosted by the tone knob, this could also be because the baked in sound emphasizes the treble a bit by default. The other option, of course, would be that my ears are tricking me and none of this is true 😉

Playing around for just a few moments, trying out different knob positions I immediately have to agree with the pedal’s name. It certainly sounds fat. It also sounds warm. Warm and fat are two great things in my book. My fingers went off on their own accord and started playing stoner rock licks, which seemed like the right thing to do, with what I got from the little fat bee. Turning up the gain knob from the center area to nearly full, a childhood memory sparks up. My family were close friends with another family and they had a child about my age. This guy occasionally had some very weird ideas on how to have fun and pass time. There was this barn. Above the door, there was a hole between two of the wooden boards. It was dug by wasps that made their nest there, that hole was the entry and exit. The weird idea of having fun was to dare people to pick up an overripe apple from the grass and throw it at that hole. When your aim was on point and the apple struck one of the two boards right next to the hole, the wasps got really angry. I remember performing a half-hearted toss that missed the mark and lacked the momentum, thinking this ordeal might be over with that. Turning my head, I saw my friend launching an apple with all he was good for, hitting the board dead center with an audible thud.
That little hole started spewing wasps like nobodies business, and man, those beasts were MAD.
The next part of this pastime was as simple as it could possibly be. Imagine you’re a elementary school age kid. Imagine you’re confronted with a full swarm of angry wasps. Imagine your reaction. Right. It’s this moment that you find out that a human can actually outrun a swarm of wasps. All it takes is the adrenaline pump jacked into overdrive by the prospect of a painful death.
Why am I telling you of somewhat terrifying childhood memories?
That moment when I turned and ran, the sound that made it through to my slightly foggy brain was a mix of a beautiful and serene late summer day, a swarm of insects that mean business and my own blood rushing through my body pumped by the frenzied heart muscle running at capacity, or slightly over. It kinda reminds me on how the Fatbee does its thing.
Replace the wasps with bees. No, replace the wasps with slightly overweight bees that are actually pretty chill about things (but keep in mind they are insects. The don’t really do chill – so their version of a relaxed afternoon and yours differ greatly). You’re nearly there. 

It’s got that deadly potential — I mean I’m no expert, but my guess is that being killed by a swarm of frenzied wasps and a swarm of frenzied bees might not be exactly the same experience, but there have to be lots of similarities. It also has that raw power. Insects don’t translate well into that, because they never invented V8 engines with lots of cubic inches. There’s also some quality of using a rasp. A brand new high quality rasp intended for rasping metal, but used on a great piece of hardwood.

 
The sweetspot for me is with the gain somewhere around the middle and the tone knob all the way up. The breakup has some artificial flavor to it when it’s in the “Attack of the Killer Bees” range, but before that, it gives off a very good tube amp vibe. It feels like you’re pushing a vintage 15″ speaker. There is a lot of warm fatness to the sound, a wooden quality that lacks the metal sharpness of many other drives.
In that regard, it can easily serve as a tone sweetener that is run as an always on pedal and will feel at home not only in a rock context, but also in everything that has a vintage vibe going on. It’s a gentle sound, the breakup is more like a warm hug and absolutely no slap in the face. It also clears up nicely on the note decay and you can feel in your fingertips what you’re getting while you play. The dynamics are absolutely there, you can play less aggressive and it will clear up completely or you can dig in and make that vintage 15″ suffer.

I like that pedal a lot and would recommend it for everyone looking for a simple drive pedal that’s not too harsh and provides a means to get a fat sound with a warm quality that works in lots of contexts outside of metal. It stacks well and I could see myself using it as my not-so-clean clean tone for stoner rock.