NPD: Boss ODB-3 (from a guitarists perspective)

[broj15]

So I'm back home visiting my family for a few days, and today I decided to pop by my local music go round just to see what they had.

Long story short I walked out with a Boss ODB-3. I do play bass, but not currently playing bass in a band, and I've been feeling like my guitar tone has been lacking here lately so I decided to give this thing a shot and I must say I'm pretty impressed.

I've been intrigued by the idea of using a bass OD/distortion for a while, considering I play through a bass rig and tune down to drop A, so it would make sense that a dirt pedal geared towards a lower tuned instrument would work well for my purposes.

So since I am at my parents place all I had to plug into was the fender frontman 25 that my dad keeps in his shop just to test out his customer's guitars, but between his t60 and this pedal even that piece of shit was putting out some relatively doomy tones. The high & low eq knobs seemed pretty responsive, but the best feature is the blend knob for the wet/dry mix. With the blend set to about 1 o' clock (60% wet & 40% dry) I could pile on ALL the gain, and chords & single notes still felt defined and chugs & tremolo picked riffs still had a nice amount of attack and never got "squishy" like they usually do with tons of gain. Needless to say I can't wait to get back home so I can see how it meshes with the rest of my rig.

So yeah, if anyone is looking for maybe a bit of a different flavor of dirt for thier low tuned guitars maybe look into a bass OD of some sort with a clean blend feature and see how it works out for ya.

 

[wakjob]

Oh man, that's what's missing on OD pedals for me...
A blend control!

My Sparkle Drive doesn't work the way you'd think with its clean blend control.

Thanks for the heads up.

 

[broj15]

Oh man, that's what's missing on OD pedals for me...
A blend control!

My Sparkle Drive doesn't work the way you'd think with its clean blend control.

Thanks for the heads up.

Ayy I totally agree! All kinds of bass od's have blend controls but hardly any marketed for guitar. I actually used to have a sparkle drive so ce I knew I wanted something with a blend control, but ended up not liking really anything else about the pedal so I sold it.

 

[Shask]

I have one of these, but have never tried it as an OD in front of a high gain amp. I will have to give it a try. I didn't really like it too much as a stand-alone distortion pedal. Even on bass, I really only like it for a totally fuzzed out, harsh distortion. I don't like it as a subtle gritty bass sound.

 

[Alex79]

Some bass pedals work great for downtuned guitar.
MSD Automagic Bass wah is definitely interesting (though I still prefer normal guitar wahs); EBS Multicomp in TubeSim mode is wonderful on downtuned guitars for clean sounds.

 

[cardinal]

Never tried it with a guitar.

For bass, I liked it with the bass and treble dialed way back (essentially bringing the mids forward) and using a very high level to compensate for the volume drop. I'd probably try the same with guitar.