Jim Dunlop MXR Bass Distortion+ Pedal

Broken, one week after Christmas and after the returns window. Buy from elsewhere.Edit: Replaced immediately by Amazon despite being beyond the window, after talking to customer service. Arrived 2 days later, being used ever since.

The tone out of this little box is phenomenal. Rugged build quality means it'll survive live gigging and works great in the studio straight in to the desk out of the DI. Even better, the extra parallel out means feeding a in-ear monitor is simple and saves pi$$ing off the sound crew having to faff around with your "personal" monitor set up.Love it.

I bought this the day I flew out to a gig. I knew I was going to DI in to the FOH PA and wanted to be able to control my tone. This thing is awesome I wouldn't have been able to gig without it now. It doesn't matter what the backline is or if it is my own amp, I just set the eq to flat and let the M80 set the tone. After a bit of playing around I have found a great light dirt tone that works with my band. The only negative comment I have is the batter compartment protrudes from the body of the pedal, this caused me some issue mounting to my pedalboard. I did manage to solve this by using a doubled over piece of 3M dual lock on each corner, now it is solid on my board.

Lets get the first thing right, this does have two modes (clean and distortion), but it is not a distortion pedal. What this does is let you get a great fundamental bass tone. The clean is great with the colour switch, and with the three band EQ you can really get a beautiful clean sound. With the distortion channel, you get to blend in some grit into your tone! Now, a lot of people say this pedal isn't worth it because the overdrive sounds are not great compared to other pedals. This is true, but that is not how it is to be used. You dial in a little grit, I like the blend at 10:30 and the gain at 9:00, so as you churn out the notes, your bass just sounds beautiful, powerful, booming and with just enough dirt. Grab yourself a Bass Overdrive pedal and put that into this pedal in driven mode and you will blow the audience away! That is what I mean by this being a fundamental tone pedal.The construction is solid and the pedal is reliable. The glow in the dark decals also really top it off. I no longer own an amp, I record and gig with this strait to the mixing desk (through a compressor first if I can).I love mine, and at £144, its well worth the money!

The MXR Bass DI Plus is a swiss army knife bass pedal and crucial piece of kit for any bass player who intends to perform live. It functions as a DI box, pre-amp, EQ pedal and distortion pedal all in one unit. It is essentially the same pedal as the hugely popular Sansamp Bass Driver DI, except cheaper and with more features. It comes in a sleek, attractive and rugged black floor pedal with a solid weight to it. Feels very durable.Having a pre-amp/DI box should be required consideration for all performing bassists. Not only are they cheaper, easier to maintain, and of course easier to transport than a big heavy bass amp, they will also eliminate the problem a lot of musicians at low and mid-tier levels (AKA, most of us) experience in having to try and make a bass amplifier sound good in a room which is probably acoustically terrible (despite being in a live music venue), as a lot of smaller pub and club live rooms are. With a unit like this, you can plug straight into the mixing desk and get a workable live tone at the touch of a button. On top of all that, a pedal like this will function adequately in the studio as a DI for recording. It may not have as much character as your all valve head and 8x10 cabinet in either setting, but it works guaranteed every time. This is the trade off you have to consider.The main selling point for me of this unit over the Sansamp is the addition of a mid control, which the Sansamp Bass Driver inconceivably does not have (though the Para Driver does). You can engage a suitable bass distortion with the second foot switch and adjust the gain and mix (blend with clean tone), and it has a built in noise gate which is another useful feature. The clean channel can either be left as it is, or you can hit the "colour" switch to engage the preset EQ which scoops the mids very heavily at around 800hz (and can be somewhat compensated for by the 3 band EQ) and adds some grit to the sound, clearly based on the Sansamp clean gain meant to emulate an SVT stack. If you're playing metal or heavy rock, and/or your bass is maybe less expensive and doesn't sound so great being DIed straight to the desk, this switch is a useful feature to instantly beef up the tone and give you a stage-ready sound to fit right into a band mix in heavier context. The addition of a phantom power switch to power the unit from the sound desk via the XLR out (and forget all about messing around with 9V batteries or a PSU) is another hugely useful and well thought out feature.There are better and more expensive bass DI units out there (the Sansamp VT, Aguilar Tone Hammer and EBS Micro Bass for example) but the M80 clearly stands out among its price bracket for it's winning combination of performance and functionality. Check it out.

Faulty product, it just made a horrible and laud buzzing noise when connected to the amp. Disappointing experience.