Dumble pedal

[mojo]

I have heard clips of various pedals designed to give Dumble tones:
Zendrive, Jetter GSR, Ethos, etc. Most are several hundred bucks. I'm intrigued by this one, however, as a possible way to get a Dumble-like sound cheap. Anyone here ever build or buy one of these and compare to the other "Dumbly" pedals/clones/real thing? Heres a link to a clip: http://www.olcircuits.com/audio/olc_umb ... demo01.mp3
Its the Umble by Officially Licensed Circuits. I'd love to have something that gets the general feel using my usual cheap gig rig.

[odourboy]

IMHO the Umble falls well short of the mark compared to the Zendrive, the Jetter Red and the Howie. Haven't personally tried an Ethos or a Fuchs, but the clips are excellent, so I have no doubt that they'd blow away the Umble.

[mojo]

I originally posted this on the Trainwreck side (I screwed up) and Bob-I responded there. He had similar thoughts about the Umble. What amps have you guys tried it through? Thanks for the responses.

[Bob-I]

I originally posted this on the Trainwreck side (I screwed up) and Bob-I responded there. He had similar thoughts about the Umble. What amps have you guys tried it through? Thanks for the responses.

I played the Unble through about a bizzallion amps. I have several clones, Dumble, Super Reverb, JTM45, 18 Watt Marshall, SLO, plus friends amps, a Supro Thunderbolt (Amazing amp) a 66 Super Reverb, SF Champ and several others. It doesn't hide the charactor of the guitar or amp, but like I said on the other forum, it's quite dark and the bottom end is loose and flabby compared to a Dumble.

[tele_player]

I built an Umble, to satisfy my curiosity. In my opinion, it can sound quite good, but the design could use some refinement. There's too much range in the controls, it's tricky to find a great sound, and pretty easy to find lots of bad, noisy sounds.

I'd sell mine, since I've got a D'Lite and a Zendrive, but it will probably just sit around in my pile of unused fuzz boxes, with the TS9 and Blues Driver.

[mojo]

Sorry I missed the similar thread from last September - just read through that. Where do you think the sweet spot is on these pedals in price to sound quality ratio? The reviews on the Gear Page seem to be largely that the Ethos is pretty close in sound to the real deal, but its fairly large and expensive for a pedal. Most seem fairly impressed with both the Zen and the Jetter. The Zen is $180 and the Jetter is $230. Is the Zen twice as good as the Umble, and not quite as good as the Jetter? Is the Ethos twice as good as the Zen?

[Fischerman]

Interesting quote from that site:

Looking closely, we can see what amounts to a few Fender-style gain stages and an odd looking Fender-style tone stack. There is nothing revolutionary about the cascaded gain stages, but the tone stack looks like it was mis-drawn. Maybe this was a "happy accident" by the designer, but this little variation from the Fender design has a larger impact on the sound and is perhaps key to the $10k sound.

What might have been potentially 'mis-drawn'?

Also, FWIW I recently got a GSR and quickly flipped it. I guess it's a good thing that I much, much prefer my homebrew ODS over it. The GSR certainly had some low-gain ODS qualities to it though.

EDIT: mojo, check out Jack Zucker's Sheets of Sound site...he demos several of these pedals. They're not dogear-quality tone but I think you can get an idea.

[angelodp]

Just curious as to why and where you position the zendrive on a D'lite. I have a series loop and a Dumbleator?? D'lite has a serious OD so why the Zen.... additonal coloring.

Ange