Ibanez Tube Screamer Mini

The Tube Screamer Mini is, after doing a little superficial research, mostly identical to the Ibanez Tube Screamer 808 reissue – You can’t fit a battery into the tiny box, and the Mini has true bypass. There seem to be other differences if you go in deeper, but most people claim that the differences in sound are so minute, they can be ignored. The clipping stage has silicone diodes and a first order high pass filter at 720Hz. However, the clipped signal also gets inverted and then blended with the unaffected signal, which leaves the dynamics intact and supplies the frequencies that were cut out for the clipping.

We have three knobs. Tone, Overdrive and Level. Overdrive does not really work like a gain knob. It does raise the volume somewhat when you turn it up, but it passes signal at fully CCW and the raise in volume feels like it’s not linear at all. The tone knob is an active treble control centered at 3,2kHz, capable of boost and cut.

Let’s address the elephant in the room. How does it fare when you send a bass signal its way?
I must admit: Surprisingly well. I know that this pedal, or rather the whole family of Tube Screamers and the scores of direct copies and pedals that were heavily inspired by the Tube Screamer are known to not only cut bass, but also to push everything towards the midrange (which is the midrange viewed from a guitar standpoint), resulting in a perceived loss of lows and highs on top of that. When I engaged the pedal, I expected my bottom end to be completely neutered. While it is safe to say that some low end loss is happening here, the result is far better than expected. You can get some back by applying a bit of EQ downstream, and under the right circumstances you could go as far as claiming that Tube Screaming tidies up the low regions and gets you a tighter response down there. This does not pose as a hurdle that cannot be overcome. Not at all.

In my setup, the first few notches of the Overdrive knob won’t do much. Audible distortion sets in around 10 o’clock. When you push the drive as hard as it will go, you’ll get a lot of midrange and not much else, but there are some nice spots between the extremes.

Mr. Susumu Tamura, the designer of the original Tube Screamer wanted a pedal that sounds like a mix between an overdrive and an amp, and I do think he succeeded in that regard. I know pedals that clearly feel like you’re playing into an amp and I know pedals that clearly feel like an overdrive, and I would place the Tube Screamer into the exact middle. The feeling it sends my way is that playing dynamics translate really well into drive. I did not take long to find a setting where playing normal sounded just a tiny bit wooly around the outer rim, which sat clean in a mix, but double stops plucked with a bit more force would bloom up and blend together. The treble knob is quite useful, too. It’s an active control capable of boost and cut, and I found that it can add definition – when you overdo it, it’ll also bring hiss and finger noise, though. It can also mellow the result by cutting a little bit off the top – but even with the tone knob far in the negative region, the bass does not sound muffled.

Those were my impressions after I played the pedal for about an hour in my home environment.
The next logical step was to try out how it works in a mix, plus some A/B testing with another drive pedal. When I did that, I was forced to concede that the low end loss is much bigger than I estimated in the first test run. Switching from the Tube Screamer to my default clean sound while playing with drums and guitar brought back a staggering amount of weight to the bass notes. Imagine you’re able to sing in the bass register, but yesterday you have been out, and had too many cigarettes, too much liquor and on top of everything, you shouted yourself hoarse. You sing and discover that your throat did not take all that punishment all too well and (ignoring the headache) you sound weak and your vocal chords tend to distort once you go over a certain volume.
You go to bed and stay there for two days, someone bringing you healthy food and drinks. You get up and try again. That’s what it felt switching off the Tube Screamer. My ears were adjusted to the sound of my bass through the TS, so the low end that finally came through felt nearly crushing.
Switching forth and back between the Xotic BB Bass Preamp and the Tube Screamer made things even worse, for the BB has a bass knob and in my default settings, there is a generous boost applied, making the BB sound even bassier than the clean sound. Confronted with that, the Tube Screamer sounded nothing but anemic. I was left scratching my head, wondering how I could have missed that. No amount of EQ before or after the pedal can bring back that kind of low end. I suppose that I was taken away by the grain and texture of the drive which really felt like it’s doing so many things just right, plus the even response that felt so natural, my ear turned a blind spot towards the low end.
Hooking the Tube Screamer into the signal chain via the Broughton Filter FX Loop, with moderate settings opens the door for the lows to enter again, but I needed to feed the pedal the full lower range to get audible breakup on the lower strings, blended with highpassed clean signal. This creates a workable solution that will do in a pinch, but it’s not worth taking up that much real estate on a pedalboard to make a Tube Screamer work properly – there is a bass version made by Ibanez and there are plenty of bass capable copies of the circuit made by other brands, too.