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Red Witch's Empress Chorus/Vibrato on bass

#4
I own the Empress for a few days now. It's nice and very flexible, though I'm not sure it suits my needs.

I switch it on to "enhance" the song chorus (no pun intended) a bit, but it's barely noticeable when playing in the lower register, especially when playing one note at a time.
Another issue is that it seems to cut plenty of low-end when activated; I'm getting a HPF in few days - I wonder if having a HPF in the chain will reduce this effect of low-end attenuation, since there's less low-end to begin with?

My settings are:
- Mix a bit less than max
- Depth max
- Voice somewhere past 12:00
- Rate somewhere before 12:00
I also toggled the inner dip switch to reduce the signal boost issue when turning on the chorus.

Any tips how should I tweak the settings to get the effect I want? Should I try a different chorus? I considered MXR analog-chorus and EHX bass clone, but both sounded rather flat and I didn't like their sound very much. I'd prefer an analog pedal since the rest of my pedals is analog as well.


EDIT: I made it sound like I'm not happy with the empress at all - which isn't true. It sounds deep and beautiful when playing a solo, a melody, or chords. I'm mostly concerned about the low-end cut.
 
#6
Flippy said:
Another issue is that it seems to cut plenty of low-end when activated; I'm getting a HPF in few days - I wonder if having a HPF in the chain will reduce this effect of low-end attenuation, since there's less low-end to begin with?
Click to expand...
From my experience and based on what I've read so far - chorus is not really supposed to make your lower notes sound chorusy. Even the MXR's bass chorus deluxe has an X-over function which leaves your lower notes untouched. Chorus is there to make your mid and higher notes shine. Maybe check out Walrus Audio's Julia, there is a bass demo on YT but chorus will usually sound very subtle on lower register. I don't have any experience with HPF (is that a pedal type?). Have you watched my review? I don't think I had any low-end cut off.
 
#7
Roman Jakobej said:
From my experience and based on what I've read so far - chorus is not really supposed to make your lower notes sound chorusy. Even the MXR's bass chorus deluxe has an X-over function which leaves your lower notes untouched. Chorus is there to make your mid and higher notes shine. Maybe check out Walrus Audio's Julia, there is a bass demo on YT but chorus will usually sound very subtle on lower register. I don't have any experience with HPF (is that a pedal type?). Have you watched my review? I don't think I had any low-end cut off.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that makes sense :) I didn't mean to apply chorus on the fundamentals of the notes, but to equalize the strength of the effect across the neck. Actually I hesitated buying the empress specifically because of lack of a tone knob, fearing that lower freqs will start pulsating all over the place. Perhaps you can't have a cake and eat it too in this case.

HPF stands for high-pass filter, a kind of EQ that cuts off all frequencies below a set value. It's used to improve speaker performance by removing sub-sonic frequencies and to aid in containing the bass boominess on stage.

I just checked out the Julia review, didn't like it. Empres wins all the time :) As per the low-end loss, it's hard to hear when playing the bass alone, but in full band it's rather noticeable.
 
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