Description
The Mean Bone brings to you exactly that classic Rock sound you’ve grown up with. It's the distorted guitar sound that can be heard on the famous rock, hard rock, heavy rock, glam rock, grunge records, and I could list hundreds of great bands from the 80's and 90's here.
During the 2 years of development, I tried to create a distortion pedal that holds it’s place in almost any guitar – amp combination, I don’t like to use cliche keywords, but it’s a relatively „transparent” sounding circuit. Mean Bone is such a distortion. Not overdrive, not boost, not metallic tone, not distinctly modern, but not truly vintage either, it’s a true classic ROCK beast. It doesn’t settle on the character of your guitar, it rather adds, does its thing. It distorts the signal in the classical sense of wording. This is the reason I recommend it to any guitarist who uses a distorted guitar sound!
With an internal voltage charge pump, I set the circuit’s “headroom” to maximum, so the circuit is incredibly fast and responsive, like a real, high-style hot rodded sports car. According to my guitarist friends, this pedal has “no pedal sound” but sounds like a tube preamp. Indeed, I agree with that!
As with all the next-generation Kasleder pedals, I use some super rare and special ingredients in the Mean Bone, which gives it that tiny unique spice in addition to transparency.
Another special feature of the pedal is that it knows the “cleanup” effect perfectly, which is not usually the case with most distortion pedals. It responds very well to the volume pot of your guitar, you can practically use it as a “pre gain” control. If you roll back the guitar volume pot, the sound image will not collapse, the sound will not be covered, but you can nicely control the density of the distortion texture. This was also an important mission for me when developing the circuit.
Because it’s a very precise structure, each control has an effect on the operation of the others. The 3 knobs controls have a fairly wide range, while the 2 three-position switches allow you to venture into the area of fine tuning.
Controls
Volume
You can adjust the pedal volume with it. The pedal volume changes according to the different Mode positions, which is normal, but even in Mode 3 we have plenty of volume reserve so that we can use the pedal as a drive or booster in a smaller gain position. So the higher the volume position, the more the overdrive nature of the pedal begins to prevail with it’s own distortion.
Tone
Passive treble cut equalizer. This also acts in a wide spectrum to set the needed treble content. At maximum, the ultra bright sound of clean Fender tube amps. Backed off a little, it’s the more dirty and more mids rich sound of Marshall tube amps. The chances are, that everyone will find the setting they like in the range of 10 to 2 o’clock.
Gain
Thanks to the huge headroom, with the Gain pot we can go from fine, just breaking up amp tone to a thick dense, almost higain distortion. Importantly, when I use the words “higain”, I don’t mean modern metallic sounds, it’s a Rock pedal! An interesting feature of the circuit is that at lower gain positions the sound of the pedal is slightly thinner, to compensate for this you have the Bass switch.
Bass Switch
Partly to compensate / supplement the change in bass range created by the Gain knob, and partly to tune your guitar pickup to the circuit. This 3-position switch does not set the bass range in the classical sense, but rather the resonant frequency of the bass range of the guitar sound. The versatility of the circuit is evidenced by the fact that when switched to the deepest range at a relatively large gain position (position 3), the sound begins to fuzz out. This is not the main profile of the pedal, but set like this it can be used for great fuzz sounds too.
- Middle position = position 1, Minimum bass
- Down position = position 2, Medium bass
- Up position = position 3, Maximum bass
Mode Switch
With this switch you can choose from 3 clipping modes. Three different distortion textures for three different characters.
- Middle position = position 1, this is the most open, least compressed position, characterized by a strong tight mids, slightly hot rodded plexi-like sound.
- Down position = position 2, asymmetrical clipping. This is the texture that most closely resembles for tube distortion, in terms of style a JCM800 character.
- Up position = position 3, this is the densest, most compressed texture. If you play in this setting for a long time, you will feel very soon in the 90’s.
