After the first two Big Mud versions I had kept getting asked if I was ever going to make a "Green Russian" version of the BM as a lot of bass players LOVE it. EH obviously knew this as they had released the "Bass BM" with army green artwork and a component value circuit very similar to "one of" the old Russian versions.
To be honest, I'd never been a big fan of the green Russian as it had too much unwieldy bottom end for me and lacked any clarity but I could see why bass players loved it.
I own a few originals and have sold and repaired many over the years and the nerd in me "makes" me look inside before sending them out and these are reasonably consistent compared to US made versions, but still not perfect by any means. They did utilize some crazy design work and obviously used components available in good supply in Russia at the time.
When you plug a green Russian in the first thing you notice is that bottom end and how "FAT" they sound compared to most vintage US made BMs, even the version 3. The schematics I had traced out all showed capacitor and resistor values that would support this so it was a simple matter of changing the cap and resistor values in one of my BM PCB's to suit. I have two Russians here that I have kept as they are my favorite versions of that pedal and my Red Mud, as it would become known was based on an amalgam of those two. Like the Ram Head, I tried a few different versions and kept coming back to these, so there it was.
Tone wasn't happy with the original artwork so only ten were made with the dark green plates and then the rest have been the "cleaner" looking lighter green, although, just like the originals, the green has varied from batch to batch.
This version has LOTS of bottoms and LOTS of gain so it's not for the light hearted or more sensitive among us, but it certainly deserves it's place in the club.
Next up was a dream come true for someone like me. It's actually turned into a real eye opener for me with my first foray into the hardcore effects world.