Product Overview
The pedal started as my thoughts about tone controls for dirt pedals. There are various different tone controls that appear on pedals, and probably most things have been tried at least once. Overdrive/distortion/fuzz pedals are a specific application because the tone controls have so much to work with they can shape the entire sound of the pedal – they’re a key part of the voicing of a particular circuit. So what options are there?
Active controls
- Baxandall Bass/Treble or Bass/Mid/Treble
- Sweepable controls, with Frequency and Cut/Boost
- Full Parametric EQ, with Frequency, Q, and Cut/Boost.
Passive controls
- Amp tone stacks (Fender, Marshall, etc etc)
- Big Muff Pi and derivatives
- Simple RC lowpass (Proco RAT and similar)
While the Big Muff control is a masterpiece of doing a lot with very little, in general I prefer active controls – no volume drop, bigger cut/boost range, more control, no interactions with other circuits around them. For some of the passive circuits, you finish up needing either a buffer to prevent interactions or an op-amp to provide make-up gain afterwards, and if you’re going to do that, you might as well have an active circuit in my view. The problem with some of the active circuits is that they’re complex to build and require several controls, so they’re complex to use too.
What exactly are we trying to do?
I decided I needed to come at the problem from a different direction, so I started thinking about what we’re generally trying to achieve by twiddling a tone control. I tried to boil it down and simplify it as much as possible, so I finished up with four basic options:
- Smoother or heavier sound (more bass)
- Brighter sound (more treble)
- Cut through more (mid range peak)
- Classic scooped tone (mid range notch)
It occurred to me that this could be done with two controls – one that provides a Bass/Treble balance, and one that offers a mid range Cut/Boost. The Hard Bargain design came about as a test platform to see if this idea was practical and offered a good range of control for just two knobs.
