Mad Professor Blueberry

Requested by a few people now and I do want to keep the bassists happy too.  In tomorrows blog I'm going to show you how to make pizza boxes, especially for drummers.  Just kidding! :o)

Although the hand built BJF and Mad Professor effects can hurt your wallet, with the new PCB range out they've made them a lot more accessible to the masses.  And as these are great sounding effects and certainly more than Tubescreamers with different input caps, this is another builder that we want to keep making pedals.  Plus Bjorn's a good guy and plays AC/DC and Iron Maiden so I like him! :o)

A few notes: This is small enough to fit in a 1590B with a bit of careful measuring.  Some people have said this is a bass Honey Bee, but doing the layout I found it more similar to the Model H but with diode instead of JFET clipping.  If anyone has trouble with biasing, consider swapping the 30K and 5K6 resistors for appropriate trimmers and aim for around 5 to 5.5V on the JFET drains. 

Info about the original:

BJF design dynamic bass overdrive.

Mad Professor BlueBerry Bass Overdrive (BBBOD) is a high quality dynamic overdrive pedal for electric bass.

It was designed to get light to medium overdrive, reminiscent of vintage tube bass amplifiers.

With the Drive control, you can get natural dynamically controlled overdrive like on those old tube bass amplifiers, or more compressed thick distortion.

At lower drive settings the BBBOD distorts more the harder you strike the strings, and there is no definite clipping point, but rather different shades of distortion as the amplitude changes. Higher settings will give more compressed sounds.

With the clever Nature adjustment one can adjust the tone, and also control what register distorts. From really big and fat with low register distortion to cutting upper midrage solo bass tone.

There is enough volume to use the pedal also as a booster.

While mainly designed for bass guitar, the BBBO can also be used with other instruments for low, dynamically controlled distortion.

Controls:

VOLUME : controls output

DRIVE: sets the amount of distortion and sustain, as well as the type of distortion.

Lower settings give dynamically controlled overdrive, the unit distorts more the harder you strike the strings and there is no definite clipping point, but rather different shades of distortion as the amplitude changes.

Higher settings will give more compressed sounds.
A good starting point with most basses is fully CCW, turn the knob until you find the overdrive level that suits your playing.

Lower settings are good for old school tube amplifier tone, while higher settings gives denser distortion.

NATURE: is a tonecontrol for filtering and to control what register distorts.
Turning CCW gives more lowend and also distortion in the lower registers.

Turning CW gives an emphasis in the upper midrange for more protruding solo bass tone.