Darkglass Alpha Omicron Bass Distortion

After a bad experience with the Darkglass B3K I wasn't sure if should get the AO but I'm glad I did.

Darkglass calls it a "distortion" and I'm sure that's exactly what it is from a tech perspective. Soundwise it does however have a touch of a fuzz vibe to my ears, which I personally love. It's not insanely bright and sizzly like vintage fuzzes though. The AO is a lot more mid-oriented. Which may make it sound a bit duller when soloed but also makes it sit very nicely in the mix.

The controls are easy to understand and very versatile. The clean blend is a very useful feature and I love the ability to mix the two distortion engines. There's not TOO many controls to get lost in and the size/form factor is great on my pedal board.

I'm also relieved to find this pedal working great with passive basses. The same could not be said about the Darkglass B3K. I couldn't get anything useful out of the B3K with passive basses unless I used a clean boost in front of it. Luckily the AO works great with just a passive bass straight into it. I'm a vintage P-bass nut so this is an absolute necessity for me.

Build quality is excellent as always from Darkglass. Their pedals always have that "expensive" feel.

Any complaints? Well, I'm not too happy with the position of the power input. But I guess that depends on how you set up your board.

Highly recommended if you like this style of distortion. Basically, if you like the online demo clips you're probably gonna love it!

In this case you truly get what you pay for. I always held off on darkglass as the price was to steep, then Christmas gift vouchers rolled around and all I can say is .. Wow
TONE.
One of my first thoughts about the pedal with the bite and growl engaged was 'this is a killer slap tone', it's not just a brutal OD it also is a fantastic tone sculptor.

I leaned towards the alpha side as I liked the tight punchy sound from it. However the omega side has this crispy open raw sound. I can explain it like the difference between using a neck and bridge pickup. Some people prefer the neck alone, others prefer the bridge and someone might prefer both. The exact same applies to this pedal when it comes to blending the two circuits.

USE.
If you want the pedal for a strong distorted sound be prepared to roll of the gain from your amp, or to do a lot of tweaking with the pedal's level as it clipped my amp when I didn't use a compressor, as the pedal can deliver a high gain sound. Combined with a compressor and a noise suppressor it created this beautiful modern punchy tone. Which ended the tone quest for me. I was told by friends that I caught the dragon.

A fantastic design from Darkglass, this overdrive distortion is extremely versatile. It works extremely well at low gain settings, adding quite a "tube amp" style growl to my ears, opening up to thunderous but very usable high gain distortion sounds when you crank it, with more mid scooped, thundering sounds on the omega side and more mid and treble present snarling sounds from the alpha. These two different drive sides work extremely well together blended.

My one issue has been that the footswitch has begun to fail over time, occasionally double switching on a single stomp. It should be pretty easy to fix for me but the footswitch design used (at least in the revision of the pedal I got) is somewhat prone to this sort of failure, I've had the same type of switch fail in the same way in other brands of pedal. For the money I would have hoped for a more durable design.

Overall I still recommend this pedal, if you want this drive sound there nothing else that sounds like it.