Chop Shop for bass

jrhevron

Active member
I'll post pics later... just finally got this together last night and played it in practice. Had a disastrous first build that I just couldn't fix and was likely due to burnt out jfts. Did a 2nd try and the build couldn't have been easier and it fired up first try.

I like jft based drives and have tried a few on bass: pedal pcb modified son of ben and a ss/bs mini. The Chop Shop is my favorite so far. I have enough eq in my line (onboard bass preamp, di/eq last in chain), so not having a tone/eq is just fine with me on this one. I prefer it. I was able to get a good tubey edge of breakup tone that sounded great. Def want to mess with the biasing. I biased at 6V, but want to do it by ear to see if something closer to 4.5V works. Also, I was able to get a nicer breakup at 9V than 18V, but I'll have to mess around with that as well.
 
Is it a straight build or were there any mods?
Straight build. When I made my Son of Ben, I did a few mods that are highlighted in another thread.

For this build... and correct me if I'm wrong... I assumed that there's no real need for mods as there's no tone control and the signal goes fairly straight through? Maybe that is simplifying things, but it does seem like that's pretty much the case in practice. I did notice what seemed like a little bit of a mid boost even when you weren't using it as a drive, but it mostly seem to pass through the full signal, which is what I was looking for. I had my Son of Ben next to it and you can hear the pronounced mid boost on that pedal-- and I can't say I'd really noticed that as much before I a/b'd them.
 
Thanks!

I haven't tried my Chop Shop on bass, just curious if you made any changes for bass. I really like the Kliche bass mod, be cool to see how the Chop Shop compares.
 
So, I couldn't wait and just got a Nein from someone off of reverb. The rest of my summer is tight and I'm just not going to have time to build. The Nein is very good. Cuts through the mix nicely and is good to pair with the Chop Shop. It's very similar to the Chop Shop, but just a little more. So it's nice to have each of them at a different level, Chop Shop at tubey thick that breaks up when hit hard and the Nein closer to fuzz. You can stack them well, but they also work well as two different flavors of the same basic sound.
 
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