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Bass Synth Pedals and Making Them Not Suck
- Thread starter JimmyM
- Start date
Markbass super synth also does a GREAT flashlight. I did a 5 month cruise ship contract not too long ago and my Hammond, moog purist keyboard player, said..and I quote.." that thing sounds like a minimoog! --- Use that!!" Oh, and bounce that bass line too.
Had to isolate that little phrase there just to have a laugh. Moog purist keyboard player...LOL!
He is!!! LOL! monster player....would stand on top of the B3 during a solo and stuff...
Absolutely. You put a pure sine wav into some of these cheaper synth or analog octave pedals and you will get the effect 10 fold. Most good analog octave pedals will filter the signal big time to try to get as pure a sine wave as possible. And as loud as possible to feed the CD4013 CMOS chip that generates the octave.
Of course. There's a pitch-to-voltage conversion the pedals have to do. But you learn ways around it...technique, not forcing it to do stuff it can't, etc.
Exactly. Almost at a point of anticipating things. Hell it's probably better to have an active preamp?
Any particular reason why the active pre? Hotter signal making it track better? I don't know about that. I suppose it wouldn't hurt, but I don't notice any significant difference between active and passive.
I just remember back when I was rolling activated my synths and envelopes seem to have more attack and sustain. Then again I could be wrong it's been years since I've played active pups
Now thinking back they did track better than passive
I loathed my syb-3. The only purpose I saw for it was playing the intro/sound effect from A Current Affair.
Sadly, I'm still in the "these synth things suck" phase. I've had the Bass Microsynth for a few years and sold it out of frustration: I play mostly a rickenbacker and a classic 50 precision, the tracking on the E string was horrible. I tried trimming the internal pot, it got slightly better but anything that was played a little bit faster got completely lost by the pedal.
I now own a Markbass SuperSynth, the tracking is better, but I'm still not 100% happy. Some of the sounds are great, huge sounding, but when I bring it with the band the volume is all over the place: some of the presets I memorized are too loud, some too quiet, I get it home and they all seem to be fine :| Also, I can't get a "real" sound, it always sound somehow cheap\toyish\not serious. I don't know how to describe it, I'm sure it's me not knowing how to properly set it, but I'm leaning forward selling it and moving towards the octaver+filter+fuzz realm.
I now own a Markbass SuperSynth, the tracking is better, but I'm still not 100% happy. Some of the sounds are great, huge sounding, but when I bring it with the band the volume is all over the place: some of the presets I memorized are too loud, some too quiet, I get it home and they all seem to be fine :| Also, I can't get a "real" sound, it always sound somehow cheap\toyish\not serious. I don't know how to describe it, I'm sure it's me not knowing how to properly set it, but I'm leaning forward selling it and moving towards the octaver+filter+fuzz realm.
Exactly why I left the all-in-one synth pedals behind. Besides, some combinations can sound much better anyway.
Why didn't you guys tell me that you could make bass synth pedals not suck just by adding other effects??!! Seems so obvious now
Spent a couple hours with my bass and my Boss SYB-3 and Digitech Bass Synth Wah tonight. I don't use them on my board, although I have tried to make both work as envelope filters and just never clicked with either. They're not bad pedals, especially when you consider that I have less than $100 into both of them. But the sounds you get are rather cheeseball, so I never bothered with them too much.
This week I've been on a Muse kick, and earlier today I was checking out other music with bassists who like to use synth, and I'd often hear sounds and think how it sounded like one of my pedals, only way better. Then it dawned on me that it's all in the other pedals they use, so I busted the synth pedals out tonight and got to work.
Yep, that's how they do it, by golly! Totally nailed the Chris Wolstenholme "Plug In, Baby" sound with BSW, MXR Bass Distortion, and Animato. Then I went exploring on my own and found that pitch shifters also helped a lot by adding extra overtones. Got a crazy massive sound with the SYB-3, Animato, OC-2 dry + down one octave, and EHX Pitch Fork dry + up 3 octaves. Oh sure, it would glitch out occasionally, but I could control that by playing a little more precisely, and I figured out how to make the glitching work in my favor after a few minutes.
So now it's making me look at these little gimmick boxes in a whole new light, and instead of their limitations, I'm seeing their possibilities. Of course, considering that my main band is a 50's-60's-70's band, I doubt I'll get to use these sounds much with them, but if I ever get a call from Skrillex, I'm ready!
A little chorus or phasing at the end of the chain can help too
Well maybe something gets said in this thread that helps you
Sometimes less is more and unless you are going for an early-80s keyboard synth sound that is quite fuzzy then something with a good punchy attack but with the dry signal mixed in around 50% can work well.
I created a chunky sound on a recording by recording a dry signal and one through a pedal, then fed part of the dry signal through overdrive and octave down, and the double tracked a second entire track though mild overdrive then panned each of those four versions slightly left, right, and centre.
