It seems like one of the hardest things to get right is a really solid, musical, useful distorted bass tone that maintains clarity and punch while also giving you all that gloriously gritty, girthy grind.
Bass players discovered pretty early on that the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff fuzz sounded great with basses, but as musical styles evolved, it wasn’t quite hitting it. Mixes became tighter, playing techniques became more refined and detail-oriented and players just needed more. More control, more nuance, more interactivity, just more.
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Thankfully, EHX has never rested on its laurels. This is a company that makes complex loopers, sample-and-hold pedals, intelligent harmonisers, and all sorts of other weird and wild digital creations while still making great use of the glories of analog. The Deluxe Bass Big Muff Pi 2 is a whole toolbox stuffed to overflow with features designed to give you the ultimate control over your dirty bass sound.
The Deluxe Bass Big Muff Pi 2 kicks off with the once-lost dual op-amp Big Muff 2 design that was recently unearthed and unleashed on the market. The basic version of this pedal features Volume, Tone, Sustain and Blend controls along with a bass boost switch, and it’s easy to dial in a great tone. It’s fantastic if you need something basic with a fair amount of tone-sculpting. But the Deluxe version goes all-out.
The first thing you’ll want to do is set the Input switch to the appropriate setting (0dB is best for passive basses, -10dB for active or hotter pickups). On the output end, you have the option of a regular 1/4″ output, a low impedance XLR DI output of the effected signal and an additional buffered 1/4″ output just for the direct, uneffected signal. This is great if you’re working with multiple signal chains because you can send a clean sound to one amp and a filthy one to another.
Like the regular Bass Big Muff Pi 2, the Deluxe has those Sustain, Tone, Blend (which controls the ratio of the wet/dry mix) and Volume knobs, but we also get a few other very useful additions. The first is the Gate knob, which gives you the ability to tame the hazy, fuzzy, growly artefacts that you’ll find creeping into your signal at higher Sustain levels. It can be used as a simple noise-scrubbing tool or cranked up high to give you more of a choppy staccato effect.
The most exciting addition to the Deluxe, however, is the Crossover section. This gives you dedicated High Pass Filter and Low Pass Filter controls to really focus your bass sound. The HPF applies to the wet signal feeding the fuzz circuit, while the LPF acts on the dry signal only – together, you can use these to strategically carve out a place for your bass in a crowded mix. For instance, if the lowest low-end frequencies are clashing with the kick drum, you can effectively lift up your fuzz sound so that part of the band mix is no longer crowded. If your high end is getting smeared by cymbals or a particularly fizzy guitar tone, you can drop its highest levels down while still maintaining the overall character you dialled in with the Tone knob.
The Deluxe has two footswitches: Effect and Crossover. This really opens up the potential of the pedal for using the Crossover as an effect in its own right. You can even use it as a very dramatic ‘telephone’ effect by zapping out all of the low end and keeping just the highs for a feature moment in a song and then returning to your full ‘set for kill’ sound. And it’s here in the footswitch section that the Deluxe really distinguishes itself as not just a ‘tone generator’ pedal but as a performance one. The two footswitches are actually soft-touch units that operate as latching ‘on/off’ switches at a tap, or become automatically momentary if you step on them for a little longer. This means you can dip into or out of effect mode in the heat of the moment, and it feels much more intuitive and connected than the regular ‘step to turn on, step to turn off’ option. It turns this from a pedal that you play through to a pedal that you play with.
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