Fusion Box Bucket Brigade Delay Effects Unit with Tube Overdrive Review

Almost great.

So I got this because I wanted a specific type of flangey metallic high feedback distortiony goodness. And this unit ALMOST hit the mark. Let me start by saying that there is ONE knob that makes this a terrible piece of gear. And that is the "colour" knob. It's basically a LPF that has an exponential curve. Meaning at 0% it's cutting everything above 200hz. At 50% it's cutting… read more everything above 250hz. No that's not a typo. It's not until you get to about 80% that it starts opening up, and by the time you get to like 90% and up, which is the only real usable range, you get the full signal with the addition of a bunch of white noise. This unit is also EXTREMELY sensitive to gain staging. You're basically fighting the noise that the analog circuits are generating and delaying over and over again. Input too quite, and the noise takes over. Input too loud, and everything turns into a distortiony mess. I don't necessarily hate this. It's fun exploring to find the sweet spot. What's not fun is having an unusable exponential filter cutoff. What really bugs me about this whole thing is that this could have been the best chorus/delay unit ever made. The dry signal is mono, and the wet signal is also mono, but phased so that it's a side signal. So when you're inbetween dry and wet, you get an amazing ability to control the image of everything. And if you go full wet, and flip the phase of one of the outputs, you get a true mid mono, so you can pump the feedback, create a bass fundamental, then dial back the mix to use your dry signal as your sides. The functionality of that is freaking GENIUS!!! It's obvious that whoever designed this meant it to be used with your dry signal being your main mid signal, and I think that was a mistake. This is too gritty to be a nice pretty delay, chorus or flanger. You're not gonna easily get clean metallic flanges either. And the long mode kinda sucks. The delay and feedback knobs should have been midi or cv controlled for precise tuning to make automating those fundamentals accurate and easy. I really really really wanted to love this unit. It was so close to being the coolest thing I own. If anyone from Erica is reading this, please guys. I will totally buy a 2.0 if you give me a real LPF, a phase switch on the output, midi in, Tube circuit only on the overdrive, and a transformer on the outputs. But for now, I'm gonna see if I can return this and get a Zen Delay. It's not exactly what I want, but at least it's something I can use.

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