Origins – Electric Piano Bass (Distorted)

Over the last decade composer’s desks have undergone a major revision in their appearance. Gone are the Kaos Pads and Virus’ Desktop Synths. To be replaced by these, pedals, or stomp boxes. We accept it as the new norm. But from purely a hygene point of view desks are made for the doing of things with these, your hands, why then are composers putting things that are designed to be operated or stomped on by your feet on their desks.

and don’t get me wrong, I’m massively guilty as charged, I built my first “fuck box” about 18 years ago and 6 years ago, the guys (or rather, a guy) at Strymon was so amused that I refered to my rack of pedals as a fuck box they made me a blanking plate for their eponymous blue sky pedal with the label fuck box on it. It caused a bit of a stir at Strymon and my potty mouthed collaborator was threatened with a discplinary action if I were to reveal his transgression. I hope that is now water under the bridge now that I’ve come out of the closet…. or rather fuck box.

Anyway, as a piano player I always feel somewhat out of place when walking into a guitar shop to look at pedals. It’s as if I’m about to do a bad thing, that I’m not welcome, I’m a fifth former in the sixth form common room, and when I open my mouth I’m certain everyone is going to laugh at me, but not in a nice way.

So I have conveniently skirted any real investigation into what these things actually are. I use them because they tend not to be made by technologists. They’re grungy, unpredictable, are called funny names, and have hand drawn face plates. We may have to buy our keyboards and computers from corporations to make music, but these things are made in small batches in garages, and workshops. These give us keyboard players, us composers that edge you will never get from a Roland or Yamaha. OK, I’m going to say it, these things make me feel cool.

So as part of my new YouTube series “Origins” I decided to find out once and for all what the difference was. I bought 3 Boss Pedals one for each saturation type to compare. I decided upon a rare Electric Piano Bass (think Ray Manzarek) as this gave me an instrument impedance signal from which I thought the best to assess these different saturation boxes. But also, for us fellow non-guitarists was a more familiar sound than a dry guitar. Then I decided to use some more “studio grade” saturation units to demonstrate my findings.

Overdrive: Jimi = A 1960s Mixer King overloaded.
Distortion: Overstayer
Fuzz: A (not on fire) Culture Vulture.

The real character of this experiment came with the lifting of the keys on the electric piano. With everything squashed to smithereens the somewhat clunky nature of this 1960s sounded like a musical instrument gasping for air after it had been strangled. I had to capture that. I’ve stuck a knob on the GUI so you can control the level of these…. And an LPF to de-fuzz if you need to. Enjoy.

Christian.

xxx