First and foremost, let me begin with a warning. This unit is loud! It is loud enough to drive a power-amp by itself and you can even bypass your amplifiers preamp totally with it. The highest quality components available are used here, and made with maximum care. I am a bassplayer myself and I design and make each one of my pedals as it was for myself. A while ago I came across an interesting type of NOS diode, that gave to my ears an excellent warm clipping and compression, while somehow it retains the bass and does let my instruments low notes shine through the clipped signal. But I wanted more. I wanted a clean signal to be blended and more headroom voltage in the circuit, for an even more natural sounding bass overdrive. After two years of tinkering, the Jelly Fish Bass Overdrive Bass Born, I mean was born.
The function of the knobs are simple and straight forward. There are no wrong settings you can achieve with it, no matter where you turn the knobs.
Output is self describing. You can control the volume of the pedal, and as I have already mentioned, it has more than enough. You have a huge amount of headroom to chose from according to your needs, thanks to an internal voltage multiplier circuit, that gives the circuit three times more power than the usual 9V pedals. Drive is a smart solution for the ever growing community of bass players
whom are in need for a clean blend control on their overdrive pedal. It is basically a dual control. While you turn up your clipped signal, you also blend in the clean unaltered output of your instrument, amplified to a perfect balance between the two signals. This is the reason that you will always have a strong presence of the clean undistorted low frequencies, even with the drive maxed out.
These are not the usual amplifier style boost only controls. They have a well designed balance of cut and boost ability with the center-detent simulation at noon. With the Output, Bass and Treble at noon and the Drive at minimum, you should have a neutral transparent sound, exactly as your instruments output.
From here for example, you can cut the bass and treble, and while the circuit retains unaltered the mid frequencies, you can achieve a mid boost by turning now the gain up. This is the sound preferred for fast finger-style grooves, jumping out harmonics and an attack that will give an „in the face” sound for your instrument in the mix.
If you are preferring the scooped mids slap bass style sound, boost this time the tone controls. The mids will stay true in the same place, while you can add boom for the low strings and sparkly snap for the high ones. Balance it out with a little compression offered by adding gain and tailor the output with the volume.
For that old-school walking bass sound that made popular so many songs from the 60’s and 70’s. Boost a tad the bass, cut a little from the treble and add an amount of warm compression character of those old tube amps had from the gain. This is the moneymaker sound. Will give a good bass foundation for any type of music genre and band you might play in. Even your glissando will sound smooth and full in the same time. How about that?
Rock sound. Keep it raw and simple. Leave the tone controls at noon. Okay, okay, maybe a little treble for more pick attack and grit, not that it is not having already enough presence, but you want to be heard behind those pesky guitar players. And now, the secret sauce recipe of a great rock sound? Turn the gain up and rock out! That’s it. Yeah!