Hey, I'm looking to improve my octave up effect. I'm using a TC Sub'n'Up atm, have used an EHX Pitchfork before and also an EHX Ring Thing.
All of them sound very synthy and unnatural. I'm looking to mimic a guitar sound on top of my bass. So, is there such a thing as a natural sounding polyphonic octave up effect? Preferably not bigger than a Boss pedal.
So what I did, as I also found most of them pretty unpleasant sounding:
I would split my signal, one side dry. The wet side goes low pass (or bandpass or eq) —-> octave up —> eq —> blend with dry
The first low pass etc removes string noise and upper mid content to alleviate some of the crappy glassy shrill sounds, leaving mostly 'fundamental' going into the octaver. The eq on the way out, preferably a graphic eq but it all depends, shapes the sound to taste, usually I'm backing off upper mids again to tame the warble.
that's all catered towards the 'bass solo with an octave up to thicken the sound' kinda thing. A similar approach can be used to cater to the sound you want- I also get a lot of mileage out of actually high-passing it, slamming it into dirt and getting a monstrous wall of sound, but that's kinda leaning into the nastiness of the octave up.
If you want to sound like you're playing an octave higher without the root, I have a couple tricks, though to me it never really gets near a usable 'clean' sound. What I do is bandpass the signal hard, really isolating the low mids for the fundamental, bonus points if you're using a jazz bridge pickup- I will then blend in a VERY highpassed clean signal, such that you only get upper harmonics and string noise. Combining the dry string noise and the filtered octave up can be a very interesting sound, but I really only use it with reverb and maybe a ton of other effects as an interesting melodic voice, rather than trying to be a telecaster or whatever.
there's a lot of meat on the bones for these kind of modular splitting setups, but it also gets pretty expensive or complicated if you're not able to design or build your own stuff (I have a splitter-blender fx loop patch pedal that has high low and bandpass switchable for in and out for each channel)
