Just bought a Digitech BP355

[isaac42]

Got it on ebay, so I won't have it for several days yet. Didn't cost too much, and it should be fun to play with. We'll see.

[isaac42]

Supposed to arrive today.

[isaac42]

And it did. No time to mess with it. Gotta head out to rehearsal in a few minutes.

[isaac42]

Read through the manual last night. It's not all clear yet. Taking it to rehearsal today to play with it.

[WRGKMC]

You'll have fun with that. Its even got a built in USB interface for recording. Its only USB 1.0 but should be able to record either a stereo track at 24/44.1 or record the bass in one channel and drum machine on the other channel at CD quality 16/44.1. Great for laying down song ideas

 

I Have a Digitec RP150 for guitar that has the built in interface and a RB55 for bass.

The best part about them is the amp cab modeling which expands your tonal capabilities. You can dial up something like an SVT with an 8X10" cab and pretty much nail those tones.

 

The compressor and noise gate are good. EQ is a bit limited, but you don't need much with the amp modeling. Chorus and echo are good. Reverb, OK. I don't use those much on bass but they are there. I use various drives on guitar, some from the amp modeling and some from the drive effects bank. The crazy stuff I don't have allot of use for. It should have a pickup type selector for switching between single coil and humbucker which makes some nice EQ and gain changes. There should be a button near the input for switching between amp and line levels. Maybe the harmonizer can be good on bass for getting sub lows mixed in with the dry. I don't have much use for them but the driven synth bass sounds are decent. The notes lock in well.

 

What I did with mine is built my own presets from the ground up. Its real easy to do on those pedals. I'd select a series of amp types, like 3 SVT settings with a 1x15, 4X10, 8x10 Then I'd do Bassman with a 15, 4x10 2X15 cabs, then another head with more cabs. This way I'm able to memorize my presets when using it live.

 

The built in presets jump from a decent setting followed by several so extreme you'd never use them. You can modify then save them however. Its all in how much time you want to put in. I built 20 which I use quite a bit. I usually have them in sets of three for guitar so I can switch from Rhythm to crunch to lead without having to scroll too far and not having the changes too drastic.

 

On mine the pedals sounds more gained up when playing loud through a big amp compared to a small amp at low volume. You may want to tweak your settings when playing through your full rig if you plan to use the pedal live. This way its less likely you'll have huge volume jumps when scrolling through settings. Yours has an expression pedal which mine doesn't so you'll be able to program that to do all kinds of cool things besides adjusting volume. You could program the compression so strings sustain more, drive so the bass gains up, Chorus speed like a Leslie cab, Reverb depth to create canon sounds. swells, wah, you name it.

 

The drum machine is great for practice too. Having that beat while practicing riffs really does a great job tightening up your playing and being able to design riffs that fit within the measures.

 

Yes you should have allot of fun with that plus the ability to record is great too. Download the drivers to a computer and download a DAW program and you can build some good bass guitar compositions you never get a chance to play with a band. The cab modeling does wonders for amps that don't have matching cabs too. My rig is a connection of miss matched heads and cabs and the modeling is used to get the cabs to resonate properly. The rigs wouldn't sound nearly as good without it. EQ doesn't come close to what the modeling does for nailing the right bass tones.

 

Good Luck.

[isaac42]

Thanks.

 

First thing I have to say is that everything works. That's always good.

 

Second is that most of the presets are usable. I also have an RP100a for guitar, and I don't find all that many of their presets useful. If I played guitar much, I'd go to the trouble of setting it up with user presets that I like more.

 

But this will be at least somewhat useful as is. Most of the presets sound good. The question is, do they sound better than my Ric into my Sunn 200S? In most cases, it isn't a matter of better, but different, and sometimes different can be good all by itself. I am not a big effects guy in general, at least on bass, and, similar to what WRGKMC said above, reverb and delay aren't things I expect to use a lot. Chorus occasionally, maybe. Various forms of distortion, possibly, though they're not really my style. Still, sometimes they're right for the song, style be damned. The harmonizer could be useful, and I've always liked octaves, both up and down, though they rarely seem to fit the song.

 

I went through all of the factory presets at rehearsal Thursday. Afterward, Bob said he liked it. He said that there were a few settings where he thought to himself, "I hope you don't like that one!" but that mostly, they all sounded like me, because I was the one playing, and they added some interesting variety. Allan just said, "Cool! I love effects on bass!" So response from the band was positive. That's also good.

 

In another band, I use a Digitech BassSynthWah. None of the presets on this sound like that, but I imagine that, with some work, I can come up with something that's close enough. That would cut down on the number of pedals I carry around with me. Seriously, this one ought to do everything I need, once I get used to it.

[WRGKMC]

I really didn't use any of the presets in the RP 150. They simply showcase what the pedal can do and aren't of much practical use to me. I first tried to take the presets that sounded half way decent and simply modify them but I'd wind up with a bunch of patches that had no logical order for performing live.

 

The ideal way might be to have a patch for every song on your set list. Just play along to the album and nail the tones the bassist gets then take a song list and write in your patch numbers. I've worked with other players who set up patches that way and it was very successful in cover bands where you captured the sounds used by those bands.

 

For my own use I find that restrictive. Guess I'm too conditioned to using separate pedals. Most of what I play is original music so having sets of organic home grown tones/effects which get the best tones from my instruments and accentuate my style of playing is better for my needs.

[isaac42]

I don't think that approach would work for me, as i play in three different bands, doing well over 100 songs, and the set lists change gig by gig, with one band not even using a set list. In short, i play more songs than there are presets, and there is no discernible order to the songs I play.

 

A better approach for me is to do what one of the guitarists I play with did: program two or three useful sounds in consecutive locations, such that the most used is between the other two and can be switched to easily. I could easily do that for all three bands. Fortunately, for me as a bass player, it's unusual to need more than two sounds in a single song, usually only one. That gives more flexibility in switching sounds between songs.