Blackbox Cobalt

248 Rock Hill Drive, P.O. Box 760
Rock Hill, NY 12775
Phone/Fax 845-796-3616

Blackbox Cobalt

Blackbox Cobalt
All Blackbox Effects are handpainted. Actual paint scheme may differ from what is shown.

The Cobalt is a warm, flexible and highly customizable clean boost/overdrive designed for guitar and bass. The Cobalt is designed to be very responsive to your playing dynamics and is highly adaptable to many different instruments and uses. The Cobalt features a very high impedance input to preserve your instrument's tone and to avoid loading down your pickups and uses hand selected and tweaked components to achieve superior sound quality. The Cobalt can be used for everything from a transparent clean boost to that "amp right on the edge of breaking up sound" to a very open, high gain tube overdrive sound (even at unity gain settings!) with many subtle shades in between. Besides having a large amount of gain available, the Cobalt is designed to be very quiet in operation and adds virtually no noise to the signal chain even when used at higher gain settings. The Cobalt adds some serious punch to your sound without compromising the tone and feel of your instrument and amp.

Controls

Gain - Controls the amount of input gain. Use the Gain knob to pad down the input signal to prevent the Cobalt from overdriving and adding dirt into the signal. Alternately, the Gain knob may be used to overdrive subsequent stages, providing a nice tube amp overdrive sound at unity gain levels in conjunction with the Drive and Bias knobs.

Drive - Controls the secondary boost gain and amount of overdrive. Use the Drive knob to fine tune the amount of overdrive or clean boost.

Bias - Controls the signal bias which effects the amount of signal headroom, compression, waveform symmetry and "crunch". Counterclockwise provides more headroom and less signal distortion, clockwise provides more compression, overdrive and assymmetry of the waveform. Use in conjunction with the gain and drive knobs to tailor your sound.

Volume - Controls the amount of overall output volume and gain.

Feature:	What it means:
True bypass	Since the input and output of the effect are wired "straight through" when the effect is bypassed, it won't suck the life out of your instrument's tone
Built by hand using the highest quality parts	Durable construction and reliable performance
Cool, unique hand painted exterior	So it looks as good as it sounds!
Low power consumption for long battery life	Replace the battery less often (if ever)
Better frequency response than a cheap AM transistor radio!	Designed and built for full frequency range for use with guitar, bass, synths, etc.

$199
Temporarily out of stock

Questions? Call or e-mail steve@stevesmusiccenter.com. Prices quoted are subject to change. Quantities may be limited on some items. If you plan to order more than one of this item, please contact us before ordering to verify availability. Click HERE for Return Policy.

What does the Cobalt sound like? Well...it sounds just like your guitar and your amp turned up a couple notches. These sound files can't really demonstrate the "feel" of the Cobalt, but they will at least give you some idea of what it can do.
Surf's Up!	Settings: Volume-10:30 Everything else cranked. Guitar: Custom shop Fender '59 reissue strat. Amp: Vintage Fender Deluxe Other effects: Reverb This file starts without the Cobalt engaged. After the intro lick, you can hear the Cobalt coming in with some serious boost and punch. With the volume down at only 10:30, the Cobalt is barely working. The Bias control all the way up adds some nice crunch and bite to the tone.
My Fake JTM45	Settings: Volume-12:00 Bias-11:00 Drive-3:00 Gain-10:30 Guitar: Custom shop Fender '59 reissue strat. Amp: Vintage Fender Deluxe Other effects: A tiny bit of reverb I'll let Leonard (the guitarist and composer of this file) explain this one: "After about the second week of playing with the Cobalt I started noticing something that it did to my sound. I couldn't quite put my finger on it at first. But after a while it dawned on me. This pedal has a knack for sounding like it adds HEADROOM!! I know that sounds dorky. But my main amp is a very low wattage Tophat. I think it's only rated at 18 watts. It's very loud but it definitely doesn't have the headroom of my Marshall. So what I did was take an even lower wattage amp-my Deluxe-to show this principle. And use the settings I use to add headroom. And boom my little maybe 8 or ten watt vintage Deluxe with it's little 8" speaker started sounding a lot like a JTM 45 Marshall into a 2x12. Don't get me wrong it's not EXACTLY the same but it's very close. Listen in particular to the bluesier lick in the middle of the phrase it has a definite Marshall flair to the way it breaks up. And think about the way "Surf's UP !" sounds in the intro. Then you can get an appreciation for how different the same exact rig sounds. The Intro to "Surf's UP" is what the amp sounds like naked. Then listen to this file. CRAAAAAZZZZY huh!? So this file was intended to show this "HEADROOM" I'm trying to explain. And also the Cobalts ability to really morph your sound by balancing the input and output stages of the pedal and the front end of the amp. Kinda like cross patching the inputs on a Marshall."
Steppin' Out	Settings: Volume-10:30 Bias: 7:00 (full cntr clckws) Drive-5:00 (Cranked) Gain-3:00 Guitar: Gibson Les Paul Amp: Vintage Gibson (Sorry- it's so old can't read the name on it) Huge clean boost without breaking up the front end of that TINY amp! Can your overdrive do that? A couple bars without, the rest of the clip with the Cobalt engaged.
Blue Mooshka	Settings: Volume-9:00 Bias-12:00 Drive-12:00 Gain-5:00(cranked) Guitar: Fender Telecaster (American Standard) Amp: Vintage Gibson Other effects: Reverb (very little) & delay (set to just slap back) This clip shows the touch sensitivity of the Cobalt. Clean with just enough grit to give it character. Remember when listening to this file this is a tiny and very old amp. And although this file sounds very "Fender'y". This is a VINTAGE GIBSON amp.
AHHHHHHHHH!	Settings: Volume-1:30 All else cranked Guitar: Gibson Les Paul Amp: same Fender Deluxe Aggressive and very articulate.
Frankenstein	FRANKENSTEIN Settings: Volume-11:30 everything else cranked Instrument: Novation Bass Station (analog bass synth) Amp: Direct to mixer Turns cheese into monster PHATNESS ;)