A Fine Line: Darkglass Ultra Pedals
image by Sarah Windisch
If you say the name “Darkglass” around a bass player, especially one of a heavier genre persuasion, I hope you have a mop and a bucket to clean up all the drool. Pavlov trained dogs, Finnish dark wizards trained bass players.*
Darkglass have created pedals up and down the price spectrum, never once putting quality behind any other characteristic. Just a brief look at their Artists page shows Alex Webster (Cannibal Corpse), Tony Levin (King Crimson), Bryan Beller (Dethklok, Steve Vai), Orion (Behemoth), Steve DiGorgio (Death, Testament, every other metal band ever), Matt Freeman (Rancid, Charger), and many many others use Darkglass to achieve their specific sound. It would be easier to list the bass players who don’t have a Darkglass pedal on their board somewhere than to list a fraction of the players that do.
I was sent four Darkglass pedals from the Ultra series (Microtubes B7K, Vintage, Alpha Omega, and Mictrotubes X) and given the task of summing them up. No mean task. For context, I’ve been a “less is more” player when it comes to pedals thus far into my bass journey. I own exactly one overdrive pedal, and it has four knobs. The least complicated of the Darkglass Ultra pedals I was sent has, conservatively, five times more knobs, sliders, switches, and buttons than that. This was, put simply, like going from the menu choice at a New York street meat vendor (“Yes, I’d like a dog with mustard and sauerkraut, so everything you offer.”) to the menu of choices on the NCC 1701-D Enterprise. (“This is our replicator. It can make literally anything.”) Spoiled for choice is one way to put my position. Utterly overwhelmed is another.
When I think of Darkglass I think of brütal tönes, so that was where I started my Darkglass investigation. I figured the Bypass/Clean portion of the pedal was just there because reasons, but the Distortion pedal was where It Was. I was wrong. While all of these have amazing distorted tones, the clean channels they have are remarkable and beautiful. Some though, like the first on our tour, are not build for clean and pretty.
I grabbed the Alpha Omega Ultra, plugged in my Geddy Jazz, plugged it all into my Orange Crush, leveled out all those pretty red sliders, put the knobs all at twelve o’clock, and went for it. And I immediately felt like the most badass, crushing bass player in the world. It’s just the way these things sound, even if you don’t know how to EQ something, even if you’re blindly guessing at knob positions and just riding the E string while you twist things this way and that, slide things to zero and to eleven, you sound good. Until you don’t. I noticed this more with the Alpha Omega Ultra than the other three, but these pedals will not hesitate to bite you, thrash you around, then throw you into a tree, and then use your bass for a scratching post. There is almost no warning in the Alpha Omega before it goes completely bonkers and your tone goes from cool and mean to your guitar player shaking you and shouting, “I can’t hear what note that was are you playing a lot of notes or just one what’s happening!”
“It’s such a fine line,” as a wise man once said, “between stupid and clever.” Darkglass would like to welcome you to that line. These pedals should come with warning labels like vodka commercials do. “Please enjoy responsibly.” I let one of my small children come into my practice space and mess with the knobs so I could play using both hands and hear all the differences as they changed and by the time he was done he had grown a full beard and had a dragon tattooed on his chest. That’s not normal. That’s the Darkglass Experience.
I moved on to the Microtubes X Ultra. To give you an idea of how easy it is to get wildly different tones out of these pedals, in my initial personal ranking this one came in dead last. That first night I found it hard to dial in, I felt I couldn’t get a powerful enough tone, I was frustrated by the tiny High Pass and Low Pass knobs, and it just wasn’t giving me the fizz that the Alpha Omega had.
But now, if I was given $450 and told I had I choose one of the four, this is the one I’d have. I’d waffle for a moment between this and the B7K, but I think this is the one I’d end up bringing home with me. It’s also the one I used on our “Five Bass Players, One Song” video over on the YouTube channel. If you haven’t caught that yet give it a watch, it’s a very cool experiment.
You have to cage the Alpha Omega Ultra, and even then when it is controlled it kinda feels like it wants to kill you and eat your face. You can actually tame the Microtubes X Ultra and, once you’re familiar with what 500Hz means and where the High Drive sounds best blended with the Low Level, you can make it do tricks for you. It’ll still kill you if you let it, it’s still a wild animal, but it plays much nicer in civilized company.
Before I get any further there’s one thing about this pedal I’d like to address. Darkglass- I’m talking to you now. You know the High Pass/Low Pass knobs you got on there? The teeny tiny ones that have an atom’s width marker gently nuzzled into them that no one on Geddy Lee’s green Earth can see or feel? The ones surrounded by things that light up like the warning lights on my car when I go over 75? Why don’t those light up? If I did buy this pedal the first thing I’d do, before I downloaded all the wonderful plug-ins and texted both my friends, the very first thing I would do is get a White-Out pen and paint that tiny divot white so I could actually see where it was pointing.
Following the Mictrotubes X Ultra we have what I think of as the most traditional of the quartet- the Vintage Ultra. I felt immediately at home with the Vintage Ultra pedal. And, for once in this whole experiment, I understood this pedal and what its purpose was. It didn’t want to kill me. It didn’t want to impress me. The Vintage Ultra wanted to please me.
As I mentioned at the top, I play through an Orange Crush 50 practice amp. I also own the Orange Terror 500 head. I adore the Orange sound and it speaks to me deep down in my black bass player soul. I am a fanboy through and through for that particular sound and the Vintage Ultra, to me, wants to be that sound. It wants to sound classic and tough. It doesn’t want to scare your mom, but it does think it’s funny if it does. It’s not a wild tiger or a mad wolverine or a pissed off Great White trapped in a cage. It’s Mufasa**, chilling on Pride Rock, watching the kids go wild, knowing that when it comes down to it, if you really want to come at the classic king, it has a roar that will send you tear assing back to the elephant graveyard.
The only reason I wouldn’t take this pedal is because I own Orange gear for the reason this pedal exists. I like this sound and I, personally, already have it. If I didn’t have the Orange head this would go on my board immediately for the times when I wanted the vintage, classic feel but didn’t own the proper head to get it. I like products that do what they say on the box and while Alpha Omega sounds cool and biblical and Microtubes X and B7K sound futuristic, Vintage sounds like “Do you want to sound classic? This does that.” (If the Alpha Omega were named like this, in keeping with the biblical theme, it would be named Sodom Gomorrah.)
The fourth and final pedal on my Darklglass Tour is the Microtubes B7K Ultra. Remember how a few paragraphs ago I said I’d have the Microtubes X Ultra if given the choice, even though I’d waffle back and forth between that and this? I lied. I’d have this. Maybe. Look, I’m still not sure, they’re both so good. I wouldn’t wheelie either one off the back of my motorcycle, is what I’m saying.
In its favor over the X Ultra, the B7K doesn’t have EQ sliders. I realize that this is an extremely specific reason, but I like knobs better than sliders. To me the labels Lo Mids and Hi Mids are clearer than 250Hz, 500Hz, 1.5kHz, and 3kHz. It’s simpler and I am a simple gear guy. Remember, the overdrive pedal I currently own only has four knobs. I also really like how much the Attack and Grunt switches change the character of the pedal. You can get back and forth between very different tones very easily. I mean, not during a song unless you’ve got a super dedicated roadie/best friend, but still, a flick of a switch is easy.
The Mictrotubes B7K Ultra might be made up of the best parts of the others. If we want to stay with the wild animal metaphor I pretty much beat to death by bringing a cartoon lion into it, the B7K Ultra could be an animal found on the island of Dr. Moreau, but an alternate island where the experiments having gone wonderfully right instead of horribly wrong.*** I found it to be the easiest to get multiple “I Love This” tones out of, but it was also quick to “Ew, I don’t like that at all.” Like with all the fiddly little knobs and switches, it took me a while to dial in something I really loved, but when I did the comfort food brought it home. And that’s not to say I didn’t find a bunch of tones I liked. And that’s kind of the thing with all of these pedals. It’s easy to find something good. With the billions of options at your fingertips you will find something cool, something that works for the sound you are hearing in your head. But it’s hard to find The Tone. The sound that Peter Criss told us about in" “Beth”. There are so many options that if you’re like me you will have the overwhelming urge to turn the knob just a little bit more and you’ll miss it. If you do find It, be smart enough to take a picture of exactly what the pedal looks like with your phone, because you will bump those knobs setting up and then all is lost.
source- wifflegif.com
Overall, the pedal you buy is completely dependent on what you’re looking for and who you are as a player. You want to rip off heads with your bass tone’s bite and you’re most concerned with aggression? The Alpha Omega Ultra is your pedal. You want that old school sound? The Vintage Ultra is for you. You want to fight with yourself over a modern but not too modern with a really nice mix of options tone? The two Microtubes are perfect for you. But here’s the other thing- The Vintage will kill you if you dial it in right and the Alpha Omega will purr like a kitten. It’s just not what they want to do. The scope and range of these four pedals is absolutely staggering. Buying one does not tie you to any one sound. It turns out the Darkglass Sound is actually anything you can imagine.
And that’s before I even think about what it would be like to have more than one on my pedal board.
Thanks to zZounds for sending me the pedals to write this and for giving me the time to live with them for a while and get to know them before I wrote a thing.
*Now if somebody could just train drummers. What’s that Pavlov guy’s email?
**That’s right, a Disney reference in a Darkglass review. Your move, Bass Player Magazine.
*** How’s that for a pull quote? “Like the Island of Doctor Moreau, but in a good way.” -Doug Robertson, The Bass Channel dot net
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Doug Robertson is the editor of The Bass Blog, the blog component of The Bass Channel, your one stop YouTube channel for all things bass. His number one is a Mexican Geddy Lee Signature Jazz and his boomer is a BEAD tuned T-Bird. Find books by Doug here. If you’re interested in contributing to The Bass Blog please reach out to Doug at doug@thebasschannel.net. We would love to hear from you.
