We love it when a pedal works equally for both guitar and bass, and today’s pedal is exactly one of those rare beasts. The El Oso Bass Distortion from Heavy Electronics adds some great dirt and crunch to both instruments, but somehow manages to walk the fine line between the two without overpowering either one. This doesn’t happen very often in the pedal world, and we’re excited to see what it can do for us.
Aside from the usual Level and Gain controls knobs, found on many, many fuzz and distortion pedals, is a Mix knob. Why is this a game-changer, you ask? Well, a lot of these types of pedals can be downright overbearing, sonically, and push so much that you lose your original tone in a wash of overdriven mess. Now, those sounds can be great, and useful in certain musical styles, but having the option to blend your clean signal with the distorted one is pure bliss, and opens up more possibilities for how you want to use a pedal such as this.
In other news, the El Oso Bass Distortion also features a JFET input signal buffer that helps match up with the wide variety of impedances found in both guitar and bass pickups, making it sound incredible when using both instruments. Using the Mix and Gain knobs together in various configurations also results in a multitude of sonic revelations, and is a blast to sit down and mess with for hours, searching for the perfect complimentary tone to your guitar/bass and amp setup.
The model we used for today’s review is the older one, which uses a bigger enclosure, but still sounds wicked awesome, and is still very pedalboard-friendly, though the newer one is even smaller. Made with high-quality components by hand in Minnesota, true bypass switching and a single point mounted PCB, the El Oso is a monster distortion pedal, using that open voicing to work well with guitar, even though it may be geared a little bit more towards bass, which we dig. Check out some more rad gear on the Heavy Electronics website, too, you won’t be disappointed.
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