MI Audio Blueboy Deluxe
This might be called a Ghost From The Past. I did start the Dirt Jounal after completing a similar, yet less extensive journey with preamps. When I got back into bass pedals around 2013, all I was looking for was a bit of dirt for my signal. A guitarist I was playing with lent me his Blueboy Deluxe to try out and I liked it so much that I ended up buying it. However, I did sell it some time after getting deeper into pedals. I have thought about it several times since we parted ways, though. As I said, I really liked that pedal and started to wonder how it might compare to my current collection and how I would like it these days, knowing what I know now, but they are somewhat rare. I did find one on Reverb for quite cheap and snagged it up.
This one is looks a little bit different.
My old one had the bigger enclosure, but the knob layout is similar.
Let me start with what I remember from more than a decade ago:
The Blueboy Deluxe has your typical Level and Gain knobs, plus four smaller ones, and these are a bit weird. They are called Bright, Tone, Mids and Char.
I am not entirely sure but I think all these controls had a center detent and were active boost/cut controls.
Bright is easy and does as advertised. It’s a treble control.
Tone is a tilt EQ that will boost bass and reduce treble when turned to the left and vice versa on the right. I remember this as a powerful knob, capable of copious amounts of bass. In a pinch, I did use the Blueboy as a clean preamp for a dubby tone with the gain super low and the tone maybe at 9 o’clock which got me a huge bass boost.
Mids is the one control that I remember as being more of a guitar specific thing, boosting what guitarists claim as their mids, which would be upper mids for bass. I remember keeping this neutral and not working with it.
The Char knob, I remember as a clean blend. Revolutionary on guitar, pretty standard on a bass pedal.
I remember the Blueboy Deluxe as a throaty, organic pedal. The gravel that gets added into the signal is on the larger side, big chunks. Huge bottom end and lots of beef. It could make my bass roar like an elk in heat, and it was quite touch sensitive. I did use it as an always-on pedal for hard rock for a while, stacked it with other pedals and also used it as an overdrive to activate when needed.
The one I had in the past seemed to be a decent quality. This one I have now looks like it has seen more stages than me. The silk screen print has suffered something terrible. Maybe it was integral to the trademark sound of some player who did not want others to know what gear that is and thus took sand paper to the enclosure? Maybe it was recovered from an avalanche or someone literally used it to tear down the roof?
We shall never know. It’s safe to say the unit has been around, though. From an optical viewpoint, there is serious wear and tear, but in terms of function, there’s nothing to complain about – it all works well.
First of all, let’s determine what the knobs do.
Bright:
With all other knobs at noon, the Bright knob does as advertised. Turn it down, loose top end. Turn it up, gain top end.
Mids:
Mids seems to be cut only. At minimum, there’s a massive cut centered around 1kHz. At max, the line looks as flat as it goes.
Tone:
Since I recorded with all other knobs at noon, the Tone knob at noon has a little bit of a hole in the middle, but it’s obviously a tilt EQ centered around 750Hz. However, there’s more than 20dB difference in the low end.
My guess is that the flattest response can be had with the Bright knob around two o’clock, Mids knob maxed and tone at noon.
I guessed wrong. So did I on the next try. Eventually I found the flattest possible setting:
It’s quite simple: Tone at noon. Mids and Bright maxed out.
At this point I consulted the manual to see what the maker has to say about this, and there seems to be a further interaction between the Mids and Tone knobs, the mids action gets more pronounced the higher you set the Tone knob and it’s doing nothing with the Tone completely CCW, it does nothing.
I did not measure the Character knob, because that does not really show anything useful.
What I can say with confidence is that I was completely wrong about what that knob does, though.
It is not unlike the Depth knob on the Broughton Evergreen Overdrive pedal – it is a bass EQ of sorts, but it is located pre-gain. This means you choose not exactly how much low end leaves the pedal, but rather how much low end is introduced into the clipping stage.
Now this might work very differently on guitar, but playing this pedal with bass, you can’t really go far until it gets really fuzzy around the edges and sounds farty. So in my use case, the Character knob is an easy one. Start with it completely rolled off, then slowly increase. Keep increasing as long as it gets better. When it stops getting better and starts getting worse (when the fundamental of the notes start farting out), dial back one notch and that’s the sweet spot. In that regard it works the same as the aforementioned Broughton.
I was told the Blueboy Deluxe is MI Audio’s take on the Tube Screamer, but they certainly did more than just taking a TS circuit and slap in a mod or two. As you can see, the massive frequency hump at 724Hz is absent. This pedal is neither pushing everything towards the mids nor does it cut bass. It also has more gain on tap, even though it feels like it enjoys lower gain settings more.
What I remembered correctly is that the playing dynamics are great. It really reacts to the touch and it’s fun to set it to a level where you can get it mostly clean by playing lightly and very dirty by digging in.
Since my gear, pedal choices, tonal preferences have changed in the last decade, I cannot replicate the way I used it back then, but it’s safe to say that this one is a bit more civilized than I remember. There is a bit of a learning curve attached. Out of the box and straight into my setup, I expected to hear that tone I remember, but could not make it work. It sounded a bit too fizzy, more like farting out speakers on a vintage amp and less like fist sized stones in a giant cauldron. However, starting at what I now know to be neutral and carefully moving forward doing one small tweak at a time made it sound better and better, bit by bit, and soon enough, I had a sound that felt right.
When you max out both the Gain and Char knobs, you do get into some interesting fuzz realms with a spluttery broken drive that’s feeling like playing molten metal, sans the incredible heat. Like cooking tomato sauce without a lid on the pot – once it starts boiling, the stuff gets everywhere and don’t get hit by those fragments.
The not-maxed-out sound has character, and it has attitude – coughing up a fat, yellow chunk of phlegm and spitting it on the sidewalk attitude. It’s fairly rough, and it likes my P bass best. I actually have to dial back on the mids with the P bass lest it sounds honky, but even with a slight scoop, it sits fine in the mix. There is no loss of bottom end – in fact, with the tone knob slightly before noon, I get the feeling that the lows get a little bigger. In my ecosystem, this would be considered as a drive pedal for dirty rock music – especially for a trio where you can use some extra helpings of dirt when the guitar is playing leads. For my personal taste, it lacks subtlety for very light drive duties and for heavier drive, I run into my usual problem of audible separation of harmonics from the drive pedal and my darker clean sound, with the result having too much of an artificial flavor.
This is the BlueBoy with my Aria Pro II Ric copy:
BlueBoy with my P bass:
BlueBoy with ALL the settings maxed out: