GEAR
PEDAL SNAPSHOT � Phil Traina
LA Sound Design: BB-01 $ 195 Street
If you ' ve never heard of Dave Phillips of LA Sound design, you should look him up. Dave builds some of the coolest pedalboards and rack systems around. LA sound design caters to the who ' s who of musicians from around the world. Those of you who have spent hours in their room trying to figure out the best order and placement of your favorite pedals on the allotted space, know the struggle. The struggle for perfection transitioning to art. Dave has the ability to make a box of random pedals into a masterpiece. Meticulously making cables and routing the wire in just the right way; real beauty is what comes to mind. As a board builder extraordinaire, Dave has had across his desk pretty much every pedal one could think of. Dave would tell you that one of the most important parts of any pedal chain is the buffering and / boosting. So who better than Dave to design a super useful and great sounding booster buffer?
The Model BB-01 takes all of the features you could ask for in a buffer / booster unit and puts them into one box. The topography is pretty simple: a gain knob for up to + 15db, a vintage / modern button, and an internal dip switch to control if the buffer is always on or not. Lastly, the stomp. I was running the buffer / boost by
itself with 50ft of cable in total. I wanted to see how this box reacted with my straight guitar tone by itself first. With the pedal off my tone was overall pretty good, but very rolled off. Remember, I have a super long cable run. I was plugged into the newest Milkman creation: the 50watt Sideman with my Bill Crook paisley tele-style. With the gain at unity in the vintage setting it brought me back to where I started with a shorter cable run. There was a slight mid scoop, and the buffer adds a bit to the lows and highs as most buffers will, but overall it was very transparent. In modern setting, it added a little bit of sparkle to the top end, but not enough to say it colored my original tone in any way. In the modern setting, I noticed the fidelity to bounce out from the amp a little more there was a slight mid bump. I want to say the tone was slightly more in your face or hi-fi. I switched to run it at 12v and the results were that much better. The overall tone was bigger. Personally, I would always run it that way. Diming the gain knob, the + 15db was enough to get the amp to break up nicely, but not high gain by any means. I moved on to place an overdrive after the BB-01, and hitting another pedal I was able to get tons of gain and added sustain. It still retained the original OD tone, just bumped it up by hitting the front end a bit harder. Placing the BB-01 after my OD was equally great. It gave me a louder version of my original tone. I can see this pedal used equally in either configuration. It works equally well, just different.
The BB-01 is great for the player who enjoys what a buffer does to a pedal-chain, but also for the player who would rather compensate with a boost. Dave and LA Sound Design has you on both fronts. If you are looking for a simple, full featured buffer / boost unit, the BB- 01 may be the ticket.
www. lasounddesign. net
Proto Guitars: Proto Fuzz
$ 220 Street( Pre-Order price of $ 200 with $ 100 deposit)
It’ s not very often that I get to review a“ prototype” prior to the release of the actual product, so I’ m pretty excited that I got my hands on this pedal at all. As I am writing this, there are only 10 units out in the world – most in the hands of session elites for R & D. Hopefully that number will increase soon, because this pedal is a ton of fun! So, what IS this mystery pedal? It’ s the Proto Guitar’ s Fuzz!
Who is Proto, and where did they come from? Proto Guitars was started in southern California as a custom pickup company by Howard Ulyate and Matt Chait, currently living in Nashville. Branching out from their usual pickup offerings, The Proto Fuzz was created in conjunction with DIY legend Joe Gagan out of New Mexico after three years of searching for someone brave enough to take on Matt’ s unique fuzz quest. When he first explained the concept of this pedal to me, I wondered why it hadn ' t been done before.
So many of our favorite classic guitar tones were achieved with a fuzz pedal( often a Fuzz Face or Tonebender) set to 10 while the player used the volume knob on his guitar to find all of those magical in-between tones. Watch Clapton, Hendrix, Gilmour, Page, or Ronson – they rarely take their hands too far away from that volume control! Hendrix’ s cleaner-than-clean Strat tones were almost always created with a fuzz pedal. Weird, right? continued on page 46
40 Jul � Aug 2017 CollectibleGuitar. com