A challenge for all the Axe whizzes in here...

C

campersand

Member
Imagine you're in a band. Now imagine your bass player quit and you decided not to look for another bass player and try to find an alternate solution with just you, your Axe (Ultra) and your drummer. What would you do to fill up the lower frequencies?

My current setup is basically splitting my guitar signal into two rows in the Axe, one going into a pitch shifter shifted an octave down and running that through a few other blocks to clean up the sound as much as I can. It's explained in more detail here.

The problem with this setup is that the "bass" signal gets really muddy when playing chords. I can't figure out a way around it but I figure there are a lot of people on this board with more creativity when it comes to the Axe than I have so maybe someone can come up with a better plan.

Thanks in advance for any help!
 
I get my wife to hold the bass and play the root notes. Sorry, can't have her.

I have a buddy, who is a drummer, and we get together and once we work something out I call her in to hold down the bottom end. Create a backing track is the other method.
 
campersand said:
...imagine your bass player quit... What would you do to fill up the lower frequencies?
Click to expand...
I'm with Jack on this one. Create a backing track, get a synth with foot pedals... anything but downshifting the guitar.

The fundamental issue is that the bass's job isn't to fill up the lower frequencies, but to use those frequencies to say something: set up a counterpoint, spell out the root...to contribute something musical in the lower registers. Downshifting the guitar to fill up the lower frequencies works about as well as upshifting the bass to fill up the higher frequencies.

Caveat: the above rant is just one man's musical opinion. A lot of good music was made by breaking the rules, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

If you're set on making the guitar serve double duty as a bass, you might try putting a filter after the pitch shifter to shelve or cut the higher-frequency output. You'll lose some of the harmonics along with the upper notes, but you might clear up the bass chain a bit.
 
Try running the split with the octave down out the effects loop into a different amp than the "main" signal...
 
Last years there are quite a few "guitar + drums" bands. Looking at the amps on stage I think those guitar players spit their signal and route the low freqs to another amp. They often play a lot with fuzz too. Yo can emulate this with the Crossover.
 
Why not just split the signal immediately after the input?

Path A is guitar, path B including the pitch shift down.

Perhaps the downward shift should occur near the end of that signal chain?

All 1980s metal had the bass playing the root so I won't worry about it in the short term for goofing around.
 
Thanks for the input, everyone. Keep the ideas coming!

Rex said:
If you're set on making the guitar serve double duty as a bass, you might try putting a filter after the pitch shifter to shelve or cut the higher-frequency output. You'll lose some of the harmonics along with the upper notes, but you might clear up the bass chain a bit.
Click to expand...

I'm already doing that. It helps but doesn't quite solve the problem.

yek said:
Last years there are quite a few "guitar + drums" bands. Looking at the amps on stage I think those guitar players spit their signal and route the low freqs to another amp. They often play a lot with fuzz too. Yo can emulate this with the Crossover.
Click to expand...

I'm already doing that, too. Not running to a separate amp but I am using a crossover after the pitch shifter.

luke said:
Why not just split the signal immediately after the input?

Path A is guitar, path B including the pitch shift down.
Click to expand...

And...I'm already doing that, haha. Any other ideas? :D
 
I did a short duo stint with a singer songwriter where I thought about setting up a path A guitar, path B bass routing, as mentioned, but getting the looper involved--probably in the bass path. The stint ended, so I never tried it, but I imagined laying down a bass line once thru and grabbing it w/the looper, then switching to the "guitar" path for the rest of that song section while the looper plays, then doing it again on the bridge, etc. I thought I might even be able to set the whole thing up with the Global Bypass feature. She played a little guitar, however, so I figured the disappearing and reappearing of my guitar parts would be ok.

Obviously there are a ton of challenges here, if the material you're playing would even lend itself to a looper, uh, approach. Plus the Axe looper is only 16 seconds, which would have worked for her music but other stuff not so much...
 
Add me to the list of people who think that doubling EVERYTHING you play on guitar down an octave would have a bad result. Think of it this way... how many songs have you ever heard where the bass and guitar play the same notes throughout the entire song? And how often do they play to the exact same rhythm for every note throughout the entire song? Plus, playing chords that are digitally transposed an octave down will sound really bad. I fully understand how you would consider this idea. But, trust me... this is not likely to work very well.
 
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Hey guys, thanks again to everyone who's responded so far. I fully understand the drawbacks of doing the octaver thing and am still interested in hearing any ideas anyone might have for how to either make that work better or fill up the low frequencies some other way.

There are plenty of bands/ensembles/etc with no dedicated bass instrument who make it work so this isn't a completely wacko idea. Most of them just crank up the bass knob on their amps or have backing tracks, neither of which I'm totally opposed to. Just thought some of you might have some creative ideas about how to approach it with the Axe since there are so many more possibilities with the Axe than with most "normal" guitar setups. :)
 
White Stripes did it.

You just need to have a HUGE sound.

It's not my bag, I dig playing with bass players ... that can play.

To each their own.
 
My old band did it for a while we used an electro harmonix POG which i think the white stripes used as well. What was cool was you could set it to pitch shift up to a certain frequency range so if you hit a chord it would only shift the low notes giving a better bass line kind of effect. I'm sure you can mimic this with axefx as well. But we ran it into a bass amp and cab which made it sound more credible. It was actually a lot better then you would expect. The pog tracked pretty well, way better then a whammy pedal.
 
Well if anyone reads this thread and is in a similar situation, here's what I ended up doing and, for now at least, am quite satisfied with.

On it's own path, put a bandpass filter around the 250hz with a q of maybe 3ish. Then put a pitch block set to local poly, fixed harmony with one voice tuned down an octave and the other one's level turned all the way down. This gets me a double of my guitar an octave lower and fills up some of those frequencies but doesn't get too muddy thanks to the filter. You might have to play with the tracking to get a good balance of tone vs. latency.

Then I put a para eq after the cab in my guitar's normal path and shelved the lows from around 180hz up 12db. My guitar's tone is fairly bright so doing this surprisingly didn't muddy the sound, just gave it a lot of nice, full low end. If you try this and it's too muddy, you could always do a peak around 140 or whatever and cut the lows from, say, 50hz.

Play with the level of the pitch block until it's not totally obvious that it's there, that way it'll fill up space but won't sound obtrusive. I attached the bypass of the pitch and the eq (with the pitch bypass mode set to mute) to an external controller so I can turn the "bass" on and off. Sounds pretty good! Of course, other peoples' setups will undoubtedly take some tweaking to sound right, but I think this is a good starting point for people looking to do the guitar + drums thing and still have some punch to the low end.
 
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