EBS Billy Sheehan Ultimate Signature Drive Pedal Reviews
Onstage and in the studio, bass virtuoso Billy Sheehan runs a sophisticated bass rig, splitting his signal to achieve his signature sound. The EBS Billy Sheehan Ultimate Signature Drive pedal distills the essential ingredients of Billy’s signal chain — compression, distortion, tone shaping, and blending — into a bass pedal like no other. The Billy Sheehan Ultimate has two channels — Clean and Drive — and allows you to blend them together to create your own signature sound. Each channel has its own effects loop for coloring your tone with external effects. An exciting new feature of the EBS Billy Sheehan Ultimate Signature Drive pedal is the Hi/Lo Frequency range switch that shifts the entire frequency spectrum of the Tone filter up or down, vastly extending the pedal’s tone-shaping power.
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Highest Rated Reviews
An Excellent, Truly Versatile Bass Overdrive Pedal!
The Ultimate Drive is a fantastic little unit. It does everything from subtle grit to blistering distortion. The blend feature is a must-have (and the comp circuit is a nice inclusion too). For those interested, I've done a pedalboard walkthrough featuring this unit. It showcases the sound range of the Ultimate Drive, how it stacks with other pedals, and how to use both FX loops. You can check it out here
Fantastic Bass OD pedal!
I was on the fence about choosing this pedal verses some of the other Tech 21 options which all looked good but in the end I decided to try the EBS Billy Sheehan Ultimate. I put it through it's paces when it came in and it has exceeded all expectations! The controls offer a lot of functionality and a wide variety of sounds, all very, very useful. Perhaps the coolest feature in the loop option for both the clean and crunch sounds. I was able to (after buying the loop/insert cable) use a volume pedal as an insert on the crunch sound which is exactly what I was looking for. That allows me to incrementally vary the amount of crunch with the volume pedal. The little loop/insert cable s only about 12" long but I connected it to 25 foot stereo cable (used for headphone extensions). It worked perfectly. I highly recommend this product. It is very well made and sounds great.
Very satisfying
I went to a workshop with Billy. He explained that a company was in the process of converting his rack equipment into one pedal. Considering what he had at the time, that seemed almost impossible to me.
however, later I bought one, and I was very pleased with it. In fact, I recently told my Sweetwater Engineer, Bob Furlong, "if I could only find a guitar pedal that would satisfy me as much."
Anyway, mine is an earlier model without the built-in distortion and frequency shift. I very seldom use distortion on bass, but I could see we're having a dedicated bass voiced distortion built into the pedal could be very helpful to get something usable.
I am currently using a Boss HM2 clone with a pretty radical setting to get my distortion sound. Remember, in real life, diming everything out doesn't necessarily give you the best sound!
Sometimes, I put a chorus pedal or a mu-Tron in the loop. By the way, some of the newer chorus pedals have a much wider band width than the old ones, so you might need adjust the treble on the chorus pedal to get it to sound right.
