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Vintage threads from the first ten years

blackstone mosfet overdrive pedal?

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6/11/2000 9:48 PM
dave	blackstone mosfet overdrive pedal? has anybody heard of this pedal? any opinions/reviews? thanx

6/12/2000 4:01 PM
nic	I have been thinking of getting one for awhile. They have a good website that describes irritations of tube screamers and the like to their "improvements". Unfortunately I have never tried one out and they are not shipping them lately. nic

6/12/2000 5:47 PM
R.K. Watkins	Hi guys, I played with one last year at the New York guitar show. While I played it through headphone in the middle of a fairly loud show, I found it buzzy and not very musical. I have several ODs and the one that is still on my pedalboard is the Fulltone Fulldrive II, basically a refined tube screamer. Good tone to all, RK

6/12/2000 10:47 PM

I have one, and it's an interesting pedal. On its lower gain channel (the "brown" channel) it has an extremely realistic low-to-medium distortion that doesn't color your tone at all. (I know everybody always says this about their distortion pedal, but I've tried all the better-known boutique overdrives and it's actually true in this case.) At its higher settings (the "red" channel) it's a little dark for my tastes, but still sounds very good. It's a tiny little thing, it has some socket-mounted user-changeable components inside, and it comes with an outstanding manual. I have the older model, but evidently the newer model has a little more adjustability with respect to tone and gain settings. Also, in finest boutique tradition, Jon Blackstone is very nice to deal with -- I live in New York and he invited me to come pick one up in person. I don't use it as much as I do the Burn Unit, which is my current favorite, but it's a very worthwhile item.

6/12/2000 11:58 PM

Matthew Springer

I just traded my FD2 for one and it's the best distortion pedal I've heard. The internal component tweaking is very helpful. I found a whole range of sounds by adjusting the output "presence cap" for instance.

The brown channel does a really good plexi sound. The red channel (heavy distortion) does the pseudo octave eric johnson thing very well. I'd say it's the best pedal I own or have owned. It actually sounds wuite a bit like the Booster 2.5+ crop of DIY pedals that are going around. The ONLY thing I can possibly complain about is that it doesn't like a wah pedal in front of it very much (or at least my Mu-tron). Definatley pick one up if you like the dark, heavy plexi thing at less than head crushing levels.

-Matthew
Some stuff I went through before I hit this one:
FD2, SoulB, 70's, Varidrive, Tube Driver, MP-1, Sansamp PSA-1, V-twin

6/13/2000 12:50 AM
R.G.	As we clearly see from the replies... ... there can be no disagreement about matters of taste...

6/13/2000 3:30 AM

... there can be no disagreement about matters of taste...

Yes this is true... But it seems that there is a demand for something other than a tube screamer. Something with more of the description of the Blackstone unit:

.No fizz. Like a good amp, the Mosfet Overdrive imparts harmonics that seem integral to the tone, as opposed to a disconnected fizz. This is not just a filter after the distortion, but a tailoring of each stage to prevent the generation of high-order harmonics in the first place.

It doesn't "plink" The mosfet circuit exhibits a minimum of what we sometimes call "attack leakage". This is the tendency for attack transients of notes to seemingly sneak past the overdriven stage without being subject to the same effect as the body of the note - sort of like a compressor that isn't fast enough to catch transients. It leads to a plinky sound, which make you work harder to get a note to "hang on", and tends to make note attacks sound the same regardless of what you're doing with the pick.

~Excerpts from the Blackstone website.

These maybe sneaky sales pitches but they describe what I am looking for. I live in an apartment, hey no cranked amps here at least not after 7:00 P.M. Short of buying a kidney bean shaped unit with a million transistors stuffed inside I'd like to think there are alternatives that could help me maintain my sonic signature...

Now $200+ is a bunch of money for a DIY'er like myself to pay. I am not a designer of electronic circuits, I can however follow suggestions...

Does Jack's Booster 2.5, (I think was suggested in an earlier thread) do these things? Maybe with more flexability?

THANKS,
nic

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