Best Bass Synth Pedal in 2019
Introduction: A Foreword about the Best Synthesizer Keyboards for Beginners
Are you ready to find the best bass synth pedal for yourself and your band?
Bass players have a huge number of effects at their disposal to shape their sound and create unique tones for their performances. Today we are going to talk about bass synth pedals and what to look out for when buying pedal for your pedalboard.
Let’s start with our countdown!
QUICK RUNDOWN
If you are in a hurry these are our top picks:
- All analog design
- 4 Voice mixer section mixes
- Attack control, two sub-octaves, 2-pole resonant low-pass filter
- Enhanced detune, enhanced algorithm
- 11 DSP variations of Saw, Square, and Pulse synth waves
- Enhanced Wave Shape Mode provides sharper sounds
- Based on the iconic DOD Meat box circuit design with updated components
- TRS Output and True bypass
- Wide range sampling rate/depth reducing effects
- Full metal shell
TOP 5: BEST BASS SYNTH PEDALS
We are starting our countdown with an amazing effect station by EHX – a company especially popular among the bass players’ community!
The bass synth pedal Electro-Harmonix gave us is a balanced-out effect unit that does exactly what it should do!
The four voices mixer section gives us the choice of a lower-sounding sub-octave, the guitar-generated original, the higher octave and an additional square wave which makes this pedal especially interesting!
The all-analog design and true bypass guarantee that nothing of your original tone gets lost.
The filter settings allow you to give many interesting shapes to your tone which would be impossible without this pedal.
The smaller issues that this pedal has is that not all tone combinations sound equally good and that it is not the most intuitive pedal.
You will have to spend a lot of time with the manual and a lot of time experimenting until you actually learn how to use this effect. For long sustained notes, you will also need a bass compressor.
The biggest turn-off is the fairly high price compared to some other effects on our list. That is why this great pedal comes only in place five on our list!
- Sound 85%
- Efficiency 90%
- Price 85%
- Fast slider controls
- Unique tone possibilities
- Good mixture of different settings and chassis size
- Requires a sustainer or compressor pedal
- Not all settings are useful
- Unappealing price tag
The EHX POG 2 is not your classical synth pedal – it is much more than that! What it lacks in some complex and weird tonal options that other pedals have is being made up for by a lot of possible octave settings that are easy to dial in during a live performance.
This nifty pedal is more of an octave pedal, but it has many differences to an ordinary octave pedal that make it behave similarly to a synthesizer.
POG stands for Polyphonic Octave Generator, and that is exactly what this pedal does!
First of all, you have four different octave outputs to choose from and how loud they will be, as well as a slider for the dry signal.
You can dial in all 5 at the same time, use only the two octaves bellow and two octaves above settings, or anything that comes to mind. This gives you an incredibly high amount of possibilities when creating your own synth-organ tone and is an incredible addition to any band.
Of course, it can be used with a guitar or when playing bass in a higher register to add the lower octaves, but it can also be used to add higher octaves to a lead bass solo. When used in moderation, it gives you a nice, mellow sound in addition to your dry tone.
As it is polyphonic, it tracks every single note so it can be used with chords, double stops and open string runs.
This pedal has spawned a whole family of similar pedals, including the Micro and Nano POG, the Soul POG and the Epitome 3-in-1 Pedal.
The reason why we have chosen this pedal over any other POG, especially the great Epitome, is the unique slider style layout of controls normally found in equalizers which makes this pedal very intuitive and stage-friendly.
The only downsides to this pedals are the ridiculously high price and the fact that the tracking in the lowest register is slightly slower. On the other hand, the price, which is certainly higher than that of an average pedal, is a result of great construction, design and functionality.
The POG 2 is filled with possibilities and tonal character and because of that, it is one of the favourite pedals among bassists and that id also the reason why it takes the well-deserved second place on our list!
For more about Electro-Harmonix, check out customer reviews on Amazon.
- Sound 100%
- Efficiency 100%
- Price 85%
- Endless tonal possibilities
- Easy-to-use slider controls
- Fantastic performance combined with beautiful design
- Not really a pedal for players on a tight budget!
Now is the turn of the BOSS among bass synthesizers (pun intended)!
The well-deserved third place on our list goes to this amazing pedal! If anybody would ever ask you why Boss pedals are so popular, you could simply show them this masterpiece and they would be convinced.
In this fairly small but robustly built pedal you have all the synth sounds you may need.
The four knob controls offer a wide range of possibilities ranging from very light coloring of the tone to turning your bass into a true modern synth.
The SYB-5 faithfully reproduces the classic sound characteristics of analog synthesizers – all neatly split among eleven different modes!
The pedal behaves predictively so you are not going to have too many spikes in your sound.
The Wave Shape Up mode allows you to make your sound very slap-bass-friendly and works with polyphonic input.
Another neat function is the Hold-Notes-Function which allows you to play a note, hold the pedal down and jam over played note.This allows for some amazing drone-notes, more interesting chords and solo-improvisation possibilities and it is something that would usually require a separate pedal!
The price/performance ratio for this pedals is by far the best on our list and that is just one of the many reasons why we’ve chosen this pedal as the best synth pedal for the money.
Other reasons include user-friendly tone controls, a good array of possible tones you can get from it, the high-quality build and the ideal Boss pedal size which fits on almost every pedalboard available.
All in all – there are simply no obvious downsides to this pedal – you either like it, or you don’t. If you are into modern synth sound and want to freshen up your playing, then this is just the right pedal for you!
For more about Boss SYB-5, check out customer reviews on Amazon.
- Sound 100%
- Efficiency 100%
- Price 100%
- Eleven beautiful modes
- Hold-Note function
- Perfect price/performance ratio combined with a 5-year warranty
- No complaints about this one!
Digitech offers a few interesting and modern pedals including a few different synth pedals.
Our pick from Digitech is the DOD Sub-Synth Meatbox which offers a subharmonic synthesizer effect combined with a low-octave generator because of which it was known as the speaker-popper!
This pedal is a re-issue of an older DOD pedal that has shaped the bass sound of the 90s pop music. It offers all the settings from the past, but it also offers more the original Meatbox, especially if you dial in the synth-tones.
It can also be used by a guitarist for generating a lower frequency so a power-trio setting with two of these pedals is a viable option!
The Meatbox offers a sturdy construction, a pedalboard-friendly by power supply input placed on the front of housing and does exactly what it should – it offers a mixture of bass-boost and bass-cut effects along with synthesizer effects.
The tone controls are easy to set up and very intuitive which make this pedal equally good in a studio setting and in a live performance.
One of the few limitations of this pedal it lacks an upper-octave generator. But if you take into account that that is not what the pedal was designed for, you see that this pedal does everything it should nearly perfectly.
Performance and utility are being delivered to the budget-conscious bassist who wants security and a solid wall of low-end frequencies – all packed together in this wonderful pedal by Digitech.
For more about Digitech DOD Sub-Synth, check out customer reviews on Amazon.
- Sound 95%
- Efficiency 95%
- Price 95%
- Beautiful design
- Does what it should extremely well
- A nice mixture of tonal possibilities in an affordable package
- Slight tracking issues
- Lacks a higher octave setting or a similar equivalent
The small and affordable pedals by Mooer have never disappointed us! In this small pedal you have almost everything you could wish from a synth pedal. Mooer gives you a fantastic product for a low price!
But the affordability is not the only thing that this pedal offers!
The small and portable chassis allows you to place this pedal on any pedalboard and you can even carry it around in a pocket if you’re tight on space!
While the size certainly doesn’t allow for too many controls like some of the bigger pedals, it still has a true-bypass.
This pedal has a digital bit crunching effect with an original circuit researched and designed by Mooer engineers after a long and in-depth experimentation process.
With other words, it offers a weird mixture of bit-crunching, sample rate reduction, fuzz, distortion and synth sounds.
It’s three different modes will behave differently on different instruments and the Lofi Machine can be used with a guitar or a synthesizer, too!
The tone controls are simple, but sometimes it can get hard to dial in a good tone.
It works well a funky slap bass sound and it will not completely destroy your low-end or your pops – while actually generating a nice backing of pleasant noise and fuzz.
If you know how and where to use this pedal, then this is for you. To truly understand how this pedal works, you need to take a look at how it behaves with a guitar.
- Sound 85%
- Efficiency 90%
- Price 100%
- Small and very portable
- Unique tone possibilities with three different modes and three knobs
- Very affordable
- Doesn’t quite keep up with the bigger pedals
- Not all settings equally useful
BUYER’S GUIDE:
Bass Pedals and Bass Effects:
A lot of effects like distortion and reverb have been used by thousands of famous bassists all around the world. And while certain effects like bass compressors come in the form of easy-to-use and transportable pedals, some effects are usually only found in big and heavy multi-effects.
Big pedalboards sometimes utilize huge multi-effect stations which are most often used in a studio setting or by more famous live performers. One multi-effect unit alone can often be good enough for smaller local gigs, but if your multi-effect lacks a certain type of setting or special effect, a stomp box pedal is the best solution
to get the last missing piece in.
A pedal is also good for really tight locals where every inch of space means a lot and making the right choice of the most necessary effect pedal for your bass can make a difference for your whole band.
With a good effect pedal, you can make even a cheap bass guitar sound amazing!
The Synth Bass Pedal:
One of the most popular effects of today is the synth bass or bass synthesizer. For those who may not be familiar with the effect – it is an effect which allows you to shape your bass tone, generate more frequencies and notes, change the color of each note while playing and in general get out a lot of sounds which are normally only available to keyboard players and users of synthesizers.
In a studio setting, using many different effects is possible, but only a pedal effect gives you mobility, an effect ready at any time and a solid number of tones which you can choose from without experimenting too much. As such, only a pedal is the choice for a gigging musician.
Only a few manufacturers have produces Bass Synth pedals. We have made it our task to give you a review of the best bass synth pedals available to the bassists! These pedals will allow you to get a more modern and original tone out of your bass guitar and allow you to play modern pop and electronica music without the need of keyboards or other digital instruments.
Conclusion:
We hope that you have enjoyed our countdown and that you agree with our choices! It wasn’t easy to make a choice between some of these pedals, but at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that you find the pedal that you like the most!
When choosing a pedal make sure that it will fit your needs. You will most likely find that you need a different type of sound and effect for live performances than for studio recording.
Also, keep in mind that paying more usually means that you are getting a more durable product so don’t always look for the lowest price tag!
If you’ve enjoyed our countdown, maybe you will also enjoy some of our other articles! If you’re into building a full pedalboard, make sure to read up our article on Bass Compressors! Or maybe you would prefer getting a new instrument?
Stay tuned for more reviews and articles and see you next time!
