My Markbass Super Synth arrived the other day and I've spent a few hours with it, so I thought I'd give you my initial impressions.
The short answer is: this thing sounds fantastic! Although it uses DSP, it sounds very analog. Think Minimoog, but with three oscillators. The sounds aren't hugely varied, but what it does, it does very well.
First off, I don't have huge experience of other synth pedals. I own an (old style) EHX Bass Microsynth. I had a Boss ME8B. I've played an Akai Deep Impact. I've played lots of analog and digital synths.
This sounds like a real synth, rather than a fuzzy processed version of your bass's sound like the BMS. It sounds fat, unlike the clips I've heard of the Octavius Squeezer, which only has one oscillator.
Here's a quick tour: Slightly corny name. Very solid construction. Pretty big - not as big as the BMS, but close, and is taller. The four knobs are sunk into a groove so they can't get knocked while on the floor. The knobs themselves feel very solid and smooth. Three footswitches, also very solid.
No option for battery power. Takes a standard 12v negative tip DC power supply. Mono input, mono or stereo outputs. USB socket for connecting to the Markbass Pedal Controller software.
Markbass describe the bypass as true, and I can hear a relay clicking inside when it switches, so I believe them. It's very clean sounding in either bypass or effect mode. No noticeable hiss.
The first knob is an input gain, with accompanying clip LED. It's nice to have this on the front panel, as I find it's key to getting predictable results when triggering synths or envelope effects. This doesn't get saved with the presets - it's global, which makes sense, as you might want to tweak it for different basses etc.
Next knob is the filter Cutoff frequency, or the octave down level in octaver mode.
Next is Tone - this is a set of 7 factory settings for the oscillators. Think of it as a shortcut to setting the various oscillator controls. There's also a User setting, which can be programmed using the Markbass Pedal Controller software. I panicked initially, thinking that there would be just one User setting for all the presets, but that's not the case - each preset can have its own User tone setting. This knob doubles as the octave up level in octaver mode.
Finally there's the Level knob, which sets the overall output level of the synth. In octaver mode, it sets the level of your dry bass signal.
The first footswitch advances through the presets. The second is the bypass switch. The third switches between synth and octaver modes.
An LED lights when the pedal is not in bypass mode. There's a 6 character 7 segment LED display in the centre of the pedal which displays the preset number and either SNT or OCT for the synth or octaver modes.
There are nine synth presets and three octave presets available, which seems a little stingy. I probably would never use that many presets on one gig, but it would be nice to maybe have a preset bank and a user bank. Any of the presets can be overwritten using the Pedal Controller software.
The presets do a pretty good job of demonstrating the possibilities of the pedal, although I started replacing some of the more wacky ones straight away with meat and potato sounds.
Tracking is very good. There is no noticeable delay between the start of your bass's note and the effect.
This seems to be done by starting the oscillator at its previous pitch while the pedal works out the pitch of the new note. If you play a very high note followed by a very low note, this is just noticeable, as it takes the pedal maybe a tenth of a second to calculate the new pitch. You briefly hear the high pitch before it switches to the low note. The other way around you don't hear a jump, as the pedal can calculate the pitch of a high note very quickly. In practice, this jumping is not obvious, as notes in a bass line tend to be closer together, and the jump is often disguised by the 'squelch' of the filter opening.
This sounds like a problem, but I think it's a really good solution - much better than hearing a delay before the synth sound starts.
Octaver mode is simpler. Just the three controls already mentioned for Octave Down, Octave Up and Dry level. The octave down sound is nice, somewhere between the OC2 and EBS tones. Has a little bit of grit to it.
The octave up sound is not what I expected - it sounds more like a synth than your bass's sound, maybe a sine or heavily filtered sawtooth and is very smooth and even sounding. I had to double check that it's an octave up from my bass's pitch but it is. It blends very nicely with the dry and octave down tones, but it's not very aggressive.
That's it for controls on the unit itself. There's much more inside the box though. Download the Markbass Pedal Controller from the Markbass website, connect to the pedal via USB, and you get access to all the fun parameters. You can't power the pedal from USB - you need to have the DC adapter plugged in too.
All the changes you make to the knobs on the screen affect the sound of the pedal immediately, so this is a great way to experiment. You can load and save patches to and from the pedal. You can also make complete preset files which contain the settings for all the presets, for backup or for different gigs etc. You can't apply these all in one go to the pedal though - you need to store each preset individually.
In synth mode, the effect generates three oscillators based on the pitch from your bass. The three oscillators have the same waveform - a sawtooth, and each can have an interval (plus 31 semitones or minus 32, over two and half octaves each way) plus a detune value. You can set the level of each. You can also pan them between the stereo outputs if you want, or leave them centre for mono use.
There's a portamento control - this glides from one note to the other when you play legato with no gaps between the notes. Very predictable in operation and adds more 'real synth' flavour to the sound. I felt like it softened the attack of the note a little bit, so I would probably turn it off unless I wanted to feature it prominently.
The pedal tracks pitches very well. All the way down to low B on my five string! Very occasionally, the pedal jumps to a higher or lower octave than the note played. It doesn't flip back and forward like some older octave pedals I've played. The pedal seemed to hold the note well as the bass note decayed. It also seems to be less sensitive to open strings than, say my EBS Octabass, where open strings present problems for the tracking.
It worked well with several basses, active and passes, fretted and fretless. Slapping, pick - all fine. Even worked great with the piezo pickup on my double bass!
The oscillators are routed through a single filter. This has cutoff and resonance controls. The filter sounds good and can be quite aggressive. Unfortunately the filter can't be made to self-oscillate by turning the resonance all the way up. That's a shame, I wouldn't use it all the time, but it can be useful for special effects or even for faking another oscillator tone.
There's a simple Attack and Release envelope filter that can affect the filter cutoff. Note that this is more like AD - Attack and Decay filter on a real synth, because the decay starts as soon as the attack has finished, not after the note has ended - like most bass synth effects, as soon as your bass note ends, the synth effect ends too.
There's an Envelope parameter which specifies how much the envelope changes the filter. I think this gets 'added' to the Filter Dynamic parameter, with the result that the envelope effect sometimes get lost if you have the Filter Dynamic setting quite high. For a more obvious envelope effect, turn the Filter Dynamic down.
There's also a Mix control, which controls the blend between your dry bass signal and the synth effect.
There are several controls that affect how your playing dynamics affect the sound. For me, this is what makes this pedal great. It really responds to your playing, making it seem like a real instrument. Some people like the fact that the EHX Bass Microsynth is a fixed filter - it doesn't change the filter depending on how loud your notes are. I guess that leads to a more robotic, consistent sound, but it's not what I want.
First of all, there are the Note On and Note Off level controls. These turn the synth on when your bass's signal level goes above the Note On level, and stops the synth when the level goes below the Note Off level. This is similar to the Trigger or Sensitivity control on other pedals, but having both allows the triggering to be customised more precisely.
Set the Note On level too low, and the synth will trigger on all the little muted notes and fret noise that you play, which can sound messy. Set it too high, and the synth might not pick up every note you intend.
The Note Off level would normally be quite low, so that the synth sustains to the end of your bass note. But for a really tight rhythmic sound, I found it cleaned up the synth note lengths to crank this up high.
Next is Amp Dynamic and Filter Dynamic. These control how much of your playing dynamic affects the output level of the synth and the filter cutoff. Turn these all the way down and you get BMS - all notes are the same level and brightness. Turn them up and your playing controls the level and filter. Perfect.
I've already found a couple of things that I don't like or would like to see changed.
There's no way to route your dry bass sound through the filter. That means no envelope filter effects! Agggh! That would have been so obvious to do and could have replaced another pedal on my board along with the synth and octaver. Being cynical, maybe Markbass want to make a separate envelope filter pedal and therefore don't want to lose sales of that to this pedal. Please Markbass, add this as an update!
The filter doesn't self-oscillate. Not a huge deal, but would be nice, maybe also some different filter types - 2 pole, 4 pole.
The oscillators only do one waveform - a sawtooth. This is a pretty good choice, it's the most useful. But a square wave option would expand the palette of sounds further. While they're at it, oscillator sync, ring mod and FM would be nice additions and would allow the pedal to take on 80s 90s and 00s dance music bass sounds.
There's no way to see what the factory Tone settings are for the oscillators. I could probably get close by tweaking and A/Bing, but I'm lazy ;-)
Now a big one. The Mix control doesn't allow for just synth sound and no dry bass. Turn the Mix control all the way up - that maxes the synth. Then turn all the oscillator levels down so they are generating no sound. You should hear nothing, right? Wrong, there's no way to completely eliminate your dry bass signal from the effect.
Now, I usually like some dry bass mixed in with my synth. It gives a little extra weight to the sound, and can get me out of trouble if the tracking fails or a long note ends suddenly on the synth. But you should be able to remove the bass sound completely if you want, surely? This would be easy to fix by Markbass, I'm sure.
The Level control on the pedal itself is not so useful. It controls the overall level of the synth effect. I've already got loads of gain and volume controls in my signal chain. I'd rather have the Mix control on the front panel, so I can tweak how much dry bass is mixed with the synth.
I really like the Pedal Controller software. But I'm a bit nervous that certain key parameters are only accessible through the software and can't be tweaked on a gig. The main ones are the Note On and Off levels and the Mix level. Everything else is on the front panel or I could live with, but these are key to getting a consistent, predictable performance out of the pedal. In an ideal world, my bass level and how hard I'm playing would always be the same, and I could set the pedal up accordingly. But that's not the real world ;-) Not sure I want to be carrying a laptop around with me at some of the gigs I do!
Don't let these moans put you off trying this pedal. It's a big step up from anything I've heard or played before. I've already started looking sideways at my BMS and EBS Octabass thinking about whether I need them. If Markbass update the pedal and fix some of the above issues, I'll be very happy.
Wow, what a long, waffly post! I've probably forgotten something - ask if you want to know anything about this pedal.
I know what you're going to say next... clips!
I'll see what I can do.
