EHX Bass Mono Synth

[Axolotl]

I've got one of these fresh off the oven for a few days now and I thought I'd share my thoughts:

Basically, it works really well. The tracking is really good, latency virtually unnoticeable. Much better tracking that on my Mel9. The sounds are all very usable for me, except maybe for "wub" and "acid" which are not up my alley. But even with these I was able to dial in interesting sounds tweaking the sensitivity and ctrl knob. The sensitivity adapts to your playing style and input gain. I play with quite a few ghost notes and the sens knob around 11-2 'o clock seems to be the sweet spot for me. The sounds are very musical and the pedal responds very well to dynamics, glissando, vibrato and bending. My studio partner who is a great bass player tried it and he was floored. Independent outs for dry and synth are a nice touch too. It's a great pedal really and it's been very inspiring for the few days I've had it.

That being said, I think 90% of the times I will be using my dry signal mixed with the effect. Dry at 100%, effect at 30 - 70% depending on settings sounds great and huge in my setup. (I play a Mustang bass most of the times). And of course, the clearer you play, the better the pedal responds. It may be just by mere contrast, but when I use just the synth sounds (no dry bass) the sounds gets logically smaller and a bit more artificial. And you lose of course the attack of the finger against the string which blends in nicely with all of the synth sounds. The dry bass complements the synths making a huge sound that doesn't sound like is layered.

The pedal also tracks guitar up to B in the first string (a guitar version is also being released). Also, using the expression pedal gives you access to other parameters that are not in the "control" knob, so you can tweak a bit further.

Sure this is a pedal with preset sounds and limited tweaking options but the sounds are great and I've got all I need to bring together electric and synth bass. I don't think I'd want to dig/tweak much deeper in a pedal like this. It does everything I expected and then some more. The price is kinda great at $120 and even the finish feels much nicer that the typical EHX.

[burpgun]

Glad to here this pedal is working out well for you. EHX priced it pretty nicely. I've got stuff from them I really like, and I use a regular MicroSynth on my bass all the time as a weird sort of thick distortion pedal. Had a Mel9 and it sounded too brittle to me, so I moved it on pretty quickly. For straight up synth stuff I got the Meris Enzo, but man, that's a complicated beast. Tracks great regardless of whether a guitar or bass is driving it, and it is capable of many sounds. But it's got a lot of knobs and it can be hard to recreate sounds you stumble into.