Eh bass microsynth full#

I tried out a friend's after hearing Nate Query of The Decemberists using one on 'The Hazards of Love.' Street price is $279. EH recommends that you don't try to power the unit in a chain from a single (V power source, but use the dedicated AC Adapter - wise advise. 10 sliders for Trigger, Voice Mix, Attack Delay and Filter Sweep. As it is, you’ll either love it for its quirky low-tech peculiarities or avoid it for, uh, its quirky low-tech peculiarities.The EH Bass MicroSynthesizer is packaged in a black aluminum thinline box with green and black applied graphics for settings and logo. One wishes that Electro-Harmonix would have upgraded the Micro Synth to current technical and construction standards. The Electro-Harmonix Micro Synthesizer Final Thought And for a couple of hundred bucks for a used one, it’s cheaper than the equivalent collection of individual stomp boxes. The filtering would sit well in a hip-hop or techno mix, and the background noise is just the kind of thing Beck would pump up in a scratch break. Add this together, and you might question the sanity of anyone who owns a Micro Synth.Īnd yet, the variety of distortions (including deliberately overdriving the preamp) would please any connoisseur of Edge City tone.

The background noise and leakage between voices is very high.

What works on the lower strings won’t work higher up, and vice versa. Two or more notes will either screech or disappear.

As noted above, you can only play single-note lines on most settings.

Pick too soft and notes disappear too hard and they blat like a foghorn. Lower settings create percussive quacks and grunts while higher settings summon vocalesque “awwww” and “mewhhh” sounds. The rate control determines the velocity at which the filter sweeps from the start frequency to the stop frequency. Think of the start and stop frequencies as vowel emulators and the resonance control as an added boost. The filter sweep section consists of four controls: resonance, start frequency, stop frequency and rate. This allows you to emulate everything from subtle bowed effects to those backwards tape solos so overdone for about six months during 1969. This functions like an automatic volume swell, sensing your pick attack and dropping the output accordingly. Whatever odd little swarm of buzzes you raise in the voice portion can be shaped with the attack delay control. Is the guitar voice in need of just a touch of background static? Tweak that square wave to taste. Is that octave tone a little too bright? Mix a little suboctave in. These four voices are processed in parallel, allowing you to mix their various idiosyncrasies as you please.

Eh bass microsynth full#

The octave voice could go head to head with Roger Mayer’s Octavia pedal, and the square wave voice is a fuzz box tone of Sixties vintage, full of crackle and fizz. The guitar voice is a dry signal, somewhat colored by the Micro Synth’s preamp circuit, and the only voice that will tolerate chords without generating wickedly erratic distortion. The suboctave voice adds a tone one octave below the guitar’s pitch, sounding very much like the Boss Octave pedal. In brief, the voice section consists of three forms of distortion and a clean tone. The controls are in two groups, voice and filter sweep, with a couple of sliders to control the note attack and entry of the filter characteristics. A trim pot on the back of the pedal sets the unit’s sensitivity to either single-coil or humbucker pickups, but all the important controls are in the form of sliders on the unit’s face. The Micro Synthesizer is housed in a sheet-metal enclosure measuring 8 x 6 x 2 inches.

Electro-Harmonix Micro Synthesizer Construction Imagine feeding your guitar to three fuzzboxes, an automatic volume pedal, and an automatic wah, and you’ll begin to get the picture. Unlike other guitar synthesizers, the Micro Synth is really a pedalboard’s worth of stomp boxes rolled into one, allowing your guitar (or whatever else you plug into it) to emulate the phat tones of vintage Seventies synth. Perhaps some clarity will emerge by first clearing up the “synthesizer” misnomer. Some exclaimed, “ It’s about time they reissued it!” Others muttered quietly, “ Yeah, I had one once, but I couldn’t tell if it was working right.” Love or confusion, indeed. When the word got out that we are reviewing Electro-Harmonix’s reissue of their Micro Synthesizer, reactions were decidedly mixed.

5 Electro-Harmonix Micro Synthesizer Video Review