CMC Audio Proto Type
This is the CMC Audio Proto Type Bass Overdrive, made in Belgium.
Let me give you a rundown of the knobs and how I experienced them.
First of all, I should paint a map of the signal path.
The signal gets split upon entering the pedal. One part remains dry and untouched, the other part gets processed by “nose” “contour” and “low cut”, then enters the bit that does the drive. Those two get mixed again. You have no control over how much dry/wet is blended – but CMC chose the sweet spot perfectly. After that, the blended signal passes the “treble” knob.
- The switch. It is a soft touch switch, but my unit sends a little plop sound down the signal path. It is on my messy test bench setup, though. It could well be that this has to do with it, the test bench is always a bit noisier than my real board. However, this switch can do a trick. When you click it, it turns the pedal on. Click it again and it turns off. Press and hold, however, and the pedal stays on for as long as you press and disengages upon release. I can see use cases for that.
- Level. Nothing to report here. It’s a level knob.
- Drive. The gain knob. With my passive bass (which does not have an incredibly high output) everything stays fairly clean until I reach about 10 o’clock, where harder playing creates a bit of fluff around the edges. Goes all the way up to solid overdrive.
- Treble. It is a shelving EQ that can cut and boost, noon is flat. The treble knob comes after clean and dirty signal have been blended, so it influences the overall output. It is not a knob to add magic sparkle, but it can make up for some loss of treble if you send it a dull signal – and it can take a bit off of the top, so you can run higher drive settings, but don’t have too much harshness in the tone.
- Contour. It’s a cut only EQ with a broad Q, centered around 400Hz. Fully CCW is flat. So one could say that turning it up creates a bathtub EQ. That what it feels like. I want to play around with that in a band setting, but I already liked it running flat.
- Nose. This is the opposite of Contour. It is a boost only EQ with a narrow Q, somewhere in the 1kHz region.
This adds bite. But it’s not the clanky, gnarly growly Darkglass bite. It’s just bite. You still recognize the timbre and character of the bass you play into the Proto Type, only that it has grown bigger and pointier teeth. - Low Cut. This does as advertised. It’s a high pass filter that goes from zero to around 300Hz – but it only cuts signal going into the drive section, not the dry path, so while you lose distorted lows, you don’t lose lows in general.
Are these controls highly interactive? Good lord, no! That would be way too much to comprehend. Every single knob is finely tuned so turning it gives you a feeling of linear behavior – and I want to add that it feels linear, because that’s what your ears tell you. I imagine that takes some work. Of course there is interaction between the knobs, but it’s neither rocket science nor necromancy. You don’t need safety goggles, white lab coat and clipboard. You don’t need the black silk robe, the summoning circle and the still beating heart of a goat.
You just give the knob a twist and use your ear. It’ll give you a pretty accurate idea of what’s happening and how this will influence the total outcome.
As an example, I wanted to set the pedal to get myself a slight, touch responsive drive sound that gets my bass more presence and more treble content (as I never get tired of mentioning, I play dead flats). So I set the Drive around noon, Level to unity, Countour at zero, and gave it a bit of Treble as well as a bit of Nose – then I plucked a string and already got a result that was close to what I had in my head. A little fine tuning on the gain and the ratio of nose/treble and I was there. The clipping stage in the Proto Type is CMOS. I only knew these things from my PC, but as the engineer says: “Every machine is a smoke machine if you operate it wrong enough”. I suppose that everything that can pass a signal is an overdrive if the signal you pass in is hot enough, so even the thing that holds the BIOS on your computer can make your bass growl.
The character of the drive is transparent, it only accentuates bits across the spectrum, but keeps the vibe you send in completely intact.
The low cut works pretty well, too! I’ve set everything nicely and ran into the problem that when the middle of the fretboard frequency range starts to sing, the lows get distorted too much – just turn up the low cut until you reach the desired result.
The CMC Audio Proto Type is fairly dynamic and can get you from just a hint of subtle drive at the edges of the notes to full on dirt just by playing dynamics alone.
It is a very utilitarian approach and feels like it was done by a full blooded engineer with a good set of ears.