Description
Introduction
Just as the masterful flight of the majestic bird from whom it takes its name gracefully crosses the border of the sky and ocean, the Albatross is a blend between a modern JFET preamp and an old-school transistor fuzz.
The Story
Look, I’m a bass player and we all have our heroes. I’ve been listening over and over since the long-forgotten cassette player format, the sound of the 70’s John Entwistle thunderous bass licks, then the virtuoso Billy Sheehan runs from the 80’s and the then more modern approach to the bass groove of Tim Commerford from the 90’s till this day. One thing these gentlemen have in common in their sound is that pushing clarity of the low strings even when the amp seems to blow up from how much overdriven they are. I needed that sound! All my research crossed in the same point. Bi-amping! The signal is split in two, one kept relatively cleaner to support the push of the low notes and one sent to hell and distorted out.
It took me quite a while and I’m not exaggerating saying that after fifteen plus years of pedal building and a whole rack full of test pedals I’ve come to this final version to release it to you. It’s completely built up from scratch, from ideas I’ve put aside along the years to have one circuit that is not particularly vintage but not too modern either but can easily reach the sounds in my head with simple and understandable controls. You don’t need to carry two amps and spend endless hours of experiments till balance them, just this little pedal with three knobs you can take anywhere.
My motto of the Albatross is: Step on it and the groove is there.
Controls
Output
The overall output of the pedal, respectively the sum of the JFET preamp and the transistor fuzz. The Blend and Fuzz knobs are the controls of the two parallel circuits.
Blend
Don’t look here for pristine cleans. To the far left you have the JFET preamp simulation of a breaking up tube amp that blends into the fuzz circuit when turning it to the right. In the middle you have the studio secret weapon of bass dirt sound.
Fuzz
Controls the dirt intensity of the parallel fuzz circuit. With the Fuzz control at zero you still have the overdriven amp sound. Turn it up to unleash a total fuzz mayhem but still retaining the clarity of the base amp sound.
