[PLAYING BASS]
Hey, it's Stan with Fender.
We're here with Pete Griffin, and we're
looking at the Pour Over Envelope Filter today.
You may have seen the video with Josh Smith where
it looked at the Pour Over more from a guitar standpoint,
but Pete is a fantastic bass player,
so we're going to look at it from a bass standpoint.
Envelope filters have been around since the '70s.
It's kind of a super classic effect.
And Pete, you use one, don't you?
Yes, all the time.
It's a really fun effect.
It's actually the first effect I tell my students
to get because it's so much fun to just mess around with.
I noticed when you were playing it,
it's not so much overt like a special effect,
but it's almost more like part of your voice
or part of your tone.
Exactly.
Well, that's what's so great about it,
is it adds almost a vocal quality to your bass playing,
or your guitar playing, that is dependent on how hard you
hit the note.
So I'm a very expressive player with my right hand,
I kind of like to play soft and then quiet at times
and then louder, and kind of dig in,
and so it responds to that in a really, really fun and funky
way, ultimately.
Supercool.
The Pour Over is a traditional envelope filter.
So, an envelope filter is kind of a multifaceted thing.
There's a filter part of it, which is really easy.
The filter just removes some part of the audio spectrum.
And then there's the envelope part.
The envelope part, as Pete mentioned, it makes it dynamic,
whereas you dig in more in you're playing,
it'll move the filter frequency around.
This one has kind of a cool twist, too.
Yeah, when I was told I was going to be doing this video,
I mentioned that I like putting a distortion pedal
in front of the envelope filter that I use.
This one actually has a built in.
And what's so cool about that is by having there
be a little bit of distortion before it hits the envelope,
there are more sonics for it to kind of mess around with,
so it can kind of get into almost a synth territory
or a kind of angrier rock territory, as well
as all the amazing funk tones that it gets to.
And it makes a pretty good straight up just
distortion pedal alone when you're not
driving it dynamically.
Oh, cool.
Right on.
OK, so on the Pour Over, there's
really two sections to it.
There's the envelope filter part that's
on the right hand side of the panel.
There's a frequency control that adjusts the filter frequency.
There's a cue control that adjusts the sharpness of it,
or as you mentioned, it's kind of the wetness of the filter.
There's the drive control, and that's
how much of your dynamics will affect the filter frequency.
Then there's a couple of switches for low pass, band
pass, and high pass filters.
For bass, you mentioned earlier, I
agree, low pass is really probably the solid choice,
because it leaves all your low end intact,
and just messes around with the mids to high frequencies.
And then there's a switch here that lets
you drive up or drive down.
Next to that is the distortion section.
So there's a gain control and there's a tone control,
and this distortion lives, as Pete
mentioned before, it's before the actual filter section.
And there's a toggle switch down here
that's a bypass for the distortion,
so you can have it be clean or distorted.
And then finally, there's an overall level
control for the whole thing.
So you can match the bypass and clean level.
It's a true bypass, all analog pedal,
and like all the pedals in this series, the knobs light up.
There's a switch on the back that you
can turn it off if you want.
Before we get into the tones of the pedal,
our flat tone here is the American Performer Jazz
Bass, killer instrument, into the Rumble 800 head, into a 4
X 10" cabinet.
This is what that sounds like.
[PLAYING BASS]
Cool, let's get into it.
All right, I'm going to turn the filter on.
And before we get into some of the crazy stuff,
I just want to show you what the filter itself sounds like,
just the inherent quality of it.
So Pete's going to play a little bit
and I'm just going to sweep the filter.
I've got it set to low pass and I've
got the cue fairly high so it'll be very obvious.
[PLAYING BASS]
OK, I'll do the same thing, but I'll
turn the cue down a little bit, so it'll
be a little more gentle.
[PLAYING BASS]
So when the knob's up, it passes the full bandwidth
of the signal, and you can hear, you can make all the top end go
away to where it's just the really super low, rumbling,
foundational stuff.
OK.
I'm gonna switch to the high pass filter.
I'm going to do the same thing.
And I turn the cue up a little bit.
This time I'm going to start with it all the way down,
and as you play I'm going to sweep upward.
[PLAYING BASS]
World's tiniest bass.
Yeah.
OK.
Let's pop over to the distortion side.
The distortion circuit in this is related to the Pugilist
distortion pedal.
For those that know the Pugilist,
it's a little bit of a simplified version of it.
There's a gain control and a tone control,
so just switch it on.
The filter's wide open right now,
so it's not actually affecting the signal.
[PLAYING BASS]
Awesome.
So, pretty simple distortion circuit.
You can hear it goes from pretty clean to really
heavily over driven.
The tone control helps you tame some of the high end.
If you have an amp with a really loud tweeter,
it'll help tame some of the fizz from that.
And as you mentioned earlier, the whole point
for this thing to be here is it gives the filter something more
interesting to work with.
So why don't we dive into the actual sounds,
and, Pete, maybe you could show us what you do with this thing?
Yeah, let's just see what happens
when we turn the filter knobs all at 12 o'clock here.
That's a fun way to start.
Let's just see what that sounds like.
[PLAYING BASS]
So that's staying pretty close.
So let's kind of frequency and cue it up a little bit more
and see what that does.
[PLAYING BASS]
I like how it accentuates your fingers,
like the little pop that comes off your fingers,
you hear it more.
It's almost like a percussion instrument or something.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's-- this is a great setting for that,
because it's really responding to how hard I'm hitting it.
[PLAYING BASS]
Magically, I happen to know that the entire signal's going
through the filter right now, but it
sounds like it's kind of leaving the low end alone.
It sounds like it's not touching the kind of inherent bass tone.
Right, which is a very important part
of having a bass pedal, is making sure
that your low end frequencies are still there,
which is why the low pass version of the filter
is probably the way to go for bass on this pedal.
Cool.
Do you want to get into some of the drive sounds?
Sure, let's see what that does.
So with that same sound--
[PLAYING BASS]
--let's try adding the distortion to that.
[PLAYING BASS]
Awesome.
That's cool.
Can that get synthier?
Let's find out.
How do we do that?
Maybe more of the drive, more gain.
Maybe a little more cue.
[PLAYING BASS]
Super cool.
Yeah.
Hey, what about that down thing
you were talking about earlier?
Yeah, not every envelope filter
has the down option for the filter to close the harder
you hit it rather than open.
So let's switch that over from up to down,
and maybe turn the distortion off, just to hear it.
[PLAYING BASS]
Yeah, that's really fun.
Yeah.
Kind of opens up a little bit.
Cool.
Hey, maybe we could look at it not so much as an envelope
filter but just as a distortion pedal.
OK.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn the cue down.
I'm going to go to low pass, and I'm
going to open the filter wide open.
And then kick the distortion on.
And then what I'm going to do is play
with the filter a little bit while Pete's playing.
[PLAYING BASS]
You can almost get that '60s kind of big square humbucker
kind of bass sound.
Yeah, yeah.
Just kind of rumble the earth thing.
There's kind of an unusual setting you can do, too,
which is the high pass filter.
If you drive the high pass filter,
if you start it pretty high so that the sound is really small
and then you drive it downward, what
happens is when he plays lightly,
it's a really tiny little sound, and when he digs in,
it explodes and gets huge.
Let's give that a shot.
[PLAYING BASS]
So it's almost like a piccolo bass
for at second, and then a full bass.
Yeah, yeah.
So one of the things that I use envelope filters a lot for
is when I play with slap playing.
And what's so great about this one
is that the envelope doesn't stay open too long.
It responds pretty quickly where it goes back to close,
so it can open again if you're playing a lot of fast notes.
So let's hear what that sounds like.
[PLAYING BASS]
Yeah, you did a little triplet thing,
and I heard the filter open all three times on the triplet.
Yeah, it gets all three notes, yeah.
Very cool.
So that's a look at the Pour Over Envelope Filter
with Peter Griffin.
Pete, thanks for coming by.
Thanks so much.
Awesome.
For more information on the Pour Over
as well as the full line of Fender pedals,
head over to Fender.com.
And stick around for more videos.
[PLAYING BASS]