Description
Billy Sheehan’s signature dirt box already had a cult following among bassists who need grit without losing the bottom. The Deluxe version cranks that formula further, delivering noticeably more gain than the original while adding a Boost footswitch that kicks the Drive circuit into extreme territory the moment a chorus demands it. That boost level is dialed in internally via trim pot, so you set your ceiling once and stomp on it live.
One of the sneakier upgrades here is player-swappable op-amps. The pedal ships with a standard 8-pin dual inline op-amp, but it’s socketed rather than soldered, so pulling the bottom plate lets you drop in a different chip for a completely different flavor of drive. EBS keeps a list of compatible chips on their site if you want to go chip-hunting.
Flip on the inverted phase and you’ll hear a real jump in low-end weight compared to the standard Drive pedal — useful when your distorted tone needs to still anchor the band. The Clean Loop and Drive Loop from the original are still here, letting you route a clean signal to an octave pedal for tighter tracking, or drop an EQ into the Drive path to sculpt your distortion before it hits the amp.
There’s also a built-in compressor with Off/Mid/High settings that keeps note definition intact under heavy gain and smooths the transition between clean and dirty tones. Two internal trim pots let you tweak Threshold and the Mid compression amount to taste.
- Drive – sets how hard the distortion engine works
- Tone – shapes the character of the drive sound
- Level – sets the drive output level
- Clean – sets your clean signal level
Runs on a 9V DC battery or an EBS AD-9+ Power Supply (sold separately).
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