Mod Electronics Rock Bottom

The Rock Bottom is a bass fuzz and boost pedal from Mod Electronics, sold as a DIY kit rather than a finished pedal. The maker describes it as a pedal that "gives you all of the sizzle you'd expect from a vintage fuzz without sacrificing those low frequencies", which is the whole point for a bass player: vintage-style fuzz designs tend to thin out the low end, and the Rock Bottom is built to keep it.¹

What it does

The Rock Bottom is a fuzz aimed at bass, with a boost function alongside it. Its two controls are simple: "Use the blend pot to set your fuzz levels" and "dial in the volume to get that sound you need", in the maker's words. The blend control is what separates a bass fuzz from a guitar fuzz, since it lets you mix the fuzzed signal against your clean low end instead of replacing it.¹

It sits in the maker's fuzz line alongside pedals like the Tone Splendor MK1S and the Contortionist II, and it is one of the fuzz options covered on the site's Fuzz Pedals and Bass Pedals pages.

The kit

Because the Rock Bottom ships as a kit, building it is part of the product. Guitar World's news coverage of the kit notes that "All kits come with easy-to-follow instructions and use point-to-point wiring", the traditional hand-wired method where each component is connected directly rather than on a printed circuit board.²

Mod Electronics rates the build difficulty at 3 on its own scale.¹ The maker publishes the full instructions and the schematic as downloadable PDFs on the product page, so you can read through the whole build and see the circuit before you pick up a soldering iron.¹

Videos

Click to load