Fuzzrocious Dark Driving v2
The Fuzzrocious Dark Driving v3 is an easy to find pedal, since most boutique pedal shops carry it at the time I’m writing this. The Fuzzrocious Dark Driving v1 was a one knob pedal, and it’s a bit hard to dig up reliable info on that one. Between the one knob v1 and the current v3, a few changes have happened.
The pedal went from one knob to three knobs, and it got a second foot switch, which toggles between the dark/bright setting. In a later iteration, the pedal received two switches to select different diodes for the clipping, and the knobs moved from the triangle shape into a line. Since the internet agrees that the v1 was the one knob and the v3 is the smaller single foot switch pedal that is currently available in shops, I assume that all the models with the two foot switches are considered to be v2.
This pedal has taken a fair share of time to arrive at my desk. Not only did the guy I bought it from take a week to ship it, but I think the first time I moved the Dark Driving to my shortlist was just after I started with this whole project. I’ve always had a soft spot for Fuzzrocious, because they made the BDPG, a pedal that defies being described and needs to be experienced – which made it a commercial failure that was discontinued. However, I never ran across a deal – or when I did, my funds were all invested – and I never took possession of a Dark Driving – until now.
In an online article written by a guitar player, the Name BJFe was tossed around.
Apparently this online article writing guitar player understood that the Dark Driving is based on the Honey Bee and the Blueberry. Ryan’s interpretation of Björn Juhls masterpieces?
That’s enough to have me at the edge of my seat.
Those two LEDs are a purple’ish hue, with a bit more leaning into the blue (or ultraviolet?) than the purple LED on my Blueberry. It’s mesmerizing, nearly hypnotizing to look into them.
There are three knobs on that pedal and my predecessor has taken a few strips of tape and labeled them V G and T. It does not take a rocket scientist to deduce that these must be shorthand for Volume, Gain and Tone. Is it a little bit excessive, labeling a three knob pedal?
I’d have said yes this afternoon. Because I had not played it yet. I waited until the sun had set, so I could do some dark driving.
The right footswitch turns the pedal on and off, indicated by the top right LED.
V is volume. CCW for less, CW for more, it feels like just before noon is about unity.
The second switch … I want to say it does impart a different flavor on the circuit, but I’d be hard pressed to identify which one is the bright and which one is the mellow setting. Maybe that is an easy one if you play a bass with strong treble and fresh rounds into the pedal, but I need to remember you that I’m the guy who will soak a fresh pair of flatwounds in skin care product over night before putting them on a bass, just to make them age faster. The setting where the second LED is on has more bass, so I went with that for a start.
The Gain knob. You know how these work. Turn it fully CCW and there’s no signal, turn it fully CW and all hell breaks loose. On other pedals. On my Dark Driving, it’ll pass signal with the gain fully CCW. Here’s what I think is happening. When you turn up the gain, just after the fully CCW position, there is a clicking sound in the signal, and I do think that with gain fully CCW, you only have the pedal’s baked in clean blend passing. That clicking sound is the gain stage coming in. There is not much happening in terms of volume increase as you travel through the travel of the knob, and what increase you have is by no means linear. The difference between the gain at 9 o’clock and fully dimed, in terms of drive, is also not very drastic. It is a low to mid gain drive pedal and with a low output passive bass, you get low gain only.
The attentive reader might have noticed two things at this point:
1. I described all the controls of the pedal in the order of how complicated they are to grasp.
2. I have not written anything about the tone knob yet.
It took me a while to untie the knot in my brain that I got from trying to wrap my mind around the function of that knob – I was lying on the floor, twitching spasmodically and trying not to bang my bass into furniture while drooling saliva on the carpet, but look at me, all cleaned up and back in my office chair, so I obviously managed.
Turn the tone knob all the way to the left and you clearly get a massive high cut and a muffled sound.
Turn the tone knob all the way to the right and you clearly get a massive high cut and a muffled sound.
I get the feeling that the whole nature of what the knob does changes every few increments – at times it even sounds a bit like my trusty ol’ BDPG.
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who regularly gets extremely stupid DIY lifehack videos through social media (please tell me I’m not alone!) This afternoon on the ‘gram, I saw someone making a silicone(?) mold off a Mercedes Benz hood ornament, then casting it in tin multiple times, soldering these together and then forming them around a piece of clay that looked suspiciously head-shaped. I swiped on at this point, not wanting to see the outcome, but it was probably some super stupid head gear, maybe even a helmet that actively increases your chance of head injury in case of a crash.
It does not matter. All I wanted from all this was to conjure one single thing into your mind: These people often use something which I assume is silicone. The stuff is a thick liquid when it comes into view, is then poured into whatever stupid contraption they rigged and then it somewhat hardens, but also stays flexy. We’ll need that now. A lot of it.
We’ll also need a 11′ piece of eaves gutter (however you call it in your local lingo, that half pipe you fix at the edge of your roof to carry off the rain water), some wood, and a 10 by 10 piece of … the internet says its called corrugated sheet iron – but there has to be a slang term for it? I’m gonna stick with wriggly tin. A 10 by 10 piece of wriggly tin.
Now cut the wood to size and glue it into the ends of the gutter, so we get them sealed, making a trough, in which we pour that silicone stuff from a minute ago. Next, take the wriggly tin and dip it in. Hold still until the silicone hardens. Repeat the process three times until all four edges of the sheet are covered with semi hardened silicone stoppers. Drill two holes into the thing along one edge and hang it up, using steel cables.
Phew, that took some time but now we got it.
When the clean sound of a modern djent metal player (short, well kempt hair, cashmere sweater, artsy tattoos, black framed glasses, Dingwall five string and a pedalboard decked out in darkglass products) sounds like sledge hammering a suspended strip of corrugated sheet iron, then the Dark Driving sounds like baseball batting the thing we just built. I dearly love it for that.
If you listen to that classic darkglass bite, and then come down on it with a low pass filter and stop mid way, or maybe two thirds through the elimination process, you are approaching the Dark Driving sound.
My somewhat blunt clean sound gains some growl (the stuff that comes from deep down, not exactly the throaty kind). The heft and weight is all there – as I wrote, with the left footswitch in the position that lights up the left LED, there’s even more weight to the lows. It’s not bright, though. No ears are pierced. No shrill top end – the Dark Driving does not much care whether or not your cabinet has a tweeter. Here’s the weird bit, though: To my ear, there’s no muffled feeling to the sound. It does not have that airy openness to the top end, but it feels like you’re standing in a very dark place. You can’t see the ceiling, and you can’t really judge if it’s just out of hand’s reach or if it’s hundreds of feet high. There’s just a void up top, that neither muffles nor sparkles in my setup. I’d wager that when you play with a clean sound that is a lot brighter than mine, you’ll get a somewhat darker sound.
One thing I found this pedal does nicely is taking your pristine clean sound and give it an oldschool vibe – think something like a B15 – a low powered tube amp with a single 15″ speaker. There is some growl and the edges are frayed, plus you get a nice emphasis on the lowest mids (or the highest bass registers).
In that way, the pedal really does something I found in the BJFe Blueberry, there is some excitement in that frequency range – only that the Dark Driving party is seated a few hundred Hz lower than it is in the Blueberry. Playing in a mix, I realized that I actually prefer the setting with the second LED off, I still assume that’s the bright one. The bass frequencies can actually feel a bit overwhelming in my setup.
Determined to finally understand what it is the Tone knob does, when a google search for the manual reveals a somewhat generic description, claiming that fully CCW is full bass and moving it clockwise increases treble, I put on my good ears and go forth and back with that knob once again.
This time, I remember the claim that some BJFe genes might be in the Dark Driving in the moment my eyes fall on the Blueberry sitting on a cupboard. I remember that the Blueberry has that filter knob that directs the amount of low frequency getting fed into the gain stage, and I can confirm that it sounds like this happens here, too. Turning the knob towards the right, I get a lot more distortion from the low end. Is this because it gets boosted and therefore drives the clipping diodes harder or is there a BJFe-kind of circuit working, where the Tone knob filters lows from clipping? I can’t really tell. The brightest setting I could find was with the Tone around 3 o’clock and with the footswitch in the bright position. Set like this, I get a slightly sharper tone out of my bass. I’ve recorded a snippet of that. The longer I play the Dark Driving, the more I appreciate the tone of the bright setting – I do flip through all the options every time I sit down and jam with the pedal, but I keep gravitating towards the brighter tone when I’m done testing and start noodling around with it to see if it inspires a certain kind of play style.
There is, at all times, this wooden timbre that smells like the bank of a river, deep in the forest. This drives feels incredibly organic. The breakup is sodden wood, not metal.
Playing this version really makes me curious about the V3 that is in stores now. There are several different clipping options in the newer pedals. While I really would like to explore these, I fear that the original pedal, the one I’m holding in my hands already has the ‘right’ clippers installed and a change of diodes might be a change for the worse in my eyes. And ears.
I’m pretty sure that if I played roundwounds and was in the habit of changing them frequently, I’d totally go for the Dark Driving as my daily driver. When you got heaps of metallic zing in your signal chain already, a little organic softness from the drive pedal would give you a valuable counterpoint.
It’s one more Fuzzrocious pedal I really enjoy playing. I do think Ryan Ratajski really knows how to build and fine tune a pedal I can have a ton of fun with.
These are the brightest Sounds I could coax from the pedal. As in every other snippet, the first pass is my clean sound, the second pass is with the Dark Driving engaged. Gain around 1 o’clock, Tone around 3 o’clock, Bright setting.
This is the pedal with Gain at noon, Tone at 11 o’clock and the Dark setting.
And one more sample, with the Gain around 3 o’clock and in the bright setting.