Effectrode Tube Drive
My first contact with Effectrode was the LA-1A compressor. One thing stuck out to me immediately: The audio quality. I did not really like the way the compression worked, but the balanced out was professional, studio grade stuff, and the tubes ran absolutely silent, giving the sound the audiophile kind of tube warmth and magic. In that regard, it easily competed with devices that cost more than double of what Effectrode charges for the LA-1A. That made me curious about their drive pedals. In the LA-1A format, loaded with three tubes, Effectrode offers the Tube Drive and the Blackbird. I did the sensible thing and ordered both.
Prior to getting the Tube Drive I had a brief conversation with Phil from Effectrode and he expressed some doubt towards the usefulness of the Tube Drive for bassists, but I stubbornly went on and got one to try it out for myself.
The Tube Drive uses two 12AX7 tubes for gain staging. The 12AX7 is a double triode, so there are two gain stages inside each of them. Doing the math, the Tube Drive drive tubes get you four cascaded gain stages.
This means serious horsepower in that regard. Absolutely nasty, over-the-top gain levels are possible.
Furthermore, there is a Baxandall tone stack with some mids-magic, driven by the third tube and controlled with the tone knob. It is not a passive tone stack that effectively only removes signal.
This one has zero insertion loss and can actually boost the frequency bands.
The controls are simple. You get three knobs and two switches. Volume/Tone/Gain are more or less self explanatory. There are two switches up top, one does a bass boost, the other does a pre gain treble boost.
This thing is, of course, very well made. Everything looks and feels like high quality, top shelf stuff.
The tubes are proud, standing upright and protected by a mini swimming pool handrail. The knobs have just the right amount of friction. You won’t turn them by accident but they work smoothly.
High quality, top shelf stuff is not only the first thing about the build quality. This is also a proper description of how it sounds.
The switches do work as advertised. The bass boost will get you a bit more low end while the treble switch does not do overly much in my scenario – this was obviously designed with roundwound guitar strings in mind. Boosting frequencies my worn flats don’t even produce yields very little.
The effect of the two switches is not overly dramatic, but the bass switch is very useful.
The three knobs that do the lion’s share of the work are relatively easy to figure out. Volume does volume.
The tone knob is a tilt-style EQ, but it’s not as easy as “left is muffled and bassy, right is bright and tinny”. There is some stuff going on all through the mid spectrum that my ears are too weak to properly figure out, and the whole operation does not feel entirely linear. Fully CCW does yield a muffled sound with more bass while fully CW does a tinny sound with cut bass and boosted treble, but the magic lies between the two extremes.
The gain knob does not pass signal at zero, but already yields audible drive at the lowest possible setting. When you turn it up gradually, you can feel how the four tube stages start driving one after the other while you sweep through the available knob travel. Towards the end, it gets a bit mangled and you can hear the signal fighting the deadly amount of gain.
However, the feel and texture of the provided dirt is … as clean as dirt can be!
Do me a favor and imagine your average dirt pedal as a bulky guy that has long hair, a beard and looks like he knows his way around a motorcycle, wearing denim and leather.
Someone who you’d naturally assume you could gift a bottle of Jack Daniel’s when you show up to a BBQ.
The Effectrode Tube drive is more of a British gentleman. Clean shaven face, immaculate hair and slightly crooked teeth. Freshly pressed, pristine white shirt, three piece suit, walking cane (or umbrella, depending on the weather), shoes polished to a shine. Someone who knows how to properly drink tea from a thin porcelain cup that has been in the family for six generations, with matching saucer, silver spoon, and the little finger spread off at exactly the right angle.
Cut both of them open and the insides look more or less the same. Both have the same amount of organs that do more or less the same things but “manners maketh man”, the British gentleman would have quoted, had you not just cut him open and ruined his suit, his carpet, and his evening.
The Tube Drive has a creamy texture to it, one that is absolutely even and predictable. When you ride the gain higher, you get a singing sound that is capable of endless sustain, perfect for playing leads. It’s not overly aggressive – for a tube driven distortion, that is.
Listening closely, I need to correct myself. The EQ is not a tilt EQ. I still fail to analyze what it does exactly, but it’s safe to say that it leaves bass frequencies alone, is flat at noon and pushes somewhere around 1kHz, but also a bit lower and maybe even a bit higher than that, but not equally. Let’s just say that right side of noon, you get a dynamic upper mids/treble boost, because I’m confident this is what happens there.
I am somewhat of a low(er) gain drive person. When I go high gain, I prefer a drive sound that is chunky and mean. Reverse engineer one of those sandblasting things and then built it, but increase the size by a factor of about 2000%. This will also require that you increase the size of the sand grains by the same amount, so you end up with a gravel blaster. Point that thing at your face from a distance of … well across the room and hit the trigger. That feeling is how I like my personal high gain sound. The Tube Drive is much too well mannered for that. It does not even do sandblasting, it does beadblasting which leaves a perfectly matte surface with a slight shine to it.
If I was into playing the guitar, I’d make room on my guitar board without hesitation and slap the Tube Drive on there. The bass switch, I’m sure, is a great help to get some more of a humbucker character out of your Stratocaster and the creamy lead sounds this can create will be divine – but my skills on the skinny six string are rudimentary at best and I don’t play leads on bass, so I will have to call this one as an interesting experience, but ultimately, a failed experiment.
…at least I thought so.
In a last attempt to coax some noise out of the Tube Drive that sounds pleasing to my earballs, I plugged it in front of my reggae pedalboard. There is very little gain staging going on on that board – instead of the gain, the bass gets boosted a lot. The only drive pedal I use in that scenario is set to a low gain, so I tried to copy that.
I must say I’m glad I revisited the pedal, because I have to revise my revision.
After some short experimentation, I settled with the tone knob set very high, the drive almost at zero and both switches set to boost their frequency range. The result was a subtle tone enhancement that was hard to put in words. There is a dynamic response, a gooey feeling with some thickness to it. With the gain riding so low, I can easily play with a clean tone. As soon as the compressor engages, there is just a little hair on the tone and with hard playing, it has audible dirt. The texture is, as before, rather soft. Two things stick out quickly. The Tube Drive’s timbre and texture change with the frequency of the note, the lower notes are a bit more gritty, while the highest notes are creamy. The response to the plucking strength stays the same all over the fretboard, though. The other thing that jumps in your face is the note separation. This thing fights tooth and nail to keep double stops apart. You really get the feeling of playing the two notes into two devices and they are blended together afterwards. It feels like each note has its own decay with the gain decreasing as the decibels lower.
However, most remarkable is that gooey feeling. Like pushing through syrup. It sounds weird when described as such, but play that device and you know what I mean. It’s entirely pleasant and feels exactly right. The device for generating gentle dirt on the pedalboard I’m currently playing the Tube Drive into is the Xotic BB Bass Preamp. This is set up to provide a gentle bass boost and a healthy dose of treble boost. In direct comparison to the Tube Drive, the Xotic’s bass boost sits a bit lower and its treble is, I think, a shelving control, but it starts way lower than the treble switch on the Tube Drive. However, the Tube Drive does a bit more in the mids and with the tone knob clockwise, it also seems to bring a nice emphasis on the uppermost mids, like a smacking of the lips after a good meal.
I really like the tone I’m getting here. There is not too much versatility in this scenario, but I don’t need any when the one trick the one trick pony does is what I’m looking for. A great sound coupled with a great feel is the trick I’m both getting here and looking for. The response to the finger attack is much better than on the Xotic, and the sound is in the same ballpark. The BB Bass Preamp emulates a tube amp and does a good job of getting the grit right. The Tube Drive has no need to emulate anything, it is exactly what it says on the box: A tube drive. Running tubes. Providing drive. I’m pretty sure that no one at Effectrode envisioned me, playing a six string bass with worn out flatwound strings into that particular box, so my guess is that I am using it in a way it was never intended to be used,
but I am the sole judge of what does and does not float my boat.
The Tube Drive has incredible buoyancy. It’s really simple at first and gets more complicated as I get to know it.
Since the Internet held no real demos or reviews for the Effectrode Tube Drive on Bass, I decided to record a few short licks to illustrate some of its capabilities.
The first sound bit is my Le Fay Karlsson, playing into the Tube Drive with very little gain and the tone around noon. Clean sound first, then the Tube Drive.
Some picking with the gain low, but the tone much higher
P-Bass, played with a pick