Blackstone Appliances Mosfet Overdrive

So, in a (probably) quiet corner of New York, Mr Jon Blackstone of Blackstone Appliances, a company that sells but a single product, has had a few ideas of his own on how a dirt pedal should work.

First of all, I want to applaud the design of the unit. Run your tweed cable from your pre CBS Fender into the Blackstone and another tweed cable from there to your vintage amp and nothing seems amiss in the picture.
It is tiny, it has two foot switches and the controls work surprisingly well when you insert your thumbnail because you’re a bassist and don’t have a pick handy.

Now, a word on the controls. You get two channels, red and brown – aptly named. Red is higher gain, brown lower. Each channel has a gain and a volume knob, then there’s a fifth knob that can do a mid scoop (post gain). Fully CW is flat, dial back to scoop.
When you open up the unit, there is a switch that allows the pedal to adapt to its environment. In its natural state, it wants a direct, unbuffered signal directly from the passive pickups of your electric instrument. When you’re feeding it a buffered signal, flip the switch and it will do its magic with a buffered signal instead.
Then, there are two electronic gizmos on the PCB. One allows the red channel to become a second brown channel by removing it, the other can be replaced with different ones to affect presence.
And there are two trim pots that balance gain and treble in some way. I merely switched the switch to the buffered setting and left the rest alone.

The red channel is a bit weird. It is made for guitar and its minimum gain setting is at noon. When you go clockwise from here, you increase gain. When you go CCW, you get a bass cut, meant to balance high gain humbuckers on guitars in some way – I guess so they don’t get in our sonic spectrum 😉

Playing that thing was kinda weird at first. I needed to read the manual twice and fiddle around a bit because not everything was like I felt it should be.
Does it cut bass? When you do that thing in the red channel, absolutely! When you don’t, then no. I did not perceive any loss of low end.
At first, it had a little too much gain for my taste, so I opened it up and set it to buffered mode, which cleared things up considerably.
The sound of the brown channel is … brown. I want to call it earthy. It’s not bright, but by not really dark either. It’s warm and a the harmonics you get are more on the raspy side of creamy.
Since it’s not a bright pedal, this is a pleasant sound. It feels like nothing I played before, with heaps of dynamic reaction to play style and a very loose feeling. Neither pushing forward nor pushing back, just hanging there, reacting to what you feed it.
I tested it a bit against the two other drives currently on the board, the Blueberry and the FPT, and I could not really draw a conclusion. Every pedal feels like it has a strong character and is built to completely different ideas of how a dirt pedal should feel, sound and act.

I guess this is a good thing. I would say that this pedal excels when you hook it up to a passive bass with roundwound strings that still have some zing in them, and maybe even when you play that bass with a pick and go for something like blues or rock. It’s not bad in my setting. Not bad at all! But the looseness that makes up much of the character is a bit lost with me and my personal playing style. I prefer a pedal that feels like it adds a dynamic of its own – either by pushing back or by pressing forward.

However, this thing is beautifully made and something else entirely. I really recommend checking one out if you get the chance.