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Bass Player Magazine Editor’s Award for Multiwave Bass Distortion
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Posted by: Will Cady | Posted in: Gear Reviews,
Amidst all the excitement surrounding the new Soundblox Bass Envelope Filter, let's not forget the first of our bass pedals, the Soundblox Pro Multiwave Bass Distortion! The Multiwave introduced a great number of people to Source Audio and the possibilities of our effects when it was released in early 2010. Among those who became fans of the pedal are Bass Player Magazine who gave the pedal their coveted Editor's Award. Here is a snippet of their review:
"Simply put, the Multiwave offers one of the broadest palettes of distortion tones I’ve ever encountered, and it’s exceptionally good at producing unique and compelling sounds I’ve never quite heard before. It’s decent at producing standardissue overdrive in its NORMAL group of voices, but that’s not the pedal’s strength. It doesn’t quite offer the definitive hairiness of analog bass fuzz pedals like the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff π or the outof- control wackiness inherent in analog overdrives like the Z.Vex Wooly Mammoth. One difference the Multiwave does have compared to the analog alternatives is stunning note-to-note clarity and definition. This, however, is not always ideal, as there are occasions for muddy, meansounding distortion. The Multiwave’s SINGLE BAND settings get closer to that vibe, but they’re still a hair polite.
Don’t let the above scare you off, though: the Multiwave is an invaluable tone-sculpting device. Its magic lies in the FOLDBACK voices, with their unusual distortion curves. A typical distortion pedal uniformly clips the signal when it hits a certain voltage threshold, but foldback distortion creates a pulsing wave, with frequency regions that increase and decrease in amplitude as they hit the threshold. This generates a lot of new high-frequency content that’s particularly sensitive to input dynamics. The resulting tones are unusual, intriguing, and musically inspiring. Everything from a gritty auto-wah like quack to chirpy and bizarre synth-y tones lie within the FOLDBACK voices, and altering the DRIVE amount, the EQ, and the DISTORTION MIX adds seemingly infinite nuance and color to the palette. The OCTAVE voices employ a distortion curve with strong second-order harmonics, producing an octave-up sound. Like with the FOLDBACK types, the OCTAVE voices are remarkably sensitive to input dynamics and to the pedal’s other parameters.
The Source Audio Multiwave is a super-cool pedal. While many bass distortion pedals are variation on a theme, the Multiwave offers a unique alternative to the status quo. It’s better to think of it as a broad distortion-based tone-shaping device than a simple bass distortion. It’s most definitely worth checking out."
To read the whole review, check out the Bass Player Magazine website.
Also, hear the sounds of the Multiwave yourself by watching our own demo video:
Related Posts
- The Gear Page Reviews Source Audio
- Premier Guitar Reviews the Source Audio Programmable EQ
- Premier Guitar Puts the Soundblox Pro Classic Distortion on the Cover of Its Premier Gear Issue
- JamPlay, An Unbeatable Online Resource for Guitarists, Reviews the Soundblox Multiwave Distortion.
- Guitar Player Magazine Gives the Soundblox Pro Multiwave Distortion its “Editors’ Pick” Award