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I put a Tonestyler in my 60th Anniversary Precision with Nordstrand p'up. I spent about an hour with this thing just noodling around. It is really amazing. Before the upgrade, the bass would get muddy if I rolled the tone down more than 30%. Thie limited the useful range of tones I could get from this bass. Now I have a much wider range of sound. Some things I noticed: the brightest setting is brighter than with the old tone control fully up. In fact, the second brightest position sounds just like the brightest position of the standard tone control. The deepest setting is a great deep blues sound. It is the sound I have in my head when I think of great blues tone. Deep, tight, clear, percussive. (The Nordy has a very deep tight bottom.) Thumbing the strings gives me a nice round old-school reggae sound. The other positions seem to act like resonant peak filter as well as a high-end roll-off. The effect is similar to using a parked wah, or an autowah with the sensitivity set low and the resonance set to just about on. The mids around the resonant peak become more pronounced. In fact some settings had a bit of a wah to it. The result is that I had to scoop the mids on my amp as the peak was too much in some settings when playing solo. However, I believe this will really help the bass carve out a niche in the sonic space of a band setting. This works well for me because I often will set my eq up to have a bit of a mid peak somewhere in the signal to give the note character and definition. Also, I suspect strongly that the characteristics of this resonant peak will depend entirely on the pickups used.
You are about dead-on accurate with those assessments! The brightest setting is as of there was no tone control on it whatsoever, so it does get brighter than with the tone. And according to Don at Stellartone, the next lowest position was designed to sound like a bass with a standard tone control, albeit without scooping out any mids.Well JimmyM, you convinced me to spend my child's college fund on stupid bass stuff once again!
I also think that's pretty accurate to my findings.
Could be. I've only tried them on my 09 Precision, but I'm very interested in putting one on a couple other basses I have with different pickups just to see what happens.
Can't comment yet but I hope to before long. However, last time I talked to Don, he suggested that instead of two Tonestylers, I should get a Bass Duo Ten, which is two TS's in one, only with a single knob controlling them. I'm a little skeptical of trying that over two regular Bass Tens, but Don says it works great, so I may go with the Duo Ten when he gets more in.
but I'm pretty confident that most folks will like it once they get used to it.
I'm not sure that's all of why Don prefers the blend, but it does allow you to use a "regular" (not the new Duo) Toneshaper. As I understood it, keeping the VVT config requires the Duo TS because it effectively contains two TS's and lets each of the pickup volumes be wired separately through its own TS circuit (I know this is what Don said, but better to ask him why).
I have no idea whether or not I want it - just trying to tell the difference, compare/contrast, etc.
