It may not seem obvious but even using two of the same pedal on different frequency ranges with slightly different gain settings is hugely powerful for adding clarity.
As a bass player, I’ve been clawing for one of these for years- I’ve had to do some very difficult routing in the past to make something like this happen
You can actually do that same thing with a Boss GT1000 core. She you split a signal path in the GT1000, you can add triggers at the split points to send the signal down different paths based on different triggers. So you can send high frequencies down one path and low frequencies down a different path. Or you can send light picking attack down one path, and hard picking down a different path. And so on. Incredibly useful.
Excellent review! Blending the characteristics of two different drives together is huge, and how an awful lot of pedals were created in the first place.
Conventionally speaking the use of a crossover will only really benefit instruments with significant bass content. It's going to be great for heavy music, or bass guitar. Probably won't be a hit for most guitar players though. I will say though, as a non-conventional guitarist myself. I want two of these.
I love modulated 80's drive tones and I'm thinking if I can just modulate the higher frequencies and leave the low ones pure, I can get the thump of raw overdriven tones and the shimmer of chorus on the highs - I need to try this...
Great review, however, demoing this through the compression RU-vid puts on its videos makes it hard to hear what this pedal has to offer. Question is, can we use a volume pedal (on one channel) to eliminate _only_ that side, and not have the volume affect our entire sound?
That's cool. It's an idea that's been floating around in the diy community for years. Some projects/schematics have been produced. In the end it wasn't worth the bother for me.
I have been using high pass filters for years. For low pass I use a two excellent graphic EQ pedals. In the 70's I taught guys how to program an Analog Synth even though I am not a keyboard player. This pedal is studio toy. Fun for the studio but for 99% of live players it is literally a waste of space. Space on your board. An instant buy is a rather huge stretch of reality for all but a small handful of guitar players.
I don’t think the appeal is necessarily as a variable high pass but as a way to create an opportunity for parallel effects processing. This is kind of a pain in the ass normally because you end up needing a pair of ABY boxes to split then re-combine your signal, so it’s a space saver for this kind of utility. And since it’s buffered you won’t have the weird impedance issues that come if you try splitting and summing your signal with y-cables alone. Most of the tone-chasing I’ve done is searching for the right gain stage of stacked overdrives/clean boosts and amp-in-boxes to get a sound that responds to picking dynamics like a tube amp in the sweet spot, but at low neighbor-friendly volume. I could see the use of having parallel drives that have different clipping diodes so you have more control over what harmonics you are introducing into the signal.
Nothing new under the sun! Use a Tweed amp, Plexi or AC-30 with linked channels and you get the same effect too, different, separately adjustable gain levels for bass and treble, only with much better sounding real tube amp tones and without any additional pedals and any cable salad. But if I hear the demo here, with it's too muddy, dull and fuzzy sounding bass and the too shrill, too scratchy treble, I anyway doubt, that the concept of this unit really works, as it should. If it worked, I should have heard the opposite: Cleaner, more focused, not at all fuzzy bass and much better sounding, more intense treble overdrive and also a not so muddy but much more transparent tone in general. Otherwise this unit makes no sense to me. I think, I better rely on the old-school solutions without such a farmer trapping pedal. Digitally I anyway can make such a crossover easily in a lot of plugins, which I have, for free, but I hardly use this option, because I did not get much better results with this option up to now. Use the right amp and the right guitar and you hardly need a pedal like this one or any pedals at all. My opinion!
