What's the deal with effects and pedals? (Also: sound in general)

the Microtubes X sounds pretty close to the Alpha Omicron but with a lot more EQing options. impressive little boxes. I’m very curious about the Vintage clone.

3 Likes

Yeah. Basically both the AO and the X would have made me very happy. The difference is basically with the X you get to play a lot more with the high and low pass filters, while with the AO you get multiple types of distortion.

All of them are awesome, really.

3 Likes

hey look at this splitter/mixer kit, it’s like a dual parallel effects loop :

https://www.musikding.de/Pro-Cessor-kit

would be perfect with a ON/OFF switch (easy to add)

3 Likes

Cool, it’s like a Tyler kit :slight_smile:

I’d want the Lo and Hi to be parametric too, fixed at 250 and 400Hz seems a little weird. Seems like a simple mod.

1 Like

also imagine the same thing in an expression pedal, like a wha or a volume pedal. the pedal would act as a progressive mix pot to manage the blend between the two loops. too complicated for me but it could be funny and very shoegaze :grin:

3 Likes

yeah I have always thought the Tyler looked like an awesome pedal, and this does the same thing for 15euro :slight_smile:

2 Likes

@Gio I was looking at the pedal board you posted and couldn’t help but notice the lack of a compressor pedal. Any particular reason you don’t use one with Bronze Medal Hopefuls?

4 Likes

Ahhh. yes. Yes there is.
Money.
Just haven’t had the disposable income for a pedal I don’t really need. The foam and the right hand do a real good job of making the big, punchy, squishy vibe that I like from a compressor.

Some day, @eric.kiser!

5 Likes

@Gio I feel that. Me too.

I see all the different gear that so many people on forum go through and I figured that since you and @JoshFossgreen are professional musicians, you would have had the opportunity to collect whatever you might want/need over the years. I had this vision that you guys have a room with piles of gear for whatever gig might come up.

3 Likes

Ha! This is so true.
I have 2 4x10 cabinets and a huge 600 watt amp in a rack with effects and tuners from the super loud rocking days. I have two uprights, one with a flight case / break-down/tour-ready rig from the Bluegrass/String Band days. I have a bag filled with all the electronics from previous set ups and rigs…

Pieces from all of the above make it into the travel pack for different sessions and gigs now… but everything that I’ve ever purchased has been 99% absolutely necessary/functional/need-it-for-tour-in-a-week type of thing.
If it counts… I did have a compressor pedal stolen from a tour van break in one time? Just never replaced.
Mainly because I was borrowing it from a friend. Paid him back, but never replaced a compressor pedal for myself.

5 Likes

Thanks for this @Gio.

I’ve been thinking along the lines of what I want (to make sure I have all the options) instead of what I need to get the sounds in my head. I’ve managed to pair it down from about ten pedals to just two.

4 Likes

Not needing an amp helped me a lot. If I had had to buy an amp/cab, I would have fewer pedals.

4 Likes

I realized something interesting lately. the DOD FX84 compressor that I love does something funny with my Precision Bass : it makes it sound more like a Rickenbacker.

A Rick and a PB can actually sound pretty close, depending on the settings and amp used. But the Rick always sounds somewhat tighter in the mids while the P sounds wider. The FX84 brings this tight character from my natural P tone. It’s subtle but really noticeable.

That’s very interesting because I like both tones, with and without the FX84 (considering that I use a second compressor all the time, which is the LA-2A model on my early Line 6 preamps). Until now, the FX84 was always on, but I’m more using it as a “even more punch” footswitch now.

3 Likes

Nothing sounds like a “Ricky” @terb, Laurent😎
Others might try but you just can’t replicate those tones from low, mids and highs like a “Ricky” can produce.
I have re recorded “Why don’t you see me” with the “Ricky”
Once I finished with the production in iMovie I will upload for review👍
Cheers Brian

3 Likes

Cool discovery @terb.

2 Likes

Then again, nothing sounds quite like a compressed P-bass going in to a SVT or SVT-like amp. I love that sound.

Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0LUm1P4oPY

That actually could be darkglass too, not sure what he’s using. It’s got that SVT ultra-high bite thing going though, while being compressed and rich in the mids.

2 Likes

I’m not talking about a 100% reproduction of a Rick tone, obviously, but something “close enough” or even “very close” :slight_smile: also an important factor is that a different instrument makes you play in a bit different way and this counts as a part of the final tone you get. Impossible to reproduce this phenomenon with only a compressor.

4 Likes

Just found this funny video about using bass/guitar Boss distortion pedals for bass. I own the OD-3 and DS-1 so I was curious too! Think this is without modding them.

5 Likes

So I am going down the synth rabbit hole again (inevitable, I’ve always loved synthesizers and it’s what I used to play in our band.) I just bought a Kilohearts subscription to get access to their excellent VSTi synthesizer Phase Plant. I’ve been playing with it for days now and it’s blowing me away.

But oh my, it came with so much more than that.

The subscription also comes with access to their entire SnapIn ecosystem. SnapIns are small VST plugins containing effects that can be loaded by other VST plugins that host them. The subscription gets you two SnapIn hosts in addition to Phase Plant - one is a simple set of series/parallel effects chains like you would expect, but another (which should interest @terb, @eric.kiser and @DaveT) is a multipass 5-band parametric filter that lets you assign parallel effects chains to different frequency ranges. You can then apply these to any track in your DAW. It’s… perfect, as far as I can tell.

The subscription comes with all of their effects - about 30 of them - and they all sound good to me so far. Here’s a clean bass track I posted earlier in the Tubes topic. I applied a simple Faturator → phaser chain to it in Reaper and nothing else:

https://soundcloud.com/user-192576005/khs-effected/s-DUBdB9mnXRt

Buying it all would be about $1k. So the subscription is not a bad deal for $10/month with $100/year store credit kicked back as a loyalty reward.

7 Likes

personnally I’m not much interested because I don’t want to do those things with VSTs, I much prefer hardware for this. but yeah, there are a lot of possibilities, it’s cool :slight_smile:

1 Like