Modding an OCD for bass?

[davemascera]

Hi guys, I'm a huge fan of the type of distortion that the OCD provides.

We used it very liberally on my band's bass. The biggest problems arose while playing it live, because using a reasonable rig, the low end would straight up VANISH from the signal. In the studio, we would have two amps hooked up to a splitter that ran from the bass, one side going to an amp clean, low-frequency rich sound, and the other through the OCD to his normal amp, and then we would put two mics on each and mix the 4 mics with low/high pass filters to get it to sound how it does live except with those low frequencies still included.

Obviously, that's not really realistic for a live setting and is not portable or convenient either. We thought about getting an active splitting/mixing pedal set-up (splitting the signal from the bass, running one side through the OCD, into a 2 to 1 mixing pedal), but that seems almost as excessive in itself.

Before we did any of this stuff, we thought that maybe we'd just be better off finding a different pedal, or modding an OCD.

The problem with find a new bass pedal, is that they all have this lame Muse-like distortion that we're not fans of. Even the most expensive ones are guilty. We tried different Big Muffs, and Sans Amps, and they just don't sound nearly as good as the OCD, low-end problems aside. Some have argued to us that half the reason we like the sound better is BECAUSE the low-end is gone and doesn't go through the distortion chain, but in the least, we know it sounds to our liking with the low-end included because it was the end result of our 2-amp recording experience. I think the reason why I like the OCD so much is because it makes certain harmonics so rich and full.

So all of that said, does anyone have any suggestions as to how we could (or get someone else to) mod an OCD to pass that low end through without ruining the rest of the sound so we could potentially just keep everything pretty simple?

We're going to have an electronics dude look at it today and are going to test out a few of his custom pedals, but hey, it never hurts to exhaust your resources and hear some different opinions.

Here's how our recordings turned out in case anyone needs/wants a reference: https://soundcloud.com/moa-desert/sets

"Sky Stone" past the middle is a good example of how the two amp experiment turned out and "Clockwork" is a good example of how the bass + pedal sounds by themselves.

[R.G.]

The OCD probably cuts out bass before distorting. Many distortion pedals do this to avoid the distortion sounding muddy. (see "The Technology of the Tube Screamer" at geofex for why)

Better than modding the OCD, arrange to mix in some clean signal with the output of the OCD. This works incredibly well for bass use of normal pedals. Buffer the dry, arrange for a variable mix of dry to effect. You may have to also arrange to invert the phase of the dry signal or the OCD to avoid bass cancellation, depending on whether the OCD inverts internally. I used to be able to hold most effects schematics in my head, but the explosion of micro-different pedals and mods makes this impossible any more, so you'd have to look at the actual schematic.

[davemascera]

Yea, i've tried a few different setups similar to that, and the problem usually ends up being that it becomes too muddy in the low-mids with the type of mix between dry/dirty I'd like. I know there are ways around that but it starts to become a problem beyond that level of complexity because I wouldn't know where to start for possibly creating a low-pass filter starting at around 200-300 Hz for the dry signal prior to it entering the mixing pot. After all, you really only need the dry signal for the subs when the signal is dirty, but then how do you switch it off to clean if you're taking out half the dry signal to begin with?

I really like how this sounds for example, but it doesn't seem as if these pedals were actually ever in production and they were apparently essentially just a modified OCD anyway.

EDIT: More specifically I like the second to last sampled tone especially. It sounds manageable enough that I could cut it using the bass amp settings alone and it would be just how I want it. No idea how he got that sound out of a design similar to the OCD.