Carl Martin Bass Drive

“The Carl Martin Bass Drive is a tube driven pre-amp/overdrive designed for the discriminating bass artist of today.” That’s how the manual starts, and I feel like it’s talking about me:

-Checking the calender reveals that this very day I’m writing this is, indeed, “today”.
-I do play the bass, often to an audience, so I do qualify as a bass artist
-While my political, ethical and worldly views are far from discriminating, my bearing towards bass pedals absolutely is!

This hulking beast is not only eating up a giant share of the valuable real estate on your pedalboard, but it’ll also require you to run it off mains power instead of letting you use the power supply of your choice.
That power is put to good use driving a 12AX7 preamp tube. Looking at the pedal itself, it seems to be a rather simple affair. Gain, master and a simple three band EQ.
The manual is kind enough to supply how the EQ works:
Bass: 63 Hz Shelving 6db Oct.
Middle: 1kHz Notch 6dB Cct.
Treble: 4kHz Shelving 6 dB Oct

My prediction towards this is that they aimed to keep the sound of the bass used mostly intact, the Bass knob adds weight down low, the treble knob adds open air up top and the middle knob is used for note definition, while the meat and potatoes frequencies from 80-1000 Hz are left alone.

Plugging it in, I am off to a bumpy start. I get massive interference, even when the unit is off, and nothing I try seems to fix it, but with the Bass Drive being a tube device that has recently been shipped, I do try to swap the tube. The construction of the pedal did not have the regular tube roller in mind – getting it out and another tube in is quite awkward. And I had to do it twice. Once to confirm it’s a bad tube (which it was), but I only had a 12AT7 tube at hand, and that’s running lower gain than the original – and once, a day later, when I found a proper 12AX7 to put into the device.

Before I comment on the sound, let me rant some more. The writing on the Bassdrive’s lower edge says:

“Made by East Sound Research, Denmark
Designed by Holm Malmquist”

The box it came in says
“By East Sound Research Denmark
Made in China”

Looking at the device, I feel like the intention of the wording tries to imply that Holm Malmquist designed it and East Sound Research made it in Denmark, while the fact that it’s actually made in China is, at least so it feels for me, hidden from the potential buyer.
Let’s just note for the record that I was so pissed off by this discovery that I had to pause my review process for a few days to make sure there’s as little bias as possible.

Not that I’d need a bad bias (foreboding hint of what’s to come)
The manual says that in this day and age, of ultra modern digital amps (I guess they mean class D, which is analog), with the bass sounds being clear as crystal, the Bassdrive can get a fair bit of vintage vibe back into your playing, drive a little soul and mojo into the soul- and mojoless rigs of today’s world.
I am very inclined to agree. I’m not old enough to have been around the music scene in the 60’s and 70’s, but gear from the 70’s was considered “old” and not “vintage” when I started out. Running on a low budget, I used lots of gear from the 70’s and 80’s all through the 90’s – let’s just give me the pass and allow me to claim “I know what the old gear sounds and feels like”.

Let me tell you that this claim is true and easily validated. When you have a modern amp setup (I have) that is capable of spitting out the sonic equivalent of crystal shards – so clear that you can hardly see them and the edges so sharp you could use them for a shave. (Mine is). It sits there idling, and apart from the cooling fan that hums so softly you need to concentrate to make it out, there is absolutely no sound, even though your bass is plugged in and ready to go.
Hook up the Bassdrive, and this room with a floor of polished marble will get a nice, comfy rug (one that really ties the room together). That rug is made of floor noise, and everyone who played in a loud band back in the days before class D and neo magnet speakers knows about that. I’m sure either you or your guitarist would get Russian short wave radio on one of the amps in the room when you turned it up and held the instrument cable just right. I’m pretty sure the Bassdrive can do that, too.
Also, that amount of articulation that comes with the newer gear and tweeters and such, being able to produce high frequency content is taken care of. I kid you not, but the Bassdrive with the treble maxed sounds more muffled than my dry sound. All of the tone feels like someone has taken every single note and wrapped it into a rag to protect it from being scratched up.
Activating the Bassdrive feels like traveling back in time, to the good old days.
When I play a vintage SVT head, or an Orange AD200, or a Fender Bassman, I understand the magic of those. The way they can make a note bloom with just a hint of hair, and only when you pluck hard. The way the power tubes saturate when you turn up loud enough for the amp to break a sweat. The sheer heft of those slightly compressed, heavily saturated notes and how they spread in the room.
It’s great. However, I’m not getting much of the above from the Bassdrive. What I get from it is everything that sucked on vintage amps and very little of the greatness. Luckily, I’m still talking about the baked in sound and the EQ. There still is that gain knob to be turned up high enough so it leaves the clean territory and offers some dirt. That’s what it is made for, after all.
The dirt produced by the Bassdrive has some things going for it.
There is no clean blend, and there is no need for a clean blend. That’s a very good thing in my book. There is enough bass on tap at all times, the low end does not feel like it gets neutered – neither by cutting low frequencies, nor by boosting mids and treble until you get the feeling of missing low end.
The muffled feeling does continue, though. There is a certain lack of an open feeling and there is also a certain lack of precision and note definition. I get the feeling that my ears have adjusted to what modern bass amps and bass cabinets, along with PA systems are capable of. I also do think that in my special case, as the guy playing old flats in any context, I have more need of equipment that does the upper registers well to give my notes a sharper edge, something that happens naturally when you play fresh rounds. In that context, I feel like the Carl Martin Bassdrive is a time machine that lets me travel back to the good old days. The good old days? No, actually I want to say the old days. Activating the Bassdrive instantly gets me a searing pain down in my lower back, because that tone carries the weight of a set of 90lbs cabinets with a 95lbs head on top.
In this modern day and age, you can look at the old days and decide what was good and what was bad about them, and then build your gear, focusing on the good, while keeping the bad and the ugly in the past, where they belong. Carl Martin did no such thing – the Bassdrive is pure nostalgia. You get the lack of top end, you get the floor noise, you get the mushy and muffled feeling, along with the drive of a tube.
Looking at the tube driven devices I really liked in the recent past, the Effectrode Tube Drive comes to mind. Comparing these two, there are significant differences. The Effectrode is made by hand with top shelf components, and the retail price of the unit is nearly three times of what Carl Martin asks for the Bassdrive. But. I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again before too long. Tubes have a reputation of being the upper crust, the best you can use – and that reputation is justified when your whole process meets the highest standards. Look at the Noble preamp (or the ravings of the owners of a Noble), the Doc Lloyd DLA-2A compressor, the Jule Amps Simone …. all that shiny, modern and super expensive gear. They utilize tubes to get that certain tube mojo, and they do it extremely well, but they charge a king’s ransom for their devices, too.
There IS a reason why tube technology has been replaced in every single field apart from instrument amplifiers and audiophile hardware.
When you couple tube technology with cheap manufacturing, you learn why solid state has taken over that sector. Compare the Bassdrive to a Tonehammer or a Bassrig Super Vintage, and the latter devices will sound more tube-like than the Bassdrive itself, but show none of the side effects.