Fuzzrocious Refines and Shrinks its Dark Driving Low Gain Overdrive Pedal - now in Compact V3 Edition

It seems as if Fuzzrocious is somewhat on a roll at the moment in terms of refining and streamlining its range - generally updating previously larger format pedals to something a little more pedalboard-friendly. And this V3 Dark Driving pedal is simply the latest candidate in that process.

The previous BB-size model had dual footswiches - with the Light / Dark function on the left-hand one. It also had many more clipping options with 2 x 3-way toggle-switches.

The new pedal is somewhat more binary on the clipping choices, while it does benefit from an additional gain knob - which lets you better balance input and output gain - for more granularity.

Controls - Tone, Drive (Input Gain), Gain, Volume, Diode : BAT46 / No Diode, Voicing : Light / Dark.

I understand the Dark Driving pedal was original based / derived from a combination of the BJFE Honey Bee and Blueberry Bass Overdrive circuits - meaning that it works equally well on Guitar as on Bass. The Light / Dark switch helps you make the most of those two extremes.

At one stage I thought I read that there was some parity between Dark Driving and the Butler Tube Driver circuit - but possibly I misread that - as the Dark Driving is often described as aiming to be somewhat Tube-like in its output.

You do get the generally lovely warm tonality that players of the Honey Bee should be very familiar with by now. For me as the owner of a variety of Honey Bee versions and derivatives, I’m not yet convinced I really need to add the Dark Driving to the collection, while it would certainly be a very ’nice-to-have’ option.

If I did want one I would of course look to my two good friends first - Joe Light over at Joe’s Pedals, and Scott Hager at Axe and You Shall Receive - the latter of which has a cool Canadian dealer exclusive Purple Sparkle Edition of the DD V3 - while I feel the standard Black one is pretty fine looking as is.

Are any of you fans of the Dark Driving format?