Pedal board - or stick with what i've got

[jimbobothy]

… just a word of experience from my part.

 

I started with an Boss OC-2, then a HX Stomp a few years ago, my plan was to see what effects I’d actually use then go down the physical pedal route soley. Err, now I’ve got no Stomp (but I have just got a Zoia 😆) and an abundance of analogue pedals that is nearly at peak (is there such a thing as peak + 1 ha ha), loads of actual pedal boards, 4 PSUs, a mountain of patch cables, have to deal with some crazy hum issues and keep having to buy dual lock!

 

While I do like physical pedals, I can’t help but think I would have been better off just keeping the Stomp! Would have saved me a bucket of brass and help me not spend hours tinkering with boards when I should be practicing ha ha 🤔😁.
 

End of the day tinkering with pedals and boards is fun, but I find I can get a bit distracted by all that and not really play the actual bass ha ha

Edited June 26, 2022 by jimbobothy

[tauzero]

On 21/06/2022 at 14:41, Bassmidget209 said:

I guess it depends what you need specifically for the tracks you are wanting to spice up. Part of the problem for me regarding multi effects is firstly I MUCH prefer having individual knobs to visualise what I want to do. Totally get the benefits of presets etc but my brain does not like it at all. Secondly there is a lot fo stuff in multis that you probably do t need or want at this stage. For me this makes a lot of multi effects too overwhelming (I do keep flirting with the idea however). A good compromise for me is the zoom ms50b. It is a fully fledged multi effect but has the footprint of a single pedal. I have access to everything it offers but it's not the main player for me. It also is soooo fiddly to work with that I don't think it will bey long term option but I'm.tryong to make it work for now

 

If you're running Windows, download Tonelib Zoom from https://tonelib.net/ which makes editing effects very easy indeed.

[PaulThePlug]

Clear the patches on a Zoom B1on / Four...

Build a patch or two... or three per tune, with ToneLib, and name it... plus a couple of Defaults...

Store patches on a PC...

Load ya Zoom with the patches needed for the gig and order them...

Loads of Bays and Patches so you could double-up just in case.

ToneLib also have an Android App so you can do it from a phone for last min changes.

Tuner and Headphone Out a Bonus!

 

Maybe ya Boss can do similar...

Edited June 26, 2022 by PaulThePlug

[BassAdder60]

I’ve experimented with pedals on bass ( mostly analogue ) with an itch to try a dedicated bass multi fx such as Zoom B6 etc but .., 

 

Every time I try FX with my band I always find I prefer my bass to sound like a bass and the FX do nothing much to add anything ( especially live )

For that reason I don’t even use an inline tuner and choose to go bass straight to amp and job done.

 

Something very rewarding about the simplicity of that 

 

I would say in our set there may of been 6/8 songs I could of tried adding an effect but to my reckoning they just didn’t really need anything just a great bass tone in its natural form ( my opinion of course ) 

[BigJHW]

1 minute ago, BassAdder27 said:

I’ve experimented with pedals on bass ( mostly analogue ) with an itch to try a dedicated bass multi fx such as Zoom B6 etc but .., 

 

Every time I try FX with my band I always find I prefer my bass to sound like a bass and the FX do nothing much to add anything ( especially live )

For that reason I don’t even use an inline tuner and choose to go bass straight to amp and job done.

 

Something very rewarding about the simplicity of that 

 

I would say in our set there may of been 6/8 songs I could of tried adding an effect but to my reckoning they just didn’t really need anything just a great bass tone in its natural form ( my opinion of course ) 

i'm busy at work as you can tell by how long it takes me to respond

 

Exactly really where i'm at right now - me - bass - cable - amp - cab
Like you there's only really 2-3 tracks in the band that i think could "use" a little something but it's not the end of the world if i don't as the bass still sounds awesome on its own. Tis why i wasn't sure if a pedalboard was a good idea or stick with the ME50B..

guess i should also consider the idea of NO effects and stick with the simplicity of "just the bass" - it has it's own charm

[BassAdder60]

50 minutes ago, BigJHW said:

i'm busy at work as you can tell by how long it takes me to respond

 

Exactly really where i'm at right now - me - bass - cable - amp - cab
Like you there's only really 2-3 tracks in the band that i think could "use" a little something but it's not the end of the world if i don't as the bass still sounds awesome on its own. Tis why i wasn't sure if a pedalboard was a good idea or stick with the ME50B..

guess i should also consider the idea of NO effects and stick with the simplicity of "just the bass" - it has it's own charm

I think there is something beautiful in a good bass sound .. hard to improve on 

[BigRedX]

Depends what your pedal board is for. For most of the last 35 years my amp has simply been a means of getting my bass guitar signal loud enough for the audience to hear and therefore the only control on it has been volume. All my tone shaping is done from my effects.

[Boodang]

2 hours ago, BigJHW said:

i'm busy at work as you can tell by how long it takes me to respond

 

Exactly really where i'm at right now - me - bass - cable - amp - cab
Like you there's only really 2-3 tracks in the band that i think could "use" a little something but it's not the end of the world if i don't as the bass still sounds awesome on its own. Tis why i wasn't sure if a pedalboard was a good idea or stick with the ME50B..

guess i should also consider the idea of NO effects and stick with the simplicity of "just the bass" - it has it's own charm

I agree in that I've never got on with digital multi fx. But I have found, I think, some analogue pedals that work well and don't change my fundamental tone. In order of importance; octamizer, photon death ray, funk machine, grape phaser.

[Chienmortbb]

17 hours ago, BassAdder27 said:

I think there is something beautiful in a good bass sound .. hard to improve on 

I think you need to get the hoof bass sound right before even thinking about adding effects.

[Chienmortbb]

15 hours ago, BigRedX said:

Depends what your pedal board is for. For most of the last 35 years my amp has simply been a means of getting my bass guitar signal loud enough for the audience to hear and therefore the only control on it has been volume. All my tone shaping is done from my effects.

Yes my amp is set flat and all the tone/eq shaping comes from either the bass or effects.

[BigRedX]

4 minutes ago, Chienmortbb said:

Yes my amp is set flat and all the tone/eq shaping comes from either the bass or effects.

 

However unless you are using PA equipment for you bass rig, there is no "flat" setting. All bass amps and speakers have a noticeable baked-in sound, that why you pick one over the others, you go with something that has a basic sound you like. 

Edited June 28, 2022 by BigRedX

[Dazm66]

So I've just bought a stomp with a view to ditch the pedal board and also it will allow me to plug straight in to a pa. First gig at the weekend so we'll see...Plan to run it into the return of my LM3. Will take the board as backup but so far very impressed with the sounds in the stomp - both amp/cab sims and effects. Will take a bit of learning but it seems pretty logical and the HX edit software is really simple to use. As others have said, realistically I play most of the time without any effects so its been easy to set up 'presets' for the effects that I do use and a decent 'clean' sound and then just use that for almost everything, setting the effects to buttons to change on the fly.

I've also got a ME-50B which has great sounds BUT the reason I wanted the stomp (or something more versatile) is that you're slightly limited about what effects you can run together e.g I don't think you can use the octave and the autowah together as they're on the same bank.

[tauzero]

On 29/06/2022 at 16:05, Dazm66 said:

I've also got a ME-50B which has great sounds BUT the reason I wanted the stomp (or something more versatile) is that you're slightly limited about what effects you can run together e.g I don't think you can use the octave and the autowah together as they're on the same bank.

 

You can use any effect with any other effect, or indeed with the same effect again, with the ME-60B (which have you got, the ME-50G for guitars or the ME-60B for bass?). That's why I like the Zoom effects, the B3 was the first multieffects I encountered that didn't insist that you started with a compressor, then preamp, then modulation, then reverb/delay. The only limitation is the amount of processing power each uses, you can't exceed a certain total amount.