Octavers and volume

[krstko]

I bought myself a EBS Octabass octaver. It was awsome, but yesterday I tried it with band and I was really disapointed. I couldn't hear myself at all, I've lost almost all volume. Why does this happen? o.O

[TXLawDawg]

Could be your amp settings but can also be contributed to the nature of octave down pedals in general. A bump in your mids at the amp should help. One of the reasons I went with the MXR BOD was because of the mid control built into the pedal itself. Really helpful for pushing your effected sound through the mix.

[RickenBoogie]

The lower the frequency, the more power needed to reproduce it. So, as already ststed, bump your mids and cut the lows on your amp, and see if that helps.

[MatthewC]

Let the clean signal of the bass pass through and mix it with the octiver. You weren't losing volume so much as losing some really important frequencies that are key to the role of the bass. If you have an effects loop with a blend, place the pedal in the loop and blend the signals until you get the affect of the pedal and the low end of your bass. If you do not have an effect loop, then hopefully your pedal has a blend knob. Use this. If you have neither, then hopefully you have an extra bass rig wherein you may let one signal be totally clean and one signal affected. And if you don't have any of these, no worries. You mentioned that you were having issues when rehearsing with your band. This means you're more than likely using a PA, so use this as your clean signal. Get any old direct box, use the link to your affected signal chain and into your amp and let the DI be your clean. Let the direct box be the first thing in your chain so that your bass is going straight into the PA. Your low end will remain and volume problems will be sorted.

[krstko]

Anyone knows how would it work with a simple booster? (like LPB1 or micro amp)

[HolmeBass]

A booster, or even some dirt, like OD or even fuzz after the octaver. Provides a volume boost and some more midsy freqs for punch.

That pedal, from my experience gigging with it, did suffer from any one voice not being loud enough on its own. I found each voice, clean or sub, were roughly equal to my bypass volume when they were dimed. So with both voices up at 1/2, the volume of the unit is also roughly the bypass volume. If you run just the sub voice, while it is just as loud as your bypass, it is lower: so it cuts less, has less present mids, and needs more power to be "equal volume" in the band mix.

So when I used it as just a sub tone, I had the low octave voice dimed, and I still needed some OD after it to help it pop up in the mix and give enough punch to carry the bassline. The pedal itself is just really subby, without much cutting lower mids or square wave to the tone.

I use a BOD for this now, and it is louder on its own, especially the sub octave, than the EBS unit was. I traded my EBS to a guitarist friend for his OC-2. He uses it for bass in his looping project, and the EBS sounds great doing that. I use the OC-2 for a straight+octave tone.

[sillyfabe]

As stated before it's not the loss of volume but the frequencies that you lost. I run my OC-2 first in the chain and that way i can use its clean blend if need be and also i can use all my other pedals down the line with a level control to boost it in whatever way I want.

Also another way to boost would be a compressor beforehand if you prefer this apporoach.

[the low one]

Originally Posted by TXLawDawg

Could be your amp settings but can also be contributed to the nature of octave down pedals in general. A bump in your mids at the amp should help. One of the reasons I went with the MXR BOD was because of the mid control built into the pedal itself. Really helpful for pushing your effected sound through the mix.

I bet if you stood outside the room you'd hear all those low boomy notes coming through, or your audience would at a gig.

I'm with LawDawg. The MXR BOD pushes the mids and really help you stay in the mix.

[the low one]

After posting on another thread recently it made me think a bit more about octave pedals and the volume of the dry signal specifically. As the volume of the octave signal increases does it therefore make sense for the volume of the dry signal to decrease so stop the overall volume from increasing?

For example, the MXR BOD with all the knobs at 12:00 sets the dry signal lower than parity but with the octaves in the mix too the overall volume does remain somewhere near parity. The problem then is that because the focus of the tone has shifted to the lower octave it's harder to hear which is where the mid boost on the MXR comes in to it's own.

Does that make sense or would you expect to have the dry volume at parity with the clean signal and then just add the octave signal to taste? In this case on a pedal like the MXR or OC2 you'd put the dry to about 3:00 and just add the octave to taste.