The Battalion is the latest bass stompbox from the effect pedal masters at Electro-Harmonix. It’s a fully fledged bass preamp with DI output capabilities and all the trimmings. It sounds pretty damn toasty judging by this demo video and, as a bonus, the face plate paint job is badass.
It looks like a it could’ve been the design on an oldschool, vector graphics, “Atari Quadrascan” arcade machine, straight out of 1982. To complete the look, they totally should have used arcade buttons instead of the normal stomp switches.
Anyway, check out some of the specs:
Battalion Bass Preamp & DI
– Four-band EQ. Bass (below 200Hz), Lo Mid (boost/cut at 280Hz, Mid (boost/cut at 750Hz), and Treble (boost/cut above 2kHz).
– Distortion section features Level, Blend, Drive and Tone controls plus a dedicated footswitch
– Three signal flow modes. Pre EQ distortion, Post EQ distortion, or Dry EQ (where only the dry signal, mixed in with the Blend control, is affected by the EQ).
– Compressor with dedicated push-button and “amount” control
– Noise Gate with adjustable threshold
– ¼” input jack includes switchable 10dB pad
– Headphone ¼” output jack. Plus a hardwired ¼” dry output jack.
– Balanced XLR output for use as a DI. The DI features dedicated level, bypass and ground lift controls.
– All analog circuitry
Electro-Harmonix have clearly aimed to make a super versatile unit here. For one, there’s a bunch of potential applications with all the I/O options they give you. It’s got a headphone out (for bedroom jamming), a dry ¼” out (so you could throw it in a pedal board) and a balanced XLR (for DI studio tones, or straight-to-PA live). All it’s missing is a goddamn RCA-out so I could plug it into my stereo.
And I certainly ain’t mad at those pre/post distortion routing options. Plus it’s got a Blend knob. So many possibilities…
If you want to find out where you can get one of these bad boys, swing over to the Electro-Harmonix site for the full deets.
