Secret EFX Omnia Bass Drive – Alex Lofoco Signature Pedal

The range of drive, saturation from Omnia is broad, starting at clean tones at the lower end of the drive knob sweep, to more high gain, almost fuzz like filth. The saturation remains in distortion territory and stays this side of full on gated fuzz pedals. But it’s not all about the grit. For example, Omnia is capable of a clean boost with a very effective passive filter tone control. The control imparts a subtle amount of equalisation cut on the bass signal with the dial at 12 0’clock. A rounding of the tone, if you will. With the level knob, there’s an opportunity for clean boost with a sparkling top end enhancement when the tone control is advanced.

What was immediately noticeable was the absence of undue noise between playing passages. Not only do we have a clean and transparent signal path, even on high gain settings, the expected hiss was negligible in my setup. Clearly marked controls for Gain, Tone and Volume on Omnia are much like any other drive pedal, but don’t let that fool you in to thinking it simply is a guitar pedal. Read on!

The Gain as expected controls the amount of saturation being added to the “wet” part of the signal – yes, by design, your bass’s “low end punch” will be kept intact as it passes around the drive stage to be blended back in later on in the signal path. The tone control is a little different in that it can provide some boost to top end frequencies when advanced and features passive style treble cut as on other pedals. This can be very useful, as I pointed out in my video: you can add clean sheen and top end attack to the Omni’s output when the gain is set low. Think Steve Harris-style bass twang here. Conversely, winding the treble control down will easily take the edge off the drive should you be running in to a bright sounding cabinet with one of those tweeters with a mind of its own. Indeed, even if you aren’t, on high-gain settings, leaving the tone control low creates a long sustaining and smooth, synth-like bass sound that would work well with an analogue octave pedal for lots of earthy depth and sustaining notes.

A great test for me with any distortion pedal is not in the high saturations settings, but moreover the lower “grit” positions. Yes, of course, creating a high-gain distortion for bass is no mean feat, that’s for sure. For me, I am chasing a sound in my head that lives where a little saturation warmth and natural compression remain relatively clean sounding. Think, “valve amp cranked up, just on the edge of break up.” So, naturally I will go search for that to see if a drive pedal is capable of a natural sound without the fizzy artefacts. Omnia does a superb job of warming up the bass tone on lower-gain settings organically. It sounds like a driven amplifier tone, not just a great bass sound with a fizzy distortion layered on top.

In the end, my favourite setting was actually the tone that inspired the entire piece at the start of the video. How wonderful to have that sustaining synth-like bass tone with plenty of natural sounding bass guitar depth?

Signature artist Alex Lofoco invested time heavily into the product design. I spoke with him at great length about his vision for the Omnia pedal. Although it makes for a brilliant effect pedal, his intentions were to make his instrument more expressive using a drive that reacts faithfully to his playing dynamics. I found it easy to dig in with a passive precision bass to make the pedal bite, yet I could ride the drive characteristics by holding back a little. Great! That said, I couldn’t resist testing with a little parallel compression up front, yielding some consistent amounts of grit throughout my dynamics. It’s nice to have the options.

On the pedal board, Omnia has a larger footprint than say, a standard Boss stomp-box and, whilst this isn’t an issue (as there are plenty of pedals on the market that are far larger), think about the layout if you’re already tight on space.

Speaking of pedal boards, external power requirements for Omnia are between 9 and 24v DC. Consumption is pretty low, too, thus lots of compatibility options with existing board power. Secret EFX note in the manual that running the pedal at higher supply voltages offers greater dynamics and headroom. For my review, I used the most likely available supply of 9V.

Incidentally, for the review, my basses were plugged directly in (via Omnia) to the instrument input of my interface of choice and my DAW track ran nothing more than a channel strip with compression and a little shaping equalisation for the song.

Visually, the metal casing is eye-catching. Coupled with the graphics, it reminds me of those military style cases for carrying munitions. Well, you could say this is a weapon of choice!

Rounding Up

If you’re looking for a big colourful distortion pedal with fat lows and scooped-out mids (like a Sansamp), then this probably won’t be entirely for you. But if you want to layer with a drive that doesn’t mess with your existing sound, Omnia could be just the ticket.

I came away from the review also thinking that, like many a channel strip rack, Omnia could be used as an always-on front end for adding a bit of warmth and grit to a sterile bass sound. Also very useful, should you have an audio interface that doesn’t have an instrument input. The pedal’s natural buffering characteristics will help to match and ensure a good signal into your recording device!

Overall, I am very pleased with the performance of Omnia and it’d happily run it in front of a preamplifier pedal or EQ should you wish to further shape the overall sound.