Basic Audio 2020 and/or 2021 Tourbox Review Thread

[Chankgeez]

Listened to that when you uploaded it last night.

I think the Fuzz Rite sounded best for that Melvins style. Although, the Kay also worked really well.

[Pete]

Listened to that when you uploaded it last night.

I think the Fuzz Rite sounded best for that Melvins style. Although, the Kay also worked really well.

Agreed! When I watched the video after putting the clips together, I was even thinking that the Fuzz Rite was the most authentic choice, if you wanted to SOMEWHAT capture Buzz's modern tones. It has a beautiful crunch and definition that I really love. It's the best "all-rounder" of the four for riffing, and I'm all about riffing.

The Kay Fuzz is beautiful for sludgey grungey stuff, but I'd say has better definition and clarity than most octave fuzzes! This pedal has a really beautiful, rich tone to me.

The Low Volt sounds amazing for a lot of the more "playful" Melvins songs, particularly where it's mostly single notes, with songs like Sky Pup and Goose Freight Train.

And of course with the Pendulum, it's so much fun for me to hear riffs in a completely new light, with absurd, disgusting, extreme, filtery, vomiting duck-type tones. The setting I used in that last video is one of my favorites. Love the Pendulum.

They're all great, but my favorites from most to least would probably be:

-Pendulum
-Kay Fuzz
-Fuzz Rite
-Low Volt

[Chankgeez]

Yep, the only pedal that didn't work so well in that style's the Pendulum.

I'm sure with enough time it could be dialed in to sound decent though…

and flouncingfleasbag now has the tourbox!

More to come soon!

EDIT, I think flouncingfleasbag wanted me to post this:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUIrolORx6M[/youtube]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUIrolORx6M

[Chankgeez]

Basic Audio Toirbox:
. Just arrived today.
I'm gonna post impressions of each pedal separately.

Low Volt-
Love it. The sound I've been searching for for a long time. Broken and hitting a wall and shattering, yet still clear.

Tried it with three guitars so far.

Humbuckers- as described above.

Single coil Teisco pickup- crushing bit singing out thru the splatter. Somehow woody .there's a lot of control to be had bias the Body and Saturation knobs. Everything reacts to the other. I love it cranked up and I cam ride the waves of beautiful chaos . Had a blast just flowing with the feedback. And then, blowing everything apart with a high note and a double stop bend.

Danelectro- lip stick pickups. - pinches a little harder, more cutting as expected but still retains clarity. Maybe even a bot more clear and more of everything. I do like the slightly more subtle single coil , maybe it has a different flavor in the body, but the Dano sings. Bridge pick up is so hyped. I cant wait to try this in my very dense band sounds.

Tried stackungbwith a ton of Fuzz and Boosts and it enhanced everything I thru at it before and after. What a champ!

Buying one tonight.
The first pedal I grabbed at random from the tourbox. I'm a little taken aback, the Low Volt IS THE SOUND!

I'm so finicky, so I am so psyched about this pedal. All the knobs and switches sounded great. Stick on the one sound I got out of it though. Just melting and sting and cutting thru like a knife.

[Pete]

Yep, the only pedal that didn't work so well in that style's the Pendulum.

I'm sure with enough time it could be dialed in to sound decent though…

[v=jUIrolORx6M

I mean, I wouldn't say that! I think the Pendulum sounded amazing, and SICK to play heavy riffs with, honestly.

It's interesting how much flouncingfleabag likes the Low Volt. That one was my least favorite, personally, but I still really enjoyed it.

[Pete]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-E2ltGkx0I[/youtube]


The last video I made from this tourbox is up! Pest Tattern! I loved this pedal. I'm very happy this one got thrown into the tourbox. I pretty much loved every setting on this pedal.

[Seance]

Next up from the iloveuzz tour boxes the Pendulum.

First impression is very good. It takes some time to dial in, but there are so many sounds in it. First off- the knobs are not labeled and there is a switch. Click the switch down and you have a cool fuzz that sounds pretty good. Switch up, however, is the thing that makes this pedal very cool. Switch up enters you into a world of broken sounds. High notes become bass notes, or, they become synthy tones. Or they are just mean, nasty, or they are almost not there. Super gated. Low notes seem to work, at least cut thru, throughout all knob twisting. Yes it pushes a subwoofer, not fully, but it can. So the knobs- extremely are interactive. Not like a pedal someone says is interactive. These knobs are life or death...hahaH...or your ability to hear a note. The pedal lets you tweak it so starved sounds do come thru and how much of a tail do you want? How much chaos is in your heart. How much are you willing to let the pedal dictate? Fun as heck.

Again played with a Humbuckers, single coil and lipstick. This pedal is definitely the best with a humbucker, in my opinion. Seems to open up, get wider and more responsive. Forgot to mention that it seems to really, while set for full madness, respond very well to play styles.

Overall- switch down =regular fuzz, a good one but nothing mind blowing .

Switch up: world of fun. Completely starved and gated to full on smash the state type of soinds.very cool. A lot of very cool, wild sounds. But you could also reign it in.

Flouncingfleasbag seems to be posting on another forum about Tour Box fuzz thoughts.

[Chankgeez]

Thanks, Seance!

Yeah, flouncingfleasbag is a TGPer who asked to be included in this tourbox. I copy & pasted his first review, but hadn't had a chance to bring his second one over here yet.

Tour Box fuzz thoughts.

That, incidentally, is gonna be the name of our next band together!

[Seance]

Tour Box fuzz thoughts.

That, incidentally, is gonna be the name of our next band together!

Or maybe the title of the first album?

Band name: The Fallen Randy Quaints.

[Chankgeez]

Here's his review of the Pest Tattern:

I found a lot of sounds I liked in this pedal but every one of them involved the OSC switch active, otherwise I felt unengaged, but OSC rocking was really cool.


The other two switches Chaos and Noise left very flat to me without the Oscillation in play, as well. Across the board on whatever style pickup guitar I chose this held true. However, once osc was pumping the other switches added juice.


The most important observation I have is that across all pick up types I found my favorite sounds with the gain rolled off healthily. I found gain turned up to be too tiny and muddy, but rolled back past twelve things could be heard.


Humbuckers- sounded best with only the osc switch. And sounded sick! Other switches detracted or didn't do much.

Single coil- all switches are cool. Noise the least of which but chaos is good stuff; a tone change really- a little more action with the oscillations but ultimately in a band mix I think that's mush.

Lipstick-
Here's where every switch was very distinct. Chaos actually deepens the sound; bites more and cuts harder. Noise works in a similar fashion. Toggling between noth on and one or the other was fun. I think it comes down to taste or need for a song but both made noticable changes to the vibe in awesome ways. I think Chaos should be named movement. Noise is more like crispy.

Overall- love it. Bias knob is the central mover for sculpting sounds. Definitely not the most wild osc fuzz I've played but it has a unique sound, it knows what it is, and I could find endless uses if I had one. Lots of fun spit and movement.

[Chankgeez]

This thing's still goin'!

I meant to post this last week, Flatscan's (slightly edited) first impressions:

"I played hooky for 45 minutes and tested them all briefly. I didn't tweak every knob but I tweaked most and I flipped all the toggle switches.

Bottom line: they all appear to work as expected. I really enjoyed each of them.

Some very preliminary impressions:

The Fuzzrite is a great example of that classic circuit. [I'm a big fan.] The added "Basic Audio" tweakability (toggles) is super useful and toneful.

The Kay Fuzz is similarly excellent. The assorted toggles are super useful and add material tweakability vs. the classic circuit. I really liked being able to bring the octave in and out of the circuit. John really does Super Fuzz-esque circuits especially well. I would love to see him render the octave toggle as a footswitch (similar to the Fjord Odin). I have no idea if this is feasible or not though. While I love the treadle and the assorted diode options on my Monster-K, my initial impression is that the toggle switches make the BA variant much more useful overall (easier to put in an array of contexts).

The Low Volt kills. I'm not sure how to put my impression into words yet but I had a lot of fun with it (rosin, cello, etc.).

The Pendulum is deep and fun. I'm going to have to really dig in here. I like that clip that you posted on SF a while back and will search out those tones.

The 5th pedal (need to research) is wild and crazy. I worked my way through all of the toggles and knobbies. The result was mayhem - absolute, total, mayhem. It rewards simple playing and held notes (fun crackle and pitch-shifting). The random portamento effect was/is lots of fun. Was this one built by John? It delivered Fuzz Factory-esque noise ."

[Chankgeez]

More from Flatscan:

https://soundcloud.com/user-452163985/low-volt

I'm sure soundcloud links're totally fucked here still, but I'll try to embed anyway:




My rig for the posted clip is:

PAFs -> Low Volt -> Modulated Analog Delay -> Maz 18 (volume at 6; Voxy EQ) -> Flint Plate in the loop.

My initial impression of the The Low Volt remains. It evokes cello and grippy rosin-type tones. I really dig it and am giving serious thought to picking up this pedal.

Relative to the other Tourbox pedals, this is arguably the most accessible of the bunch. It handles both chords and single-note lines without the need to alter playing technique meaningfully.

The controls are straightforward and work as you might expect. The wildcard is the pinch control.

It seems to afford some compression and/or very light gating (not exactly sure what is happening circuit-wise). I found that I left it mostly engaged with humbuckers and mostly disengaged with low output singles. It definitely adds meaningful usable tonal functionality. I would love to hear from John per what the pinch actually does to improve my mental model of the pedal.

While I absolutely love the idea of starve controls generally, here I didn't get much from it although I'm reasonably certain that I would get much more with additional experimentation. I did test extreme settings.

The Low Volt worked well with all my guitars (low-output singles, P90s, PAFs) and amps (Maz 18 and DRRI - AST is in the shop).

For now, I like it best with PAFs but again, I'm sure that my perception would evolve with increasing experience with the pedal.

[Dandolin]

Finally bumping the thread with my impressions of the tourbox fuzzes, and my humble apologies to John and the rest of the folks on the box for taking so damn long to do it. Life has been dealing me dirty for the last year in a succession of blows I never would have expected, and I freely admit I am way off my game. In fact, I'm worried my heart just isn't in it anymore, but I can say unequivocally that the time I spent with the tourbox was pure fuzzy joy and sorely needed at the time. I have been swamped since hitting bottom earlier this summer though, and scrambling to catch up with too many loose ends that I've dropped, so organizing and writing this has been way harder than it normally would be for me, not that it even rises to the high standards set by the cogent and helpful remarks, and ass-kicking demos, already shared in this thread. So with that out of the way, I hope the following remarks are useful in some way, if only to convey my gratitude for having had access to these fuzzy nuggets and maybe to echo some of the points made earlier.



OK, without further ado....

Low Volt:

All in all this was a surprise to me - I had listened to early demos and thought it was just a splat machine (not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm pretty well fixed for those).

Turns out this had a metric tonne of range....

Some impressions:

STARVE right, SAT full down, FUZZ low - 10 o'clock or below, Body 11 o'clock = surprise, sizzly, chewy dynamic OD without the necessity of messing with the volume controlon the guitar.

Pinch is pretty subtle.

All knobs at noon = normal, extra normal.

All of the above was beyond my initial pre-conceptions regarding this one, and very welcome.

SAT & FUZZ 2 o'clock, BODY all the way up = singing lead tone with that great feeling of lift you normally need a cranked amp for. Killer app right there.

It ate up a treble boost w/ the FUZZ and SAT down a bit - sharp, articulate.

And this all before you get to the splat, which is, well, there in all its varied glory. I think I had written this off as a softer-edged, mushier Bye Bias (cruel prejudice, and probably not even warranted by any circuit similarities), but I was wrong - I think those two could easily co-exist and complement each other in the same setup.

Pendulum:

First impression - tremendous interactivity with the controls. I had gone in a little concerned based on demos I'd heard that the Pendulum wouldn't really get as crazy as I wanted it to, but I definitely found some great sweet spots where I had it speaking in tongues. Some background: I was a late starter with oscillating fuzzes because I found a lot of the early ones I tried to just sound pinched and nasal most of the time and the oscillation wasn't what I wanted - just loud whoops without a lot of movement. Later I got a LAL 88 that began my conversion and I was fully ready for the 3MS/4MS Noise Swash and the Touell Skarn Strakal Brulu when they came into my life. So I've come to expect lots of movement and variation in the oscfuzzes I keep. Still later, I learned the trick with some of these to ride the edge of oscillation for some great vocal tones. Well, I can happily say the Pendulum holds its own with my big boy howlers, and has the capacity to get subtle without falling into the pinched nasal trap, plus I just straight up appreciated the non-oscillating mode as a fully satisfying fuzz on its own.

Loved the crazy range of tones you could pull with the QUENCY knob while oscillating.

FREE has huge range and usefulness both in oscillating and non-oscillating modes.

FREE and QUENCY really work together in oscillating mode, but VOLUME and TWEAK are also highly influential, which I didn't expect at first, and of course gate is super effective in osc modes.

Kay:

So, the Kay circuit had become a little bit of a problem for me well before this tourbox - I had acquired a couple of clones of the fuzz circuit and was really underwhelmed - they felt like anemic Super Fuzzes without the extended highs and lows and raw aggression that make that circuit work for me when I want the fuzz wall. I had sort of come to the conclusion that the special sauce I was hearing from the OGs on recordings, beyond whatever studio processing, was flowing more from the wah circuit or at least from the combination of the wah and fuzz together and so I had largely moved on to other fuzzy pastures before the Kay came up on the list for this tourbox. Not that the brilliant 1/2 gain switch on John's Super Fuzz and its implications for the possible appeal of a lower gain SF variant escaped my notice mind you....

Anyway - the BA Kay well exemplifies what I see as the core BA ethos - take classic circuits/tones, pretty much nail them, and then tack on extra range that leads you to new places, throw in a coupla problem-solving tweaks, make sure the front of your amp will be well pummeled, and still come in without making the user (well this user anyway) feel like the control scheme is cluttered or inexplicable.

So how'd it sound? Well, the nasal thing is in there - it's part and parcel of this octave circuit from what I can gather. But the fat switch comes to the rescue - I found flicking it down ideal for cutting the nasal edge on octave settings and wish every Kay fuzz variant had that one simple tweak.

I much preferred the diode switch up (diodes in?) with the octave switch up, especially if I wasn't cranking the gain (even though it does seem to cut a lot of bass) - I found the tone pretty dull elsewise.

But when playing with the fat up/octave up, flipping the diode down (out?) really helped "integrate the octave tone with the fuzz more which was a cool tone.

Also, although I wouldn't normally think about hitting an octave-up circuit with a treble boost, this turned out to sound great with the Kay - nudging it a little closer towards the Super Fuzz.

As with all BA fuzzes, I always take some time to twist and flip in search of tones that aren't normally part of the core circuit's brief - in this case I found a rad sizzly tone for lofi intros or even better, doubling with a fuller sounding dirt tone - fuzz full up, oct up, tone full down, fat down, diode up - it was totally counter-intuitive, but it turned my mind from thinking I'd just stick with my BA Super to thinking I'd be putting the Kay on my short list to eventually replace my well-loved Boss Xtortion.

Last but not least, the Fuzz Rite.

I'll admit I've always had a soft-spot for Fuzzrites (and Maestro FZ1s and Companions and such) because I love that raw, protean garage rock thing. But as I continued along my fuzzy journey, I got more and more distracted by fuzzes that were closer to the fuzzstortion end of the continuum -- big muffs and buzzarounds and even MKII tonebenders, including a lot of the rarer circuits BA has done over the years . I had a good time and I don't regret a minute of that journey, but after getting into a protracted period of corksniffing MKI tonebenders I started thinking maybe I had been away from home long enough, so In ordered a custom Maestro Eff Zee Wan from John, and *poof* most of my fuzz GAS died right there. Still, I did make room for a few more - including a fantastic Dot I just couldn't say no to, but I've mostly stayed happily in my protofuzz daze. So, while a Fuzz Rite might have seemed a bit prosaic to some of the folks scanning the BA lineup and handicapping tourbox inclusions, I was keyed in on the Fuzz Rite right from the start. And did I set myself for overhype disappointment? Hell naw - straight from the first line of my scribbled notes as I first began what became a three-hour fuzzrite-induced timeloss event: "TEXT switch & knob give so! much! goodness!" Pretty articulate, yeah? More: "Loved how nasty it got w/FUZZ up & TEXT switch in middle - great dynamics!" "TEXT right and FUZZ full up was beefy! (and noisy!)" I was definitely in my exclamation feels, lol....

An additional note: "pretty nice w/treble boost - overall, again, dynamics!!!!"

I know, I know - beefy is not a word that usually gets associated with fuzzrites, and I've had words about that with doubters on other boards (re: the Dot, specifically). Maybe I'm caught up in relativity here, but I do feel like John has packed a little bit of beef in there at certain settings. Not pointing fingers, but I have to periodically remind myself that the standard fuzzrite's "gain" control isn't controlling gain, but fading between one- and two-transistor gain-stages, with lots of o-o-p chewiness in the central mix zone - but basically, a lot of the common conception of the fuzz rite seems to be a result of the "crank it and wail" approach. As I'm sure most of the savants in a thread like this will appreciate, there is actually a fair bit of range in the circuit, and while it ain't ever gonna be a BMP or even a fuzz face, it'll get into some areas that approach fuzz facery at times, and it shares the sensitivity to guitar volume control manipulation found in the fuzz face (as does the Bosstone - another circuit that can range from reedy to somewhat beefier or even fuzzstortionesque depending on how it's tuned and dialed in on the knobs). Of course, the roll-back is a hell of a lot spittier and more artifact-laden in a fuzzrite, but I find it useful for less intense passages. One of the things I loved about the Dot was that it was easy to set up a tone that was essentially clean when I fingerpicked arpeggios and then roared into full fuzz glory when I smashed the strings with my full hand - the Fuzz Rite does that trick perfectly. I definitely appreciated lg's comments about the comparison between this build and OGs - I got to compare John's Bosstone take to an OG of Chank's and got it close enough to stump all but the golden-eared cable swapper. Yep, check - another BA classic that bottles the OG essence and lets you take it one step beyond.

[Chankgeez]

Wow, quite the write-up.

[goroth]

Fantastic write up