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