Stereo output to amp+foh

[supertzar]

I'm having a wedding gig in a month. It's a casual event and we're playing mostly top 40 style of stuff. The couple did ask for "their song" though, and it's going to be mainly acoustic guitar ballad. I don't normally use effects on bass other than slight compression, so I scavenged my guitar board for some swell octaves and shimmer reverb to add a kind of pad synth (very subtle mind you, barely on the background).

My reverb pedal (nux atlantic) has stereo out. Is there anything that would prevent me using the normal mono L going in front of my amp and the stereo R into the bands mixer to get something extra out of the stereo shimmer effect? Would my normal signal suffer with this wiring when the effect wasn't in use? Just adding one cable would be simpler than putting extra pedals to split the signal before the pedal and sending the full stereo reverb into the mixer. I can always just push everything straight to the amp mono, so it's not that big of a deal. I'm just trying to figure out if I could easily get something extra out of the things I already have without damaging anything.

[Happy Jack]

What does the manual say about splitting the signal like that?

In truth, it's not immediately obvious why this would be a stereo output pedal so I'm not at all sure what each of the two channels would be outputting.

Judging by the YouTube demos, it's a very nice pedal on guitar. Does it sound much the same with bass?

 

[supertzar]

The manual doesn't say anything special about the outputs. To my understanding it's just a normal stereo output which is usually used to bounce the delays left and right. I also believe the shimmer effect might have some stereo content but that's not so important here. I'm just hoping I could get some delay/shimmer texture to the band mix as well as my amp. I just never thought of this before and I'm worried splitting the signal like this might cause some issues (phase/impedance/signal loss... etc). Maybe I'll just try it and hope I don't fry anything. I don't see any obvious problems here but as I said, I don't use effects so much so I'm not sure if it would cause issues.

It does sound nice after the swell octaves and it is a great sounding and versatile pedal and does just about everything I want it to do on my acoustic guitar. But then again I can't really compare it to anything so there might be something better out there. I just bought a reverb/delay, loved the first one and never looked for anything more 😄

[pete.young]

Stereo is a complete waste of time in live gigs like this. No-one in the audience will notice, especially not when it's the first dance and people will be paying the band even less attention than usual. Maybe if you were the Foo Fighters and had a 12 gazillion pound touring rig, but for most of the gigs most of us are ever likely to play it's like tits on a bull.

If you were going to do it, you'd need both channels from the pedal going into a separate input on the desk and panning one full left, one full right. Having stereo split between FOH and your bass rig is not going to achieve anything other than a horrible mush on stage.

[BigRedX]

If you are wanting to use the pedal as a splitter to send to both your amp and the PA you will need to check exactly what is being sent from each output. Many pedals output a clean sound from one and effect only from the other, others will have one output out of phase with the other, and almost all will sound wrong unless both outputs have the same EQ and volume when they reach the listener (that's both you and the band and the audience). That's why it's "stereo" and not "2-channel". Unless you bass normally goes through the PA and you can send both L&R channels to both the PA and the amp (usually as soon as you plug into the right channel output on the pedal it will go into stereo mode and unless you can send both channels to the amp it will sound weird on stage) it will be more trouble than it is worth.