Tried a new pedal for recording bass

[WRGKMC]

I recently bought a pair of Aroma Cabinet Simulator pedals for recording guitar. I was getting board with the guitar tones I was getting and found the pedals do a wonderful job allowing me to virtually swap guitar cabs without having to go through the hassle of actually doing it. I bought one and liked it so much I bought a second so I could use stereo pedals and use different cabs on the left and right sides.

So far its worked better then I could have hoped.

 

The pedal is essentially a digital modeling pedal that has common cab types. (just cabs, no heads) Its got a Volume and Tone control and that's it. Nothing super fancy.

I'm not sure if it actually uses cab impulses like many recording plugins do. It does sound as good as any of the cab plugins I have so its likely more then simple EQ gimmicks. Its packed full of micro chips too so its likely more then just simple filters. Clarity is very high too. They sound just like common cabs you'd use.

 

I was adding the bass parts to some tracks the other day playing my Hofner Club Bass. I figured what the heck and plugged into one of the cab emulators solo just to see what one of these pedals will do to the bass tones. I wound up being pleasantly surprised. It's all guitar cab emulations so there wasn't any 15" cabs. I had 8",10" 12" and multiple's of those like 2X10, 4X10, 2X12 and 4X12 cabs.

There were a couple there that sounded killer.

 

The Bassman 4X10 sounded great as did one of the Vox cabs. Its no wonder McCartney got a good tone from his Hofner using light gauge labella flat wounds and playing through a Vox amp. The Hofner excels at producing great lows and mid tones with a distinctive woody tone. The box in fact had no frequency hyping many pedals have to enhance the bass. I been using a Vox Stomplab for nearly a year now and it does a wonderful job recording bass but does produce allot of sub lows. I like deep bass but this little cab pedals is very flat frequency except for the cab modeling.

 

Its like plugging into an amp with linear EQ settings. I wound up having to tweak my pickups and bridge a little to get the low E string output balanced with the other strings. Something I wouldnt have heard with the coloration of other DI's I use. After that the bass parts really slammed. I was punching double notes on that Hofner I simply couldn't produce before without a bunch of mud.

When I mixed the track a simple compression plugin did the rest. The bass still sounded deep and full but the mids had a much better attack and the finger tones were much better. I usually had to use an EQ with a 700~800Hz peak to hear them.

 

If you're into recording the $25 pedal is well worth the money. The cool part is this pedal can be used in many situations. You can stick it in an effects loop and convert your amp into a modeling amp, you can use pedals before it too. Its main purpose is to create a sense of using different cab sizes having different resonances. It does an excellent job pulling that of and you aren't having to waste allot of time trying to tweak the bass using an EQ. Changing cabs corrects many tone issues and targets many common tones bass players use. It would be cool if they come out with one specifically designed for bass cabs but its still good enough to get many usable tones.