Bass Effect Petal

[McGoo]

Does anyone out there know what petal Justin uses in the beginning of the Patient? Its after the first 4 measures then it kicks in, before Maynard sings.

[harbong]

it is a bass wah, and maybe an octave pedal.

[Marius]

Yeah, it's a Bass wah, plus some delay. And you must hammer-on with your left hand, and roll the tone-knob back and forth to get that wah-effect.

[conical johnson]

There is no wah in this song. You're right about the tone knob, although unless you have a Wal or an Alembic, it's not going to work for you.

Wals (and Alembics, but that's not what Justin uses, so I'll leave those out as they're a little different) use an unusual and powerful active setup. A typical active setup would be bass, mid and treble cut and boost. Just about every company uses something like this. Some don't have mid controls, some allow you to select the middle frequency, some (like Aguilar) are boost-only, but essentially, they take a particular set of frequencies, and boost or cut them, as per your manipulations of the controls. A passive bass can only cut, and most can only cut treble, though there are exceptions.

A Wal, OTOH, has 4 knobs: master volume, with pull-up for pick attack (essentially a treble boost), pickup pan, and low-pass filter (known as the tone knob, but totally unlike a typical tone knob) for each pickup.

A low-pass filter cuts all frequecies above the cut-off by a specified amount (in the case of Wals, I think it's 10dB). With the knob at 10, or fully clockwise, nothing will be cut. As you turn the knob counter-clockwise, it will roll off all frequencies (for the most part) above the cut-off, or the position the knob is at. The Wal electronics go further, by adding a boost of the frequencies right at the cut-off when you pull up the tone knob. It's hard to describe what this does to the sound, but it's exactly what's happening in the beginning of The Patient.

The sound is a lot like a wah pedal, and for us mere mortals without Wals, a wah is the closest we can get. But if you want to know what Justin used on the record, and what he uses live (and that was the question), it's his Wal.

If you don't believe me, or are interested in hearing the Wal's controls in effect, go to

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/walbassesnaturally/

If you are interested enough to sign up, go to the files section and look for the mp3 of the various settings. Very cool.

[buddha8916]

When my band played this song our bassist just used his synth and got a good sound out of it

[HomSar]

an auto-wah would also achieve a similar effect, you can set them so the amount of "wah" you get is proportional to how hard you play the note, so with the right configuration you can get those nice liquid bass sounds.