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 Korg G5 Synth Bass Processor At a Glance   arrowKorg News(662)   Streaming Video (138)
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arrowRated: 8.0/10arrow User reviews: (1)
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Rob Grainger writes:
The Korg G5 Synth Bass Processor is designed exclusively for bass guitar, but in my experience also works with simple mono-phonic bass lines from synths and other sources. The unit tracks a bass line (no chords) from an input signal in the range of a bass guitar and generates a synth tone in the same range.

First, select a waveform. 8 options are available:

1. Fast sawtooth. 2. Slow sawtooth.

These both generate saw tooth waveforms the same frequency as the original. Don't quite know the difference between fast+slow, but aurally they respond quite differently.

3. Fast sawtooth + sub-octave square wave 4. Slow sawtooth + sub-octave square wave

These two are great - as above but adding a square wave an octave below the original signal, producing wonderful subbass tones.

5. V. Slow sawtooth - as 2., but decays over a slower timeframe.

6. Distortion - not strictly speaking a waveform, adds noise to the original signal, but still tonal.

7. Distortion + sub-octave distortion. AS above, but includes a signal an octave lower than the original.

8. Harmonic Distortion, as 6., but with a warmer sounding distortion.

9. Filter - no waveform, the filter section (see below) works on the original signal.

A. Voice1 - adds a vocal-style waveform to the original, hard to describe. Has nuances of digeredoo and vocoder hanging about there.

B. Voice2 - as above, but more extreme. These two waveforms yields a wild range of effects.

Next, the signal passes into a filter section, with controls for Decay, Resonance, and Intensity. The intensity control doubles as filter-cutoff and high-pass/low-pass selector. Unfortunately, crossing the zero-point produces an audible gap in the signal, so careful of sweeping this one too much.

Finally, the synth signal can be mixed with the original signal.

The unit stores up to 9 user-definable presets, accessed via footswitches.

Good Points
This device is a great part of a bass-players arsenal, allowing you to mix sub-bass and synth tones with the original signal to produce a warped, funky, sound. Great for bootsy collins style bass-lines, it drips with 70's funk aural textures. The vocal "waveforms" allow you to create textures quite unlike anything I've found elsewhere for bass.
Bad Points
1. On its own, the units sound can be a bit weedy. I presume this is due to low-quality digital processing. Stick it through a more conventional analogue filter like a Meatball (see separate review) seriously bypasses this problem. 2. Audible switch at zero-point on Intensity control. 3. Perceived levels can change drastically switching between sounds - you'll probably want a volume pedal somewhere after this in your effects loop. These bad points can all be mitigated, but the unit should probably not be the first effect in your loop - you seriously DO want to follow it up with some juicy analogue processing to make it work to the best of its ability.
 

 Korg G5 Synth Bass Processor Specifications:

Analog IOs:
In, Synth Out, Mix Out, Tuner Out (Bypass), Phones
Midi IOs:
0
Other IOs:
Foot Controller -> Decay
EQ:
See Description
Dynamics:
See Description
FX:
See Description

 G5 Synth Bass Processor Links


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