T
Nice piece of equipment.
I have used the bass butler for about a year now, to do at home bass recordings. The clean channel is perfect, compression and balance work great.
My main amp is a terror bass 500 and I absolutely love the distortion on that thing. I use it almost without extra pedals for playing punkrock and even sludge. I was hoping to get a similar quality of distortion from the bass butler, and that is not the case. It sounds okay, definitely good enough for practice and fiddling around. But for the recording part I have stopped using it, as I don't get the sound I want/need out of it. The idea of a 2 channel output sounded great to me, using both clean and distortion, mix them together and boom... but no. I record clean and add the distortion in post by duplicating the track.
Since I bought it for the distortion I think I should have bought something like the sansamp - to have some more clean control.
However, I use this now and found a way to use this in a way that works so all in all I'm happy.
My main amp is a terror bass 500 and I absolutely love the distortion on that thing. I use it almost without extra pedals for playing punkrock and even sludge. I was hoping to get a similar quality of distortion from the bass butler, and that is not the case. It sounds okay, definitely good enough for practice and fiddling around. But for the recording part I have stopped using it, as I don't get the sound I want/need out of it. The idea of a 2 channel output sounded great to me, using both clean and distortion, mix them together and boom... but no. I record clean and add the distortion in post by duplicating the track.
Since I bought it for the distortion I think I should have bought something like the sansamp - to have some more clean control.
However, I use this now and found a way to use this in a way that works so all in all I'm happy.
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K
Excellent, but not for me
I got this for a recording and practice set-up rather than live playing, and it turned out to be not quite what I needed.
I loved the idea of the two independent XLR output channels for Dirty and Clean, since that’s how I like to record and this pedal would replace a line-splitter-and-dirt-pedal arrangement. I thought the Butler would be just the thing. However there were 2 problems and I’ve sent it back as a result:
1. The Dirt Channel is a guitar amp channel, not really a distorted bass amp channel. Didn’t think I’d care about that but it turns out I do.
2. The XLR outs are line level not mic level, so my interface did not like them and the sound was bad. I had to use XLR to 1/4” for my line inputs, and that right there killed this pedal for my use case.
I’m now using a Palmer Pocket Bass instead, which is cheaper and has a dry Bass Thru output in addition to a mic level XLR out so it’s nearly the same I/O I was looking for from the Butler, and the distortion channels on the Palmer are much nearer the fuzzy bass sound I wanted.
Having said all that, if the guitar/bass bi-amp sound in a live band context is what you’re after I think the Butler will suit you very well. It is, after all, what it was designed to do.
It is built like a tank, and I love the Compressor on the Clean (that’s the thing I’m most sad about losing).
I loved the idea of the two independent XLR output channels for Dirty and Clean, since that’s how I like to record and this pedal would replace a line-splitter-and-dirt-pedal arrangement. I thought the Butler would be just the thing. However there were 2 problems and I’ve sent it back as a result:
1. The Dirt Channel is a guitar amp channel, not really a distorted bass amp channel. Didn’t think I’d care about that but it turns out I do.
2. The XLR outs are line level not mic level, so my interface did not like them and the sound was bad. I had to use XLR to 1/4” for my line inputs, and that right there killed this pedal for my use case.
I’m now using a Palmer Pocket Bass instead, which is cheaper and has a dry Bass Thru output in addition to a mic level XLR out so it’s nearly the same I/O I was looking for from the Butler, and the distortion channels on the Palmer are much nearer the fuzzy bass sound I wanted.
Having said all that, if the guitar/bass bi-amp sound in a live band context is what you’re after I think the Butler will suit you very well. It is, after all, what it was designed to do.
It is built like a tank, and I love the Compressor on the Clean (that’s the thing I’m most sad about losing).
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F
Great for a specific sound
I can see how it would be great if you're trying to sound like Lemmy. However I ended up not using it for long. Not having a mid control for the clean channel turned out to be an issue and the distortion is very high pitched for a bass. I would recommend it if you're trying to get that classic dirty Hard Rock sound, but not much else.
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