santiago, i feel you know your gear pretty good, so now i'm not sure
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"Recommend" is strong, but if you've got $50 to blow and a good enough ear to know if it's really making your tone "better" in a live situation and not just making frequencies you probably don't want louder, then you lose nothing by trying, I guess...
Granted, As i added more and more tube and less and less solid state, thats when i kept pulling the BBE out more. maybe its safe to say, it works better with solid state?
santiago, i feel you know your gear pretty good, so now i'm not sure
I don't get the appeal of BBE's for guitarists, for more or less the reasons Santiago mentions.
It's a peice of gear originally designed for full mixes, either while mastering or in live reinforcement, that subtly delays the bass frequencies to reduuce phase cancellation and give the perception of clearer low end. It does something similar to the treble as well - not sure the exact details, but phase correction, basically, to make sure that the frequencies all arrive at the same time to your ear, regardless what those frequencies are.
This makes a lot of sense on a full mix, but essentially, while it's not an EQ in any traditional sense, most if not all of its effect is limited in the low bass and upper treble frequencies. A guitar, meanwhile, resides between maybe 120hz and 6-8khz, with some more stuff above and below that, but that's where the "meat" is. More importantly, that's the only place you want it to be - below that and you're clashing with the bass, above that and you're fighting the cymbols. So, this begs the question; while it might sound pretty badass on its own, when you're playing with a bassist and drummer, do you rerally WANT to be increasing the perception of those frequencies on a guitar?
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AINT THAT THE TRUTH!
Agreed. Tone is always a matter of preference. You may hate it. I recommend you not buy it before trying it.
Nice. You just explained my feelings about BBE's perfectly with that statement. I use to love them but after I really started to play out live back in about 1998, I realized that it was just killing my tone.The BBE is great for the bedroom to sound "better" but honestly its going to take away from your clarity.