Silver Blues
Well-known member
- Build Rating
A few weeks ago I posted a little teaser of the enclosure that would house this project, and I got around to buttoning it up yesterday. This pedal is, of course, a riff on the legendary Darkglass Microtubes B3K, but with some elements lifted from its sister, the Vintage Microtubes. The B3K has been the de-facto sound of prog metal bass for years now and given how much influence that style has had on me, I felt like I had to have one. Hence:
maelstrom (māl′strəm)
Internally, I would say this build is very neat, but not the most pretty. There's still some flux residue because the densely-populated board made it difficult to get in there with a Q-tip to properly scrub away all the leftovers and I'm sure there are still some fibers kicking around in there despite my best efforts. The board, however, is nice quality and handled rework well (I had to desolder and replace two resistors because I installed the wrong value).
So how does it sound? I know that the "Darkglass tone" is somewhat polarizing, but I'm a fan of this pedal and it'll probably find its way into my signal chain as a long-term fixture. The tone with all controls at 12:00/center is perfectly serviceable straight out, and I found a great "Meatplow" tone right away. Unfortunately I am bereft of Dingwall (and also skills) so I didn't give the prog tones a fair crack, but I could definitely get the high-gain modern metal thing going on with my SRMS805. Although the native drive tone is pretty good even when pushed to high gain, the real magic of this pedal is in the Blend control. I found myself keeping 40-60% of my dry signal at all times which allowed me to get the perfect balance of attack and power from my unaltered signal with the overdriven tone adding richness to the background; it's quite amazing. (Yes I know I'm just describing the function of a blend control
) The Grunt switch controls the bass that's fed into the clipping stage; the middle position has the least bass and the right position has the most. At first I thought the middle position was a little anemic, but if you mix in more of your dry and bump the level and gain a bit to compensate it lets you get a nice distorted edge behind your low strings. The rightmost position comes with a big level boost but surprisingly the load of extra bass doesn't muddy up the tone too much. I tended to like it best in the intermediate leftmost position. The Attack toggle controls the treble response, with the rightmost position being the most treble boost. I found these frequencies to be well-tuned and didn't give a big boost at uselessly high frequencies like I've seen some circuits do, which just introduces noise and makes your tone clanky and unpleasant, though I tended to keep it in the middle position. The Era control is supposed to be a sort of mid-response control and it does do the warm-vintage-tones-to-modern-hi-fi-esque range quite well. I found nice tones at every position of this knob. Weirdly, this pedal works great as an always-on tone enhancer if you want to add some grind to your sound - I spent a lot of time with the controls set as Vol [as needed], Drive 2:00, Blend 1:00, Era 10:00, Grunt left, Attack Center.
EDIT: @music6000 kindly shared Aion's guitar demo of this pedal with me, and turns out it sounds pretty great on guitar too!
maelstrom (māl′strəm)
noun
- A violent or turbulent situation.
- A whirlpool of extraordinary size or violence.
- A celebrated whirlpool or violent current in the Arctic ocean, near the western coast of Norway, between the islands Moskenäsö and Mosken, formerly supposed to suck in and destroy everything that approached it at any time, but now known not to be dangerous except under certain conditions.
- Hence Any resistless movement; any influence or passion which makes victims of all who come within its power: as, the maelstrom of fashion or of speculation; the maelstrom of dissipation or of crime.
- A celebrated whirlpool on the coast of Norway.
- An uncontrollable agitated or confusedly disordered state or situation.
- A large and violent whirlpool.
- Any violent or turbulent situation.
- A powerful circular current of water (usually the result of conflicting tides).
Internally, I would say this build is very neat, but not the most pretty. There's still some flux residue because the densely-populated board made it difficult to get in there with a Q-tip to properly scrub away all the leftovers and I'm sure there are still some fibers kicking around in there despite my best efforts. The board, however, is nice quality and handled rework well (I had to desolder and replace two resistors because I installed the wrong value).
So how does it sound? I know that the "Darkglass tone" is somewhat polarizing, but I'm a fan of this pedal and it'll probably find its way into my signal chain as a long-term fixture. The tone with all controls at 12:00/center is perfectly serviceable straight out, and I found a great "Meatplow" tone right away. Unfortunately I am bereft of Dingwall (and also skills) so I didn't give the prog tones a fair crack, but I could definitely get the high-gain modern metal thing going on with my SRMS805. Although the native drive tone is pretty good even when pushed to high gain, the real magic of this pedal is in the Blend control. I found myself keeping 40-60% of my dry signal at all times which allowed me to get the perfect balance of attack and power from my unaltered signal with the overdriven tone adding richness to the background; it's quite amazing. (Yes I know I'm just describing the function of a blend control
) The Grunt switch controls the bass that's fed into the clipping stage; the middle position has the least bass and the right position has the most. At first I thought the middle position was a little anemic, but if you mix in more of your dry and bump the level and gain a bit to compensate it lets you get a nice distorted edge behind your low strings. The rightmost position comes with a big level boost but surprisingly the load of extra bass doesn't muddy up the tone too much. I tended to like it best in the intermediate leftmost position. The Attack toggle controls the treble response, with the rightmost position being the most treble boost. I found these frequencies to be well-tuned and didn't give a big boost at uselessly high frequencies like I've seen some circuits do, which just introduces noise and makes your tone clanky and unpleasant, though I tended to keep it in the middle position. The Era control is supposed to be a sort of mid-response control and it does do the warm-vintage-tones-to-modern-hi-fi-esque range quite well. I found nice tones at every position of this knob. Weirdly, this pedal works great as an always-on tone enhancer if you want to add some grind to your sound - I spent a lot of time with the controls set as Vol [as needed], Drive 2:00, Blend 1:00, Era 10:00, Grunt left, Attack Center.EDIT: @music6000 kindly shared Aion's guitar demo of this pedal with me, and turns out it sounds pretty great on guitar too!
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