(^164) Guitar Interactive Issue 66
Here’s the situation:
I want to make my bass sound gritty
and driven, why cant I just use a guitar
distortion pedal? Well, the simple answer
is that you can. In some cases certain drive
pedals will work quite well. However for
us bassists demanding crushing midrange
and full deep bass frequencies to support
our rhythm section, we are up against some
design limitations that are required to make
a guitar distortion sound good. Simply put,
low frequencies are filtered out before guitar
orientated drive sections to help keep them
sounding tight rather than overwhelmed by
low frequencies making the sound “stodgy”
or “flubby” to use phrases I often see online!
- Less coherent shall we say.
Trying to keep this in layman’s terms, here’s
the catch. If I dump my bass guitar signal
straight in to say, a studio channel strip and
crank all the levels until the signal clips,
it’s unlikely to be a very pretty sound. In a
distortion pedal or guitar amplifier that has
a drive channel, there is some very carefully
selected signal sculpting elements to create
a distortion sound that has punch, doesn’tDrives and Blending
THE BASSMENT_DAN VEALL THE BASSMENT SETTING THE TONE