This seems cool! Walrus audio has always made great stuff, so it's cool to see a bass specific pedal
Badwater Bass Pre-amp and D.I.
Badwater Bass Pre-amp and D.I.
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Walrus Audio Badwater Bass Preamp
- Thread starter Lammchop93
- Start date
The overdrive is pretty rad sounding. I tend towards a warmer Stax/Volt tone but I like the Badwater's harder-they-come attack.
I'm kind of loving this so far... maybe I can sell a few pedals and pare down to just the one if this proves worthy!
Im a lil sad about the lack of a headphone out which is common on a lot of their competition (darkglass, ebs, tc). i'm keen to pick one up and compare it to my EBS Microbass III.
Would it have killed them to include an adjustable HPF? That said, this still seems pretty awesome.
I think my biggest gripe would be where the EQ is voiced. Low mids are actually in the mid-high range and high mids are practically in the treble range. I can only assume that the treble control is voiced in the stratosphere. Doesn't seem very useful.
Darkglass has a similar idea of low/high mids on some of their early gear with low/high-mid controls.
In Nate Navarro's demo above he sweeps all the controls and you can hear that the Low and High are pretty broad shelving filters so Low goes well into the low-mids and High goes well into the high-mids so it should still be fairly useful, though having the Low-mid sweep lower could definitely be useful where you don't want to boost or cut bass alongside low-mids
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Yeah, the low mid and high mid points on the Darkglass Tone Capsule make way more sense to me.
agreed. Makes me feel like this is a bass pedal designed by guitarists...
Or a bass pedal designed by/for players with different tonal goals than you.
It feels a bit dumbed down. Every bassist knows that low mids, say 250 to 400, are extremely important to the bass tone, whether you choose to turn that up or turn it down. Everyone has a preference. To omit that frequency feels like it's either a big blunder or they're assuming they know better than us what we should or shouldn't be tinkering with. (And they could be right but leaving out those frequencies will definitely hurt sales.)
I've been playing bass for a long time (I should fit into "every bassist" after nearly 30 years I'd think?) and actually generally prefer to cut around 500hz and boost a bit in the upper mids (especially with a driven tone) than boost those lower mid frequencies, so the mid controls on this would suit me just right. Boosting low-mids with a peaking EQ is something I used to do when I was younger, but with experience I've found that cutting other mid frequencies (and potentially also cutting some deep bass) is a more natural sounding way to bring up the prevalence of those low-mid frequencies to my ears unless I have a much more tweakable EQ (like fully parametric, where I can set a much wider Q on the low-mid boost than most typical EQs would allow). I think a wide shelving-type Lows control like this that clearly reaches up into the low-mids is probably a decent way to raise that part of the signal subtly IMO. That said, it is always nice to have more range available on a frequency sweep.
Anyway, these things are all subjective.
Cutting any frequencies in general is a natural way to EQ. In mixing we spend more time carving away frequencies than we ever add back.
Not my tempo.
But I love walrus gear and hope it does well.
Their iguana looking flanger is on my board and it’s the business.
But I love walrus gear and hope it does well.
Their iguana looking flanger is on my board and it’s the business.
In this day and age, releasing a complete preamp/DI without a cab sim option is dumb, especially since the pedal does offer a drive. The aim for many of us would be to use such pedal as their main “rig” to play straight into the PA. Why offer a DI without a cab sim, knowing the drive will sound fizzy? So many other ones on the market do offer the option….
Agreed - even if it is just a simple one button analog solution like how Tech21 does it on lots of their preamp pedals. Doesn’t need to be fancy.
Yeah, they really missed a trick there.
Semi-parametric mids, compressor, drive, and blend are all good features, but leaving out some kind of attenuation for the drive signal, be it IR-based cabsim, LPF, or a 5K filter on the XLR is just a no-go, especially these days
Out of curiosity, what would you use instead? A lot of us (myself included) have been tearing this pedal down for what it lacks. Im using EBS MB III for reference.
Curious to see which touring pedalboards this pedal ends up.
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