Immo

There are some boutique pedals that offer various ways of blending-in the dry signal (both Eras and Ages by Walrus or Mandrake by KMA), but Blue Colander's approach is slightly different, probably because Juliusz always has bass players in mind. Both of his additional knobs make the pedals perfect for bass players indeed. Clockwise rotation of Jolt in Doppel adds undistorded LOWS to the mix, which not only prevents the loss of lower frequencies, but also magically emphasizes the oomph of all the dirt instead of pushing it to the background. Range on Crooked Axis seemingly does the same but works the opposite way - dimed it offers the actual amount of clean lows and turning it counterclockwise removes the low frequencies from the distortion (but not from the mix).

Apparently it has a PCB the size of the whole interior, but the actual circuit is the same size as in small one, leaving a vast empty board which looks comically weird.

For sure, it does sound great and I recommend it to people who ask about a good improved RAT for bass. If I were a RAT guy, I'd grab that pedal, too. Maybe I will one day, though I'm quite satisfied with my dirt section as of now.

Hats, bandanas and wigs off to Juliusz, owner, proprietor and pedal design guru of Blue Colander fame. His pedals are truly unique, boutique takes on famous, infamous and obscure pedals - not just clones, but improvements, rooted in great research, hours spent bent over a breadboard, ceaseless sourcing of components and painstakingly designing physical layouts that are great looking - and, obviously, even greater sounding. So far I have two pedals made by BC. Doppel is a Foxx Tone Machine adapted for doom and gloom. I have bought Doppel after falling in love with octave fuzz used with bass for that creepy, occult rock-style tone that immediately pushed all of the great-but-honestly-overused Muff stuff from the highest step of the podium for me. I wanted to get an Orange Fur Coat, but realized BC makes a similar pedal with an extra control (Jolt) that adds clean lows to the mix without compromising any of the dirt, so I had to get that one instead. Sadly, I literally bought the last brand new one ever available. Crooked Axis is a perfect "If I Could Only Have One Dirt Pedal" kind of deal - after all BC calls it "Multipurpose Gain Device". In December I realized I wanted a pedal to be put first in the chain, one that does a clean boost, tube-ish OD (either for separate Sabbath-esque blues use, or to push other dirt pedals), and even fuzz-like tones when dimed. I was dead set on getting EQD Blumes but all but one online stores around were sold out, and Thomann's shipping costs made it barely cheaper than Blue Colander's Crooked Axis which can do the same things and then some, and then even more, so I went with that. No regrets. The great thing is that Doppel can sound a bit cold on its own but Crooked Axis adds warmth and chugs to the tone without compromising its creepy sound. Here's a poor quality sample created on the fly and recorded with a phone (please do ignore the atrocious fret noise), first just Doppel in one of my favorite settings, then Crooked Axis sent into Doppel, pushing it to the chuggy glory: Blue Colander .wav I will try to substitute it with something else, of nicer quality, so far it always seems the my crudely recorded samples express what I want to showcase best. Anyone else can share some love for Blue Colander?

Just don't open it

I wanted an OD that could go from clean tubelike boost to fuzzy grit and some good videos convinced me to get Earthquaker Devices Blumes, but all the stores in my part of the world had it either unavailable or available with bad shipping cost, so I spent more or less identical amount of money at my favorite local boutique pedalmaker's. Went to Blue Colander and grabbed the almighty Crooked Axis. It's a "Multipurpose Gain Device", it offers a super wide range of clean and unclean sounds. Ultra transparent clean 2-band EQ tone-shaping, clean boost, warm tubelike OD, fat and thick OD, grainy and gritty distortion, brassy fuzz and even a lo-fi destruction with spontaneous sub-octave occurrence. It's all there. Plus an active Bass and Treble control with amazing tone shaping capability. Yet another brilliant pedal by Blue Colander.

The knob directly corresponds to the "ENV OUT" CV jack that right is next to it (in the simplest terms, the more the red LED next to the ENV switch goes bright, the closest to 5V the voltage in that jack goes). Plus let's be honest, it's primarily an Eurorack synth pedal made by a company that does a very consistent design, and that sometimes forces them to render form that thwarts function. 😁 But I absolutely agree. This pot would be way easier and safer to use as a regular one.

A follow-up for anyone to whom it may concern. If you are a stoner/doom fuzz-head, follow the Method B described in the manual to tweak your Pre-Gain and turn this thing into a beast of a quasi-octave fuzz that can outgain many purpose-built gain monsters. If you are a funky person, follow the Method A instead. Tweak it right and you won't get a bad setting from this baby. If you want a little bit of both, still follow Method A. Even fine-tuned for funk-stank, it will deliver TONS of heavy gain if cranked. Also, mixing it with a different wah/autowah pedal and toying with the knobs will allow you to do the vowel (formant) wah, and setting it right (either LPF and "-" or HPF and "+" can create nice funky variations on slow-attack effect.

"Modify", as in drill two new holes, buy two new locking surface mount sockets and two on-cable locking female jacks, plus a bit of instrument cable, and them solder it:

It's getting dark out there earlier and earlier. Luckily, I got just the thing.

Pretty much done (yeah, right). I had to modify my pedalboard yet again, this time by adding an external effects loop to accommodate the wah.

I'm really tempted to buy a blue one as a mod platform. I'm thinking about swapping the pickup to something I have in my box, and boy, do I have stuff in there. Either: APB-2 Lightnin' Rod (since there's room for lots of stuff under the bonnet and I want to remove it from my Fender P anyway) Ibanez Blazer split coil (essentially a DiMarzio) old Ibanez EB-3 copy bridge pickup, much mojo Artec SideWinder copy Your WillPower mod makes me lean towards the last option, and then going wild with a stacked V+T and a rotary switch for Series/Parallel/Out-of-Phase tonality, a thing I wanted to build out of a Squier Jag H that got discontinued and is only available in Boring Black these days. I'd swap all of the hardware to Guyker, too.

Forgot to post an update: I wired it the way it's been shown in the above pic and it worked bed because I forgot about swapping hot and ground wires from one of the pickups and it was comb-filtering and sounded thin. After fixing that, it's done. Honestly, the difference between both PUs in series and in parallel is negligible despite output DCR being doubled in series. The volume boost is barely noticeable, but the tone has a bit more oomph. Sound thicker and darker, and seems to better open envelope filters and make fuzz pedals more angry. In other words, the series setting seems to be more influenced by the middle pickup while the parallel setting takes more from the bridge pickup. Overall, I'm satisfied with this modification and like it more than the Jazz Bass style wiring I had previously since it was inefficient. The middle, bigger chickenhead knob is the rotary selector.

Yeah, most of the time I use the Nøjs side as a clean boost or overdrive to due bluesey stuff, or saturate other pedals. I rarely set the GAIN knob over 12 o'clock if I only use this pedal alone, the fuzz is arguably very cool, but doesn't really match the stuff I want to play. I haven't tried comparing the tones, but when I tested it out of the box it was on Guitar setting and then I remembered about the switch and set it to Bass. The only thing I *think* I noticed was that the low E was tracked *slightly* worse with Guitar, but I may be wrong. I wanted to test this again, but I keep forgetting.

Finally, more or less satisfying setup. I had this DIY, oldschool, solid and bulky single-row pedalboard made from fiberboard for almost a decade now and since the guitar cable was pulling the FurFur (first effect in the chain) upwards, I've decided to fit the board with built-in input and output jacks with their cables. I bought it originally from some kid (he had his dad built it for him, and was upgrading). Originally it had a built-in 3-socket power extension cable plugged via IEC power socket. It also had a "carpet" and nailed-on silver edge slats. I swapped the carpet for the loop side of adhesive h&l, vinyl-wrapped the slats black, added corner guards, and replaced nails with screws, and also removed the extension cord w/sockets to accommodate the JOYO battery power unit. And I used IEC hole for input jack, drilled the new hole for output on the opposite side, masked the imperfections with vinyl wrap and installed the sockets with cables. It's quite clean, but still with neat DIY vibe, so I like it, though I'd prefer a bit more room since there's still one huge pedal I want to add. In the future I will also use a method to mask the holes that is slightly better than the wrap.