Best way to pull this off?

[vlad335]

I have been doing searches here and on the web and now it's time to come to the experts for advice.

What I want to do is have a guitar type sound playing rthym along with my bass to fill out a 3 piece band. Especially during solos and to fill out other parts of songs. My idea is to not have this at a full out war volume but mixed in. After hearing a dude on the effects Wiki doing Slither with a POG I thought, that's it! I could couple a POG with a distortion pedal and maybe some reverb and be good to go. Albeit at a reduced level of the effected guitar type sound. I may even consider sending this signal to a small guitar combo amp too.

Is the POG the best thing for this or could I get away with using something else? I know about the Bass Whammy but the price is prohibative.

Also in my searches, I realized I will need some type of loop pedal to set this up but futher reading on these is starting to make my head spin. Feedback loopers, buffers, true bypass, etc. ARRGGHHH! What to go with.

I'm pretty certain that I want to use 2 loops. one for the guitar type thing and another to add some overdrive to my original dry bass sound for rock tunes. Would I be well served using a Boss LS-2 or perhaps the Loop-master dual looper with LED's? I also researched the Loopbone but it is pretty expensive. I like the idea of the Boss as it has level controls, powers other Boss pedals and is pretty compact. Plus I like the durability of the Boss pedals being built like little panzer tanks. I have a couple I got modded by Mark Humphrey and they sound incredible now.

Which brings me to my next question. Will I have some tone degredation with a looper and with the Boss LS-2 in particular? I am redoing my pedalboard with my modded pedals and high-quality interconnects and would hate to place a big ol tone suck right in the first position.

Appreciate any help provided.

[SteveMcB]

Need some help on Sansamp pedals

1) Multicourse bass (ie. octave paired 8 or 12 (4 courses) or 10 (5 courses) string). My personal favourite option, and to add distortion I've used the Sansamp BDDI (bass driver DI) which is good, or used a peavey BAC-2 biamp bass chorus, which has separate high and low frequency outs, running the lows to a bass amp and the highs through a guitar amp (and guitar distortion pedal (Boss OD3)) which is incredible

2) Octave down pedal, and play an octave up (ie. 12th fret and above) You get full lows, and the higher notes fill out the rhythm territory. Distortion with a BDDI (or other bass distortions) is optional. Issues are that generally octave-down pedals (at least the analog variety) track somewhat variably, produce synthetic-sounding octave-down notes, won't track lower down the neck and get very confused and glitchy if you play chords (or double stops even). Still a very useful option which I used in the past (with an old Boss OC2 but even a Danelectro Chilli dog would do the job most likely)

3) Octave up pedal (POG/MicroPOG/HOG/Whammy/Unibass) +/- distortion +/- octave up signal running through a guitar setup - this lets you play as normal in terms of fretting position, and adds an octave above. These also can work on chords/double stops, but tend to sound "digital"/"synthy", and be expensive.

4) "Uniboss" method - play your bass through a pedal with stereo outputs (eg. boss bass chorus which IIRC is what gave the method its name)(effect does not need to be on), run one output through your bass amp and the other through a guitar distortion pedal/amp combination - lacks the octave, but using a guitar rig emphasises the mids/makes yr bass sound a bit like a guitar and works for filling out the space

5) Blender - Allows you to preserve the low end by putting a distortion (or other for that matter) pedal in a loop and blend some of its sound with your fundamental clean sound - so you keep your low end and get your distortion as well from pretty much any pedal whether it keeps lows or not.

6) Using a pedal that is optimised for distortion on bass (Sansamp BDDI, MXR Blowtorch, Fulltone Bass drive, Ibanez Phat Hed, do a search and you'll find hundreds of others) or that happens to sound good on bass and not lose too much in the way of lows (Digitech Bad Monkey and EH Little Big Muff are often discussed in this context). IMHO this method doesn't really fill the guitar space that much, it just makes your bass sound different (and cool) but it is used by some people to fill things out

7) Biamp rig as described in 1) with distortion on the highs.

Good luck,
Steve

[bassman251]

My favorite ones on this by far is the aikia unibass. You can add it with an octave up along with a fifth up at the same time if you want. So you are getting three notes at the same time. Add some of the built in distortion can make awesome power cords/pretty convincing guitar sounds...at least to me. Some people don't like the built in distortion but I found it adequate enough.

I tried the electro-harmonics micro pog but was a bit disappointed sounded a bit too synthetic for me even with distortion on the octave up.

Keep in mind they don't make it anymore but you can usually find one for around $200.00

[bigchiefbc]

Originally Posted by vlad335

I have been doing searches here and on the web and now it's time to come to the experts for advice.

What I want to do is have a guitar type sound playing rthym along with my bass to fill out a 3 piece band. Especially during solos and to fill out other parts of songs. My idea is to not have this at a full out war volume but mixed in. After hearing a dude on the effects Wiki doing Slither with a POG I thought, that's it! I could couple a POG with a distortion pedal and maybe some reverb and be good to go. Albeit at a reduced level of the effected guitar type sound. I may even consider sending this signal to a small guitar combo amp too.

Is the POG the best thing for this or could I get away with using something else? I know about the Bass Whammy but the price is prohibative.

Also in my searches, I realized I will need some type of loop pedal to set this up but futher reading on these is starting to make my head spin. Feedback loopers, buffers, true bypass, etc. ARRGGHHH! What to go with.

I'm pretty certain that I want to use 2 loops. one for the guitar type thing and another to add some overdrive to my original dry bass sound for rock tunes. Would I be well served using a Boss LS-2 or perhaps the Loop-master dual looper with LED's? I also researched the Loopbone but it is pretty expensive. I like the idea of the Boss as it has level controls, powers other Boss pedals and is pretty compact. Plus I like the durability of the Boss pedals being built like little panzer tanks. I have a couple I got modded by Mark Humphrey and they sound incredible now.

Which brings me to my next question. Will I have some tone degredation with a looper and with the Boss LS-2 in particular? I am redoing my pedalboard with my modded pedals and high-quality interconnects and would hate to place a big ol tone suck right in the first position.

Appreciate any help provided.

Since I am the one who did that Slither clip, I am obviously biased. But, I'll give my opinion anyway. The setup I used on that clip was:

bass -> A/B/Y pedal in Y mode -> output A -> amp input 1
output B -> POG (+1 and +2 octaves) -> distortion pedal -> amp input 2

I have changed to a different setup now, but its functionally the same, just better and more expensive. Now, my setup looks like this:

bass -> A/B/Y in Y mode -> output A -> bass amp
output B -> HOG (+1, +1.5 and +2 octaves) -> distortion pedal -> guitar amp

I still think my original setup sounded good, and it definitely did the job in the 3-piece I was in at the time. But my new setup just sounds better, because that extra fifth available on the HOG creates a true power chord, and the second channel just sounds better going thru a guitar amp, even if its a cheap one (currently, I'm using a Marshall JTM-30)

Now, all that being said, using the LS-2 would accomplish basically the same thing that my original setup does, and I think its a perfectly good and usable way of accomplishing what you're looking for

[cheapbasslovin]

Originally Posted by bigchiefbc

Since I am the one who did that Slither clip, I am obviously biased. But, I'll give my opinion anyway. The setup I used on that clip was:

bass -> A/B/Y pedal in Y mode -> output A -> amp input 1
output B -> POG (+1 and +2 octaves) -> distortion pedal -> amp input 2

I have changed to a different setup now, but its functionally the same, just better and more expensive. Now, my setup looks like this:

bass -> A/B/Y in Y mode -> output A -> bass amp
output B -> HOG (+1, +1.5 and +2 octaves) -> distortion pedal -> guitar amp

I still think my original setup sounded good, and it definitely did the job in the 3-piece I was in at the time. But my new setup just sounds better, because that extra fifth available on the HOG creates a true power chord, and the second channel just sounds better going thru a guitar amp, even if its a cheap one (currently, I'm using a Marshall JTM-30)

Now, all that being said, using the LS-2 would accomplish basically the same thing that my original setup does, and I think its a perfectly good and usable way of accomplishing what you're looking for

+1 I do something more akin to the LS-2 method and it works great. Dialing in the LP filter is pretty important to minimize the digital squeakiness. I wish I could use it more often this way, but our band doesn't call for too much of it.

[vlad335]

Thank you for the most excellent replies. Alot to think about and ponder for sure.

Bigchief, appreciate your input immensly. Hearing the sample you did pretty much got me going down this road. (I thank you but my wife may feel differently.) Do you have sound clips of your new setup with the HOG? I would love to hear this sound improved. ( Thought it sounded great before.)

[vlad335]

Another dumb question...

The LS-2 passes an uneffected dry signal at all times right? I mean my normal bass sound can always be heard and then I can punch in the blended loops with the foot pedal. A or B or maybe both at the same time?

[K2000]

Some of my fuzzes didn't like my Boss LS-2... I don't know if it's Boss's bypass, or a difference in output levels coming from the Boss, but my experience is that some vintage type fuzzes don't seem to like to be downstream from Boss pedals. You may decide to go with a true bypass looper (but certainly try using the LS-2, since you already have it).

I thought the Akai Unibass was cool, but sounded a bit artificial, but then again I had it turned on all the time. If you just punch it in for certain sections, in an ensemble situation, you may find it to be more useable than I did.