Request: Royal Blood bass sound

D

Democca

Member
Hallo thar!

For the last couple days I've been totally hooked on this british two man band and the amazing bass sound.
As far as I know theres bi-amping, octave tricks etc. which result in a HUGE sound.
Even I somewhat understand the concept I can't quite reproduce the sound.

I hope someone can come up with something better than my miserable attempts.

Heres a couple examples:





Cheers!
 
Many influences from here and there (White Stripes, Queens of the Stone Age, Muse, Deftones) yet they sound original. Can't help but to agree with you.
 
That's a very interesting way to achieve that sound, but I feel like I could get a tone similar to that out of my guitar on the Axe-Fx. Thanks for turning me on to this band, they are great.
 
I am currently working on a preset that is partially similar and actually playing it with my 5 string bass. The part I am struggling with is the accuracy of the pitch shifter. Not sure what device he uses, but it's impeccably accurate. What happens with the pitch shifter (Octave) is sometimes the root note is a 1/2 step off making it sound flat in the higher range. I use scene changes to control when the bass comes in along with the signal chain of the bass and "guitar" sound.

I will see if I can record a quick demo of the preset and post it later tonight.
 
Very cool find OP! Love the sound they get. Very white stripes like.

LOTS of pitch shifting going on there... Check out the pedal board:

Royal Blood - Basschat

1 bass amp and 2 guitar amps apparently. Mastodon Fuzz, Bet the Axe can get close to it though....

Pete
 
I guess you can use the Crossover block to separate the low and high freqs.
Make the lows go through a fuzz or a distorted amp model.
The mids/highs go through a separate amp model, differently EQ-ed, different fuzz.
Assign switches to be able to solo/mute the bass or guitar parts.

I much prefer Royal Blood over Black Keys these days.
 
can't help with the tone (though, yes, obviously there's octave going on there), but thanks for introducing me to this band. I like the 2nd tune quite a bit.
Democca said:
Hallo thar!

For the last couple days I've been totally hooked on this british two man band and the amazing bass sound.
As far as I know theres bi-amping, octave tricks etc. which result in a HUGE sound.
Even I somewhat understand the concept I can't quite reproduce the sound.

I hope someone can come up with something better than my miserable attempts.

Heres a couple examples:





Cheers!
Click to expand...
 
Holy crap. These guys are awesome. I'm really not sure you can get this with the Axe... two pogs and two harmonists, plus some pedals I don't recognize easily. I might play around with this when I get some free time to see if I can get anywhere near it though.
 
ibanezfreak4 said:
I am currently working on a preset that is partially similar and actually playing it with my 5 string bass. The part I am struggling with is the accuracy of the pitch shifter. Not sure what device he uses, but it's impeccably accurate. What happens with the pitch shifter (Octave) is sometimes the root note is a 1/2 step off making it sound flat in the higher range. I use scene changes to control when the bass comes in along with the signal chain of the bass and "guitar" sound.

I will see if I can record a quick demo of the preset and post it later tonight.
Click to expand...

I was actually going to make a post about this exact same band/sound, and I too am struggling with the pitch shifting accuracy. I've tried every setting possible on the thing, and just don't think the Axe-FX can do it. It's pretty damn accurate on higher strings, but it won't do the lower notes well at all. He uses a POG or Micro POG, don't remember which. In my experience Electro-Harmonix are pretty much unbeatable as far as accuracy goes.
 
the Axe just doesn't track well enough to use the pitch shift regularly..i've tried to use it to down tune for songs live before and it's just not viable.
 
So I've been messing around with my bass and making a more accurate Royal Blood preset. Again the pitch shifter just can't do lower notes accurately, but it's still pretty fun to play along or mess around with doing both bass and guitar parts.

Preset is attached. You'll see in the preset that I used PEQ/GEQ's to turn the guitar and/or bass on and off. that's just based on where I have things laid out on my midi board so I can tap on a switch that isn't in the middle of a bunch of switches.
 

Attachments

  • Royal Blood.syx
    6.3 KB · Views: 115
woooaaa... killer sound! this 2 guys are awesome!!!

In the rig i see:
1 Boss Chromatic TU (2/3)
1 Boss LS-2 A/B splitter
1 Boss Eq GE-7 (all freq way down?!? maybe pedal muting?)
2 Boss Harmonist PS-6
2 EH POGs
1 Zvex Mastotron (fuzz)
1 Styrmon FLINT (reverb/tremolo)
1 Palmer Triage 3amp selector
 
Last edited:
These guys must not be big in the US then? They're tearing up the festival scene here. Rage crossed with Muse. I'm happy that a rock band is still this visceral while being so popular. It seems there is a hunger for heavier music in the popular scene after all.

The sound as far as I can hear consists of two Fender amps panned left and right. The bass sound is relatively clean. Split the bass signal, put it into a bass amp while putting the second of the splits into a pitch shifter. Then distort (fuzz I think), and split again before feeding it to each amp. You need individual mutes for all three signals as there are times (the bridge in 'Figure It Out') where the signal is one guitar amp, then the second, then the bass gets added. They do this live too.

The axe's limitation of two amps wont allow us to get a true sound, but you can still get an approximation.

There's a whammy in there too somewhere, so it's not just a static pitch that you hear.
 
Hey hey!

So after much experimenting trying to get a similar tone for bass, I gave up for a while too. The Axe-fx Pitch block just doesn't seem to track the rumbling lows well enough to reproduce an accurate octave above that doesn't sound like a gargling robot. HOWEVER, I did manage to successfully imitate the tone by using a guitar and a shift down to the bass range. You could tweak it to your hearts desire, I just got it in the ballpark.

You may need to play around with what pickup you're using, depending on your guitar. I find it works best on the bridge position for my Fender Tele and Les Paul DC, but it's likely to vary a lot. Hope this helps!

View attachment Royal Blood (Guitar to Bass).syx

P.S, I imagine that if you used tone-matching on the bass you could sub out the AMP block there, freeing up a second AMP block required to go for the dual guitar amping effect.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom