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Supercollider earthbound8/3/2023 ![]() I had that little amp with me in my college dorm, and I played bass through it with the distortion dimed, quickly leaving the notion of “piano clean” bass behind in the proverbial dust. Nah, I wanted the bass to sound blown out and nasty! When I picked up my first true bass amp, I found that I needed a pedal to get dirty, and the very first pedal I ever picked up was a $19.99 distortion pedal called a Roadkill. ![]() I had to look the dang thing up, and was surprised to see it was made by ProCo. This was not a good pedal, but it made my bass sound distorted, so I guess it was successful at its job. Still, I knew deep down that it sucked, and wanted to upgrade as soon as possible. Eventually, the footswitch failed on my Roadkill, and I believe I sold it “as-is” at a garage sale for $5. Where do you go from a Roadkill when you’re 18 and unwise? Why, you go all in on digital multi-effects, that’s what! That’s right, I pivoted from the Roadkill to a Zoom 506II. The Zoom 506II had a plastic enclosure with two footswitch buttons (program up and down, to cycle through banks), a built in tuner (hey, that’s nice!), and – if I recall correctly – a ton of user programmable capability. I quickly dialed in the industrial bass overdrive sounds I wanted (think BILE?) and we kept making noise. In all honesty, it was an acceptable pedal. It did overdrives well enough, but wasn’t so hot at the chorus and flanger/phaser type effects that were included. The tuner was a godsend I previously had to unplug my bass and snap into a little QuickTune device, and all in all it got me through just fine with that Crate BX100. With the upgrade of my amp situation to the Peavey Nitrobass 400, I felt the need to improve my signal path. I didn’t use half of what the Zoom offered, and the plastic enclosure didn’t instill a lot of confidence, so I decided to simplify and improve in one stroke by grabbing a Boss TU-2 tuner and ODB-3 Bass Overdrive. The Zoom went back into it’s box, and was eventually sold at a garage sale in 2012 for $15. First and foremost, the ODB-3 is one of the secret weapons on Aaron Dallison’s pedal board since the Keelhaul days. It’s a dependable, sturdy stompbox that’s easy to get and affordable – awesome attributes for a touring musician. I liked that it had a blend knob to fine tune the overdrive with your clean botttom end, and the adjustable highs/lows split knob was a great feature. It was key because the highs were rather spitty, if left unchecked (in my opinion). I loved this pedal! It was used on the Re-Entry EP, the Sacred Order Of The Owl EP, and I think The Forest And The Trees LP. I wound up trading it to my buddy Dave at Bad Back Studios to pay for some mixing time on one of the latter two records noted above. I would recommend the ODB-3 to anyone looking for a solid, dependable bass friendly overdrive. Somewhere around this time, I saw Lozenge at Speak in Tongues in Cleveland. I loved their bass sound and saw he was running a Boss DS-1 into an EQ pedal to blast the low frequencies squashed by the Distortion pedal. I had to try it! I picked up my own DS-1, and a $20 Arion bass EQ pedal. It was alright, but just not the same as what I’d seen from Lozenge. I kept the DS-1 but sold the Arion a few years back for $15. I also briefly experimented with a ProCo TurboRat. ![]() ![]() That one was cool, and we did record a couple of tunes with that in front of the Nitrobass. It’s a neat pedal if you dial it in just right, and I’ve still got it. Thanks to Erik from Turbo Gerbil for giving it to me so many years ago.Īlright, back to the matter at hand, if I loved the ODB-3 so much, why did I get rid of it? I had picked up a black Russian Electro Harmonix Big Muff from a kid in Geneva for $25 on Craigslist, and I fell in love with its sound. By then, I had the Acoustic 370, and the Big Muff and the 370 loved each other long time, doing plenty of shows together. I then found an EHX Bass Big Muff for cheap and picked it up because it was smaller and easier to power with a power supply (the Russian only has a nine-volt battery connector). There's a helpfile called that, but if you're just learning SuperCollider, I suggest you avoid it for now and only dip in hen you come across a symbol doing something strange.I retired the Russian Muff from live duty, but there’s no chance I’ll get rid of it anytime soon. Your sample quickly shows a summary of how this works, but let's expand it a bit and define a three argument function: f = )) Syntax ShortcutsĪll of these shortcuts collectively are called "Syntactic Sugar". ![]()
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