When They Go High

We go low.

I don't own a bass guitar (yet) and so in order to continue not owning a bass guitar (for now) I decided to experiment with a different approach to producing bass-like noises (in the interim).

This is the Boss OC-5 Octave pedal. It takes a guitar (or other musical) signal in on the right, does some elven wizardry inside, and emits an octave-shifted signal out the left. It's quite fancy in the realm of octave pedals, having options to use a vintage-style tracking that warbles like a demon possessed if you play more than one note at a time, or the more modern mode that can track all six guitar strings separately and create a stable, octave-shifted output signal.

You can configure it to produce an octave-up signal, which produces a rather interesting chorused 12-string-ish tone when mixed with the direct signal, or produce an octave-down signal to get some bass-style tones. There's also an option for 2 octaves down, but it's only enabled in the vintage mode; in the modern poly mode that knob dials in how many notes it tracks and shifts.

So far I'm quite impressed. It's doing a basically transparent job of tracking the notes I play and shifting them, which is quite a bit better than the octave effect that's on my Zoom MS50G multi-effects pedal (though to be fair, I was having unrelated difficulties with power supply noise on that when I was testing, which may have affected the tracking quality).

Speaking of the MS50G, I'm thinking of putting together an actual proper pedal board with this, probably going for Zoom MS50G <- Boss DC-2w <- Boss OC-5 <- Boss CP-1x. This will allow me to run a Amp Sim <- Reverb <- Delay in the MS50G, get the chorus from the DC-2w, the octave effect from the OC-5, and a compression at the start from the CP-1x to even things out and bring up sustain. I probably won't run the chorus and octave together, but who knows, I can experiment.

Of course that does mean I'll need a pedal board to assemble this chain onto...