Questions to owners of the MarkBass Super Synth

[1976fenderhead]

I had this at home for a bit and tried it for less than an hour, didn't have time to try the software, just played around with the default patches and compared it with my EHX Bass Micro Synth...

A few things annoyed me (bear in mind this is all having the default patches as reference)... it was very hard to control the sensitivity of the filter... I like how well it works with the "trigger" slider on the EHX, I can get pretty much ALL notes triggering, none and everything in between. With the Markbass it was always fairly chaotic, and the quicker I played the more it missed triggering the filter, causing some notes to be barely distinguishable... Can this be fixed/controlled well with the software?

And in these patches the filter was also reacting to dynamics which made it hard to control the cutoff freq: I'd choose one with the knob, but then as I played harder, it would go to higher frequencies. Is this easier to control with the software? Can you get similar result to using the start and end frequency sliders on the EHX?

And is it possible to have the filter never triggering?


I know this pedal is all about what you do with the software, but after going through the default patches several times and not being able to get a decent sound and behaviour from all the dozens of knob combinations I tried, I'm doubting that the software can do any miracles... I liked the sawtooth as opposed to the square wave of the EHX, but that was about it... the filter was just too erratic for this to be usable with fast playing...

[pantherairsoft]

Get the software on.

You can control the sensitivity, the resonance, the envelope amount, as well as the attack and decay of the filter. That's before you start tuning the oscillators. The default settings are more of a 'showroom' tour. It's a pedal you need to be happy to spend a few hours with having it hooked up to a computer and an amp to play with stuff.

Your nighles though, are solvable via the software.

[1976fenderhead]

Thanks. I've found [url="http://www.cgraham.com/chris/music/bass/super_synth/"]this review[/url] which makes me think it's an endemic problem though, what do you think, do you agree/disagree?

"My biggest grip is with the envelope filtering. It's frustrating to work with and always wants to push the filter cutoff into very high frequencies. I struggle with filter re-triggering specifically due to the way the Filter Dynamic setting controls the responsiveness of the filter retriggering and peak cutoff simultaneously. Thus to increase sensitivity for retriggering (good) you unfortunately have to simultaneously increase peak cutoff (often bad or undesirable). Thus there's no way to implement good attack/decay filtering that focuses on a low cutoff and low filtering depth with responsive retriggering as the Filter Dynamic always pushes cutoff too high."

There's also the phasing issue I noticed as well:

"When blending multiple oscilators there is an unwanted (in my opinion) phasing applied. Minimally what may start as a thick single voice oscilator becomes a thinner, higher voiced multi-oscilators. Worse is if you try to set a mildy detuned dual-oscillator you get a horribly annoying mid-tempo LFO phase or ringmod like waver occuring which causes an audbile modulation to both volume and oscillator voicing, sometimes the rate of that phasing/whatever changes based on the pitch of your note, hence my mention of ringmod."

Both these issues sound quite problematic to me, in the sense that they will mean a lot of work and compromising to work around satisfactorily... I still liked the sound of it generally, even if not as thick-sounding as the EHX, at least it's more 'synthy'. I want to get one but I'll wait until one comes up second hand, what this has done is put me off forking out for a new one...