Fuzz that is active friendly???

[garfo]

Ei guys, I'm getting quite frustrated here.
I've built two pedals already, a Big Muff and a Tonebender MKiii, and I love the sound of both on my bass.

My bass is Active ( ACguitars Filter preamp) and has a lot of output. Both pedals fart if they see the full signal of my bass, and need to roll back the volume to get effected and clean signal at similar volumes.

I have both now sitting and feel really frustrated, specially cause I love the Tone of the tonebender... 

Any fuzz pedals out there that won't suffer from this???

[Betty Wont]

I like the brassmaster for this application.

[juansolo]

I'm surprised the Muff farts out, by it's very nature it should just clip the crap out of the signal. Muffs usually play well with active pickups... The TB makes sense, it won't like a buffered input.

[jimilee]

I love the green Russian. Are you using a compressor in your signal chain?


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[garfo]

I have tried with a compressor and pushed the Gain back so that I would get less output. The TB still doesn't lie it. It just doesn't like the loud signal. One thing that I might do is to place a booster at the end of the TB and roll back the volume pot on my bass. that way I can lower the signal going in and amplify the signal going out.

[Ralfg]

Maybe it's an impedance issue? Something I'm learning more about now as I think I'm hitting this with the Deathklaw powered by a really high gain pedal.  When you go active I wonder if the impedance goes up on the bass and the pedal's input impedance is just too low and it just can't handle it? Could you build a buffer that takes a high impedance source and lowers the output impedance? Sorry no real answer here only quotations.

[midwayfair]

Maybe it's an impedance issue? Something I'm learning more about now as I think I'm hitting this with the Deathklaw powered by a really high gain pedal.  When you go active I wonder if the impedance goes up on the bass and the pedal's input impedance is just too low and it just can't handle it? Could you build a buffer that takes a high impedance source and lowers the output impedance? Sorry no real answer here only quotations.

Active means that there is at least a buffer between the pickups (which are high impedance) and the plug on the guitar. This lowers the impedance substantially.

Bass is high-output to begin with. It's possible there's also a boost built into the op's active system.

The impedance issues people typically experience with active pickups and fuzz is that the fuzz sounds too bright and doesn't clean up as quickly.

But if your bass pickups are putting out more than 4.5V peak to peak (which is a frigging HOT signal), then you're going to lose signal in a 9V pedal even if it's a big muff which can put out a tremendous amount of signal.

The Tonebender's issue is completely different. It has a voltage divider on the output and will not give you the full 9V of volume regardless.

[Ralfg]

And still learning  just when you though you had it all figured out...

[Ralfg]

I've been thinking about this and I was wondering Midwayfair if the output voltage of the active preamp on the bass is so high, would a possible solution be using a pedal at 18volts or higher?  The pedal would have to be designed for this, I realize you could not just run anything at a higher voltage especially something like a fuzz where the components would accept a higher voltage and I would assume that most fuzz pedals were and are not intended to run higher.