MXR Phase 90 with bass ?

[Basstyra]

Hello,

I just got this pedal, and it happens to have a really, really great sound, just what I was looking for as a phaser, but...

I'm bassist, and the phase rotation on the bass is very light. With the tonality off (trebles cut), I hear nothing. And just a slitgh rotation in the treble when the trebles are on.

Is that normal, to begin with ? Or can it be my pedal who doesn't work the way it should (bought used) ? Is there any mod to have a deeper modulation ?

I love this sound, really, but it is unique, the pot doesn't really have an effect on the sound.

[Basstyra]

Ok, I found myself... An inner pot allows to trim the depth. It was just too light for a bass, or for what I was looking for.

Anyway, I'll probably true bypass this unit. Would you suggest any other cool mod ?

[bassmeister]

The internal trimpot in the MXR Phase 90 is used to set the bias of the sweep. I have the same experience as you have, the factory preset bias isn't any good for bass, but with som tweaking you get good results.

If you want to do other mods on this phaser, just try a search in this forum. A popular mod seems to be removing R28.

[Basstyra]

The bias of the sweep ?
Hm, there I go again, I realise I don't even know how does a phaser work...

I'll have a look at the schematics, to begin with...

Thanks !

[Basstyra]

Hello again...

I recently realized my phase 90 didn't sound the way I wanted, and playing with the trimpot I realized it probably moves the frequency around which the phase rotation is applied. But on bass, the variations it products are useful for just a little of the pot sweep. Do you think it's worth it to put an extern pot at this place ?

I found and read this :
http://www.harmony-central.com/Effects/Articles/Phase_Shifting

So the speed pot of the Phase 90 is a speed/rate pot, no problems there. But could the other parameters be changed ? The R28 mod seems to mod the feedback, I found articles on that here, I'll read them rigth away. => http://home.earthlink.net/~ehansen3/diy/phase90.htm

Anyway, has anybody heard of or tried to mod the Phase 90 to add a depth pot and/or a range pot, and/or something else ? I love the Phase 90 sound, but find it's not enough versatile.

In the page posted above, a volume mod is indicated, I'm interested....  

[Bernardduur]

I tried the phase 90 on bass; I hated it. I wanted a backup for my phaser I use on both guitar and bass but I came to the conclusion I don't want the 90 and keep th eoriginal phaser. Oh sorry, the original phaser is a Pearl PH-03 phaser; it has a manual adjustable sweep function so I can dial in any special freq. band for bass and one for guitar. Totally blows everybody away when used on bass after a distortion unit.

As for the phase 90; I listened to the Moosopothamus site (hope spelling's OK) and they have this bass-thru pedal that will alter make your bass more "compatible" with a guitar pedal (as in the phase 90). Try it, it may be the solution.

[Basstyra]

Do you mean this : http://www.moosapotamus.com/paraloop/paraloop.htm ?

Well, I don't know how it could make a pedal more "compatible" on bass. It's a // mixer (I allready built one similar to this), extremely useful for distortion, but no point to use this for a phaser, as the phaser effect is allready about adding a modulated sound to the original.

[Bernardduur]

Not exactly; it splits the signal in two (higher freq. and lower freq.) and leads the higher freq. through the guitar pedal, later mixing them together.

[Basstyra]

Well, not like it is right now. You can mod it, add a filter before the effect loop (a high pass) and use the low pass in the dry, to use it like you describe.

But I don't think it would be a solution there. A friend of mine is about to do such a mod on a distortion and a wah, splitting the signal to effect only the trebles, but personnaly I don't really like this approach.