The Internet Has Thoughts About Premier Guitar's EHX Bass Big Muff Pi 2 Review.
Premier Guitar said your guitarist will be jealous. The forum had already moved on.
Two sides. One page.
Johnny argues the piece. Then he argues against himself. Somebody has to check his work. Read both, then call the winner below.
The take is shown below.
Source
“Your guitar player will be jealous.”
What the internet actually said
“I've never found a fuzz that I liked — cautiously calling the BMP2 pretty good.”
Seymour Duncan Forum · h.b.
“I haven't found the Big Muff 2 demos on guitar to be very compelling, but this bass version's demos sound surprisingly nice.”
Seymour Duncan Forum · g.s.
The Suede Read
Premier Guitar reviewed the Electro-Harmonix Bass Big Muff Pi 2 and landed on a five-word verdict: your guitar player will be jealous. That is a bold line. It is also the kind of line that rewards a second read.
EHX already sold the Big Muff Pi 2 — the guitar version — to a wave of bass players who had spent years running guitar fuzzes through their signal chain and making it work. Then the bass-specific model arrived. The sequencing is its own story.
Over at the Seymour Duncan Forum, the conversation around the pedal moved differently. One poster admitted they had never found a fuzz they liked, then called this one "pretty good" — which, in forum terms, is a ringing endorsement. Another made the observation that matters: the guitar version demos hadn't convinced them, but the bass demos sounded surprisingly nice. That split reaction is exactly the kind of nuance a review with five words of conclusion cannot carry.
We think the pedal is probably good. EHX has been making this circuit in various forms for decades. The bass-tuned version of a proven design at a reasonable price is not a controversial product. It is a useful one.
What is interesting is the timing. The forum noticed. The press reviewed the outcome. We are in the business of noting the gap between those two things.
That is what this column is for.
Spotted something the press fluffed? info@suedeai.org
Your guitarist will be jealous is ad copy, and stamping it press-was-right rewards a vibe. The sequencing story the column tells actually proves the market had already solved this without the product.
What did Premier Guitar claim that could be checked? The verdict quoted, your guitar player will be jealous, is a five-word mood. The column calls it a bold line that rewards a second read, gives it the second read, and finds, what, exactly? No frequency claims tested, no owner receipts pulled against a specific promise, no comparison to the original Bass Big Muff the 2 supersedes. The press-was-right stamp here certifies that a fun sentence remained fun on rereading, which is criticism of copywriting, not auditing of coverage. The receipts desk went to press without receipts.
The sequencing story the post finds interesting cuts against the product it garlands. Bassists spent years running the guitar Big Muff and making it work, the post notes, and then the bass-specific model arrived. Read as economics rather than romance: the market had already solved the problem with the existing cheaper pedal, at scale, for years, and the bass-specific SKU arrives to convert an installed workaround into a second purchase. That is not necessarily cynical, blend controls and crossovers are real, but it is exactly the product pattern, segment an existing solution and sell it back, that this masthead names and shames when the logo is not beloved.
EHX gets the benefit of every doubt in this building, a subsidy I have billed elsewhere and will keep billing. The Bass Big Muff Pi 2 may be excellent. The way to know is the way this column was founded to know: month-three bass-forum threads, level-matched against the standard Muff and the original bass model, blend engaged and bypassed. None of that appears. What appears is a quotable verdict about jealousy, endorsed by a desk that was, in the moment, feeling some.