Spicerack Electronics – A Farewell To Cleans

This is something of a new situation for me. This pedal was sent to me by a reader of the Jounal, so I could test it out and offer my thoughts on it. However, this is not a commercial product in any way.
You’re invited to go hunting for your own version of the Spicerack Electronics “A Farewell To Cleans”, but I’d advise you not to bother. This is a one-off and what I’m holding in my fingers is the only one in existence. I’m not even sure if Spicerack Electronics is a thing. It could very well be that the person responsible for the sticker on top of this pedal was sitting with their laptop at the kitchen table while designing it and thought that a company name has to go on there. Driven by the need to invent one on the quick, their questing gaze came to rest upon the spicerack. They googled “Spicerack Electronics”, found nothing, therefore deduced that when google does not know it, nobody is using it, and simply went on.

What is the Farewell To Cleans?
A fairly beaten up enclosure that features the obvious (Input, output, 9V, foot switch, LED) and four knobs. Those four knobs are named Bass, Snap, Level and Crunch. It’s a “standard big” enclosure, I think Hammond calls them 1590BB, and it has side jacks for input, output and power.

I doubt you can get much more obscure than a one-off from a ‘company’ that has no google entry, so all there is left is to check the pedal out with ears instead of eyes.

Thinking about it, I’m gonna bore you with more technical detail first. This pedal started out in life as the old version of the MXR Zakk Wylde Overdrive. The ZW Overdrive has only one use to bassists: When they give it to their guitarist, the guitarist will (hopefully) appreciate the gift and how the massive bass cut of that pedal ‘tidies up’ the mud on a lead guitar. When you run your bass into that pedal, then “A Farewell to Lows” would be a better name. The Zach Wylde Overdrive is based on the Boss SD-1. The Boss SD-1 is surprisingly similar to the Ibanez Tube Screamer, and given that it was introduced in 1981, two years after the Tube Screamer came out, one might assume that the audio wizards in the Boss HQ had a close look at the green pedal, but as far as I know, Boss makes no such claims. The SD-1 does asymmetrical clipping where the Tube screamer does not, and the EQ is slightly different, but back to what we have at hand. A pedal that is based on the SD-1, in a way, the Tube Screamer’s grandchild.
It started out as a three knob pedal that is useless to bass players because of its massive bass cut and it was re-housed. The new enclosure features four knobs, one of them labeled Bass, so something must have happened. What did happen is that the fourth knob is a parallel clean blend, or even a clean boost. When you turn down both Level and Crunch, you still get clean signal on the output if the Bass knob is not fully off and when you turn the Bass knob high, you even get a signal level higher than unity.
It’s a bit ironic that the pedal is named “A Farewell To Cleans” is capable of acting as a clean boost.
This whole configuration looks like a bit of a janky hack job at first, but when you hook up your bass and your amp and twist the knobs a bit, the result works surprisingly well.
Since the clean side is full frequency and the wet side has a HPF after a fashion, it’s quite easy to set. Dial up the clean sound until all the missing heft is there and you’re good to go. There’s no feeling of running two voices parallel, it blends seamlessly in that regard.

From one session of playing, I want to say that compared to the Tube Screamer variants I tried so far, the tone knob feels like it attacks a frequency range that sits slightly lower than that of the green gang, but I might be forced to take that statement back when A/B testing it. I also have the feeling that the baked in tone pushes frequencies that sit a little higher than the baked in curve of the TS, so there is some considerable overlap.

What I can confidently confirm is that like most Tube Screamer variants, it hangs there in the middle between amp like and overdrive like feeling. It’s neither pushing nor pulling, just hanging there on your fingertips willingly going in either direction, following your dynamics.
With my P bass (which is running a bit hotter than my six string, and being a P bass with Chromes), it feels a bit like taking an angle grinder to a piece of hardwood.
You know, after you’ve attacked that piece with several low quality tools and it put up a fight that felt quite frustrating, you get that old Flex from your buddy who’s a car mechanic. It comes in the “Pro setup” – which means that all the things it came with – the guard piece over the cutting disc and the handle – have been removed. When you fire it up, you have a healthy dose of panic respect for the thing.
But when you take it to this piece of unyielding hardwood, the ex-tree understands that it was able to resist your weak low quality wood tools, but now is confronted with a high-rpm disc that eats hardened steel for breakfast.
Slightly worrying, but oh so satisfying how it melts away at a mere touch.

Playing the six string, I get a wooden timbre that smells like a dewy morning in a musty wood. It’s a lot more earthy and more organic, less metallic and less aggressive. I guess that both the full spectrum clean blend and the nature of the drive being quite transparent play a big role here – it’s nice to see that the sound of your instruments contributes in a big way to the result you’re getting.

You can use this pedal to make your sound a bit more interesting and ballsy, sprouting a 5 o’clock shadow on the chin, with just a hint of audible distortion in the background, but some added liveliness and a snappy feel to it, and set like that, it could easily be used as an always on pedal.
Talking about on (and off):
When operating the foot switch, you get an audible pop in the signal chain. This was a bit disturbing in my testing environment, but when you kick in the dirt pedal mid-song, no one will notice – and when you run it as an always-on tone enhancer, then no one will notice, either.

Playing in a setting with softer rock music (think of a Stratocaster through a tube amp with no high gain pedals), the grit I’m getting seems to find a niche in the mix where it sits nicely. There is no added weight down low since all the low end is essentially your clean signal, but the added harmonics and the grit feel like they help to position the bass in an area that makes it easier to locate the bass in the mix, even for a set of non-bass-trained ears.

With all the testing I could get done on my own, it was time to bring the pedal into the fray. The fray being my metal band rehearsing. To make things even more interesting, I had to live with a terrible setup in that rehearsal, with my amp facing the full stack of the lead guitarist, so some cancellation was going on in the loudness wars. I brought the Way Huge Green Rhino Mk V as a benchmark, since I do know that this pedal delivers a sound that works very well in that band context. Given that the Rhino is also based on the Tube Screamer, it’s a good sparring partner for the Farewell To Cleans.
This is what I experienced: The Farewell To Cleans managed to get more bite than the Green Rhino did. I run the Rhino with all the knobs (except for level) maxed out. With the Farewell To Cleans, I ran the gain at 8/10 and the tone at 7/10, but still got a more aggressive top end and the tone had enough bottom, but up top there was that bite. Not the Darkglass variety, and not like the DCX does. A bit less metal on metal in quality, more like something hard but organic. I said the DCX sounds like whipping sheet metal with a frayed elevator cable. The Fairwell To Cleans sounds like whipping an enamel covered metal sheet with a whip that is barbed with canine teeth.
I had the feeling that it reached at least the same density the Rhino can get, and that the 100Hz boost on the Rhino was not really adding something in direct comparison – but I want to add that in this scenario, I was fighting to stay afloat in the mix and some of the finer nuances were badly hurt in the sonic mayhem before they could reach my ears.
I know I want to repeat the test with my amp properly placed, but from this one session, I must admit that I liked it a lot more than I would have thought I would!
After I remedied the situation by placing the several cabinets in the room in a way that did not lead to wild cancellations all over the place, I tried the whole thing again.

Imagine a green rhino fighting against a compact car sized robot.
The rhino has the advantage of thrice the weight, but it’s made from flesh and bone, while the robot lacks in size and weight, but is made from a hard and durable alloy. A fight like this could easily go either way. When the rhino charges in blindly and the robot sticks out a pointy appendage while using its frame and other appendages to anchor itself to the ground, it could run the rhino through and strike the killing blow easily.
If the rhino goes in, wary of such a maneuver, it could dodge and bring its mass to bear, striking low and toss the robot like a rag doll, only to follow up with a thorough trampling. . .
Back to pedals and audio.

The Rhino has, as you might have gleamed from my description the more organic sound character while the AFTC has more of a metallic nature. The weird bit is that they don’t sound that different when you’re playing them at home – through the amp, through headphones or PA, you think “Both are modded Tubescreamers, I can clearly hear that”. However, toss them in the mix with distorted guitars and they suddenly become entirely different beasts. I kept them in front of a compressor set to peak limiting, so there was no chance for any of the two getting louder than the other.
The Rhino has that 100Hz boost that turns my mid focused P bass into something Sir Mix-a-lot would enjoy. The AFTC gains some metallic clank in the upper mids or lower treble region that bites into the mix. Not in an eardrum piercing way and not after the dreaded Darkglass fashion, but in as gentle a way a vicious bite can be executed, like hitting a medieval bronze shield with a freshly forged, modern super steel claymore.
I must admit that I liked both pedals more or less equally. The heavy, hairy balls of the Rhino and the lighter, but tighter rip of the AFTC.
The metallic nature of the drive on the AFTC has a clear advantage when the room sound gets troublesome. The Rhino sits in the mix, and when the mix goes bad, it’s no help. The AFTC has certain elements to it that stick out, and when the mix turns sideways, those are the straws you can cling to.

I do thank the creator of the pedal to send it all the way from Canada to Germany for me to give it a proper go, because this was one of the test-drives I enjoyed immensely.