Vox StompLab 1B Modeling Bass Guitar Effects Pedal

[WRGKMC]

I bought one of these Vox Bass pedals yesterday for recording mostly. The pedal has 9 amp models and 12 cabs. Its also got about 30 other effects. I probably wont use the special effects much. Most of the music I write has straight solid bass parts. Its got a total of 120 presets and 20 user patches. Things like Delay, Reverb, Ring modulation are time based and push the bass back in the mix and make it sound thin. They just don't have a place in most recordings on bass parts but they might be fun to mess with occasionally. The compressor and possibly some of the drives may be useful. Compression can even up the note attacks and drive can give the notes some edge if its dialed up carefully. The tuner will comes in handy too. Guitar tuners often fail to tune the low frequency bass notes well and drop out so you wind up having to use harmonics.

 

Main thing is the unit is supposed to be super simple to set up and 20 user presets is enough. I'll likely build one setting for each of the cab types and match them with different heads. Then I can just scroll through the 20 and find the best combination for a particular song or match it to one of my basses. Bass and drum kick has to be there in a song. Its the foundation of all the other parts in a song a built upon. If the bass is weak or wimpy the song isn't going to make it off the cutting floor and I don't care how much mixing, editing or plugins you throw at it, if the bass isn't solid tracking, the song fails every time. Hopefully this little box will add some new flavors to my mixes, if not, I know allot of bass players and one may wind up with a Christmas present.

 

 

[mildbill]

Looks like it'll be a fun and useful unit.

 

After getting a Roland Cube bass amp, I didn't think I'd ever get into using fx with bass.

The amp models were OK, but the actual fx seemed pretty cheesy and for me,

they detracted from rather than enhancing the sound of the bass itself.

 

Then I read about the newer Zoom models. http://www.zoom.co.jp/products/b1on

I got the B1Xon with the pedal first, and after using it a while, I liked it enough to get the other model too as a spare.

 

I use mainly the compressors, pre amps, amps, and cabinet models. There's tons of other fx included, but like the

Roland amp, I find a lot of them to be cheesy and not useful or practical.

That said, there are a handful of them that are real gems, and some that would be useful for specific applications.

 

While it's highly unlikely that I'd ever become an fx hound, I'm glad I kept open enough to give these a try.

Definitely great bang for the buck.

 

[WRGKMC]

Yea I mainly record with bass and when I do need effects I'll use high end plugins on the tracks so I really don't need them in a pedal. I like using chorus occasionally for some widening but even that can be a dual edge sward. A recording really needs both of the stereo speakers to move at the same time and bass usually sounds best in the center moving the speaker cones with the kick.

 

If I do use chorus on bass, I have a special tool that keeps the low Frequencies mono center. When I use it I can select the point where anything below say 300hz is centered and anything above can be in stereo. This keeps the power of the notes pushing both speakers and anything above can rotate or pan sided to side as a pseudo stereo effect.

 

Wah can be kind of neat on bass too because you do have control over making specific notes wah. Time based effects can blur the low end and its decay can wind up making the attack less effective. Sometimes a drum plate can sound good for a live, in concert effect, but again, it comes at a cost. Octavers can be good if you want those synthetic sub lows happening. Envelope filters were big in the 70's/80's but sound pretty corny today.

 

Drive? how many hit songs can you remember with bass overdrive? I can only think of a couple. Frank Zappa - Apostrophe, Sly and the Family Stone, Dance to the Music. Get off my Cloud by the Stones, and Think For Yourself on the Beatles Rubber sound album. Its just not something that sounds good on all songs and surely gets boring quickly.

[WRGKMC]

Well it took nearly a month for me to get this unit. So much for free shipping. I spent a couple of hours using it and figuring out how to edit the various settings and save presets.

 

First off I've only tried it through a small guitar amp so far. I don't expect to get thundering tones from a small 8" speaker but it does let me hear what's going on and what is not in the middle frequencies and I'm used to using that amp and can make the mental leap to what it can do through the full bass amp by exploring its capabilities.

 

I thought the box would give me some classic Vox tones and to that I was pretty disappointed. The presets were loaded with ear candy over the top effects I'll rarely use. it must have had a good 50% of the settings with over the top synth bass, echo, wah, reverb, and echo's that I will never use recording. I had to dig deep for the basic head and cab tones I was looking for. Once I learned to shut off all the crap I didn't need I found the amp modeling fairly limited but after some tweaking I was able to get some useful tones happening with my Hofner bass. The EQ seemed to be pretty limited at first, but it may be the frequencies are below the small amp I was using so I have to hold my judgment here till I try it out recording. Allot of the settings were hot and driven.

 

Getting an ultra clean punch was difficult. I blame some of this on the DSP driven effects used. DSP is great for getting allot of things to run in a small package but it does suck away some analog tone. You can get some decent tones using it but your have to do allot of tweaking. Luckily it does have 20 user presets so I can save those finely tweaked settings to memory.

 

Some of the effects are pretty cool and I will use them at some point. The overdriven fuzz bass is allot better then using a guitar fuzz box and would work on a highly driven rock tune. The octave synth bass sounds nearly as good as my Moog keyboard so I may try that too. There's even a fully loaded dance effect you'd hear coming from a keyboard I may try experimenting with double tracking the bass. Its just not stuff I'd use every day.

 

I'll get back after doing some recordings and see how it works for that task which is why I bought the unit to begin with.

[WRGKMC]

I got a chance to try it out recording and was pleased to hear the quality of the bass tones were there. The mild changes I heard when tweaking tones through a guitar amp were greatly enhanced when connected as a DI for recording. I tried out a bunch of presets tracking and the ultra lows that weren't being produced through the guitar amp were definitely there.

 

I will have to tweak things and fine tune them in where I like them but I can already see this works great for recording and is flexible enough for just about anything a bassist will need to do. Even the over the top effects were sounding good and I can easily use some of the stock synth settings in place of an actual Moog in a recording.

 

I'll post a recording at some later time when I get something completed so you can all hear the actual results.