Oh man, first rehearsal. What a massive sounding pedal. The big questions are whether it sounds better than the Multiwave and if can use it to get more familiar with the synths on the HX One. I think any failures there will be user error.
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The EHX Bass Micro Synth
- Thread starter HelpImaRock
- Start date
I'm glad you like it. I used to have the original one in bigger enclosure and I found it too muddy for my taste and sold it. My OC-2 + Wooly Mammoth + MXR BEF work much better for my needs.
That's cool. This is the whole board. The Multiwave is a lot more immediate so I'm using the Micro Synth to take the attack away.
... come on, you can't just drop that and leave us hanging, there's a story there!
It's in my book but here is the TLDR version..
IN 1988 I signed on to play bass and synth for a European tour IIRC there were a total of 30 dates in 45 days. About week into the tour the band discovered the tour manager in an altercation with a drug dealer involving shall we say contraband and payment. I was able to resolve the matter. He had apparently arranged to add to his pay by smuggling which I put a stop to so he fled home rather than face the consequences. I was asked to help out by the band and management as I had a certain reputation and had done the duty before with other bands, for a substantial increase in pay I should add. We had a number of issues that included difficult border crossings and increased attention and searches from police and security adding to travel times and much frustration. At nearly every venue there was an expected conflict with one criminal or another that I had to "deal" with. We made all of the dates on time and in full but it was challenging.
After all of that the home office management back in the UK took out their ire upon me and released me immediately after the last gig, dumping me and my gear out in an airport parking lot and refusing to pay me or cover the cartage as had been arranged. I had another tour the following week staging in Philly so had to get home so I bartered the very rare Bass Micro Synth and a rack preamp for transport back to the US. I did eventually get paid as there was a contract and my management had some weight back then but I recall it being more than a month.
I think that can be the biggest downside of the triggered-type filter topology of the BMS- it is much less reactive to your playing than an envelope (it just triggers an identical pre-determined sweep once you cross the trigger threshold rather than remaining reactive to your dynamics) so can be harder to dial in for that snappy quick response with brighter transients that something like the MXR or most of the other popular envelopes around TB can do so easily (you can set the filter so it only sweeps around the top frequencies for brighter sounds, but then you lose a lot of the punch from the filter emphasizing the sweep through the low-mids). I loved that triggered filter for certain specific sounds (like slow-swept filter or attack-delayed sounds) but would never be happy with it as my only filter. Also the Square Wave voice of the BMS is a killer fuzz voice in its own right, but not being able to use it in series with the other voices (like an octave-fuzz chain) could be limiting (having all the voices in parallel with the distortion voice seems to make the sound a lot wider vs the more focused sound of a series synth chain) and the Square Wave lacks the brasher velcro-ey top-end of many gated fuzzes that helps poke through the filter when it opens up.
I guess the short way to say it is that they are good at different things! I also dumped my BMS for an analog pedal chain like yourself, but if I had the room for a larger pedalboard and needed a wider variety of sounds on tap I'd have kept it for the certain sounds it did really well.
This is a really good post and reflects my meager experience with the pedal. That said, I'm not really a synth guy. I don't do the funk filter thing and I'm not really interested in recreating the late 70s and early 80s. What I am interested in is learning how the pedal works and seeing if those sounds fit with the expanding palate of my original rock trio. And in that regard, I think there's a lot of depth to the Micro Synth, and if anything it'll be a fantastic idea generator.
I'm also one of those that approach synth sounds as just novel timbres to play with rather than trying to match specific recorded synth sounds- I think if you approach that way then the BMS can be a really nice palette to draw from. For the bands I used it in it did a couple really vital tricks that I'd probably struggle to create as well from another single device (the C4 would probably be the easiest to being able to cop some of those sounds since it has some variation of all the basic elements available, but IMO would be much more annoying to dial in and lack some of the immediacy of the BMS). I'm definitely not trying to slag the BMS at all- just comparing its strengths and weaknesses with everything else in the similar universe that we are fortunate to have access to in these days of gear abundance!
The BMS circuit has got to be close to 50 years old. My first experience with one was 48 years ago. I find it encouraging that after all this time, the BMS can still occupy a relevant, joyful place in my tool kit of Squeaky Beepy.
Inspired by this thread, I have just assembled a new board. I seek to explore the BMS and FMERON in the loop of a new Spaceman Mission Control.
Inspired by this thread, I have just assembled a new board. I seek to explore the BMS and FMERON in the loop of a new Spaceman Mission Control.
screenplay? Sounds like a great movie or even series, like The Pit is for one day in an emergency medical center, this for one crazy tour, dealing with each local criminal boss would get character actors on board.
Because how else am I going to give you grief for selling you a five string?
Awesome, but only on cocobolo neck-thru's strung with tapes made from unicorn hide. The tape. Cores can be hex core steel.
I have a school friend in Hollyweird that keeps trying to sell some of my stories as screen play ideas so you never know. There is a screen play of the time we "borrowed" a school bus for a bachelor party honky tonkin' road trip. It's in the vein of "Fandango" Oh the things we did to and on that bus, oh my! The book is a work in progress collecting a bunch of stories, most are my own but some are fiction based on other's experiences or things I witnessed first hand, some I never want my mother to hear. She don't ever need to know some of the trouble I almost got into.
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