Two D.I. experiment...thoughts?

[Davmu]

Hi,

Thought I'd run something up the flagpole that I want to try at my next gig and see if anyone has any helpful suggestions or if its a goer at all.

Basically, my band has gone from two guitars to one and I've been playing around with a Digitech Whammy to add harmonies to the bass lines in some sections of songs. What I would like to do now is to run the dry signal through my original effects, to a D.I. with parallel output to the amp while the wet signal from the digitech goes to a separate D.I. with different effects added en route. This is so that I will have my original bass sound on at all times and the harmonized version will have its own effects, EQ etc....

Hope that explains the idea. Its sounding ok to me in rehearsal so far but...is this a good idea? Is there a better solution? And will Sound Engineers get pissed off with me looking for two channels for bass?

All comments welcome! Thanks, Dave

 

[Dave W]

Yep, lots of bassists do that. I did it for a little while myself, but never at a gig.

I think it would depend on the soundguy as to whether they get pissed off at you or not for wanting to do that. They also might not give you the end result you're looking for. They should, but you never know.

I'm in the camp of giving the soundguy the easiest possible scenario to work with, using high quality gear. I find that if you keep them happy, you're sound is usually better.

 

[Davmu]

I agree about keeping the engineer sweet, I'm planning on running this past him in advance of the gig so he knows what I want to do (I know they hate surprises) and hopefully we'll get a decent bit of time for sound check to get it right.

With all this effort I wish we'd just get another rhythm guitarist

 

[walterw]

with just one guitar no soundguy has any right to bitch about two lines for the bass (assuming you guys don't also have 3 keyboard players and 5 backup singers )

the only issue is that the second "effects" line doesn't have an onstage amp; how will you hear it?

sending it to an actual guitar amp miked up might solve that problem, and sound sweeter to boot; if you're harmonizing upper-octave stuff then it need not carry any bass, so a 60 watt 1x12 combo would be more than enough.

 

[sonic assassin]

not the same, but similar. i play guitar (sorry) in a one guitar band. bassist has the fishman fission pedal (similar to the unibass, adding an octave and fifth). we run it through a little marshall combo the drummer had laying around. sounds WAY better than run DI into the PA or through the bass amp.

 

[Davmu]

Thanks for replies. I was thinking of just hearing it back through a monitor, but yeah, a guitar amp might be the job as well, especially for further separating it from the main bass line. Will experiment in the studio forthwith!