(bass guitar playing)
- Hey, this is Pete Griffin, and I'm here with
Stan Cotey with the Fender Pedals Team.
What you just heard is the Fender Downtown Express
Pedal going straight into the Rumble 100.
The Downtown Express Bass Multi-Effect
has everything you need for killer bass tone.
All the bass essentials in one box.
I'm gonna have Stan walk you through it.
- Thanks, Pete.
The Downtown Express is kind of a one stop shop
for bass players.
The pedal was designed by Alex Aguilar
who's pretty well known in the bass world.
It's got some cool features.
It's got a studio style, so a true RMS compressor.
It's got an overdrive that's specially voiced
for bass and has a cool cabinet simulator
as part of it.
It's got a 3-Band EQ.
And then there's some really cool
convenience features.
There's a DI output, and you can select
where it comes from, and there's a
tuner mute foot-switch and a separate tuner output.
- So, up top you heard me playing through
the overdrive pedal, but we've had the drive a little low,
so let's let me play around a little bit more,
and we can show what else this thing can do.
- [Stan] Crank it up.
(bass guitar playing)
So, it can get from pretty lightly driven
to pretty massively driven.
- Yeah, that's massive for sure.
- Yeah. This has a cool thing where
Alex built a cabinet emulator into it.
So, if you're playing it through a modern bass amp
with a tweeter, a lot of distortion pedals
would get really fizzy.
And, so this doesn't do that.
This stays natural. - Seems to tame it a little.
Yeah, it's great.
- Yeah, and you mentioned this before we started rolling,
but the other thing is it doesn't rob the low end.
Alex is really careful to preserve
all the low end fundamental stuff from the bass.
- Yup, all right.
So, we heard the overdrive.
Show me this compressor.
- Yeah.
- I'm really into compression for my slap playing recently,
so maybe you can tell me more about it.
- Cool.
This is a studio style compressor so it's a true RMS type,
and the difference is, you know,
versus a typical guitar stomp pedal,
is a guitar stomp pedal just listens to the peaks.
This actually listens to how loud you're playing
and tries and evens out the overall playing volume.
So, feature wise, it's got a threshold control
which, of course, that's the amount of compression.
It's got a gain control.
So, sometimes when you compress it,
it's actually turning the volume down
so the gain control helps bring it back up again
where you can here it.
And then there's a blend control.
And you can blend from 100%,
your original bass tone untouched
to 100% of the compressor or kind of anywhere in between.
If you use too much compression,
it's neat because you get almost backwards
kind of swell effects or you get really cool
dynamic things, but sometimes it takes
a little bit of the life out.
So, blending in your original attacks
really helps kind of bring some normalcy back to it.
- Cool.
- Yeah, if you wanna play I'll-
- All right, let's try it out.
(bass guitar playing)
- See, hear it to go from kind of natural,
where it was just on some of the notes
you were playing, to pretty full on smashed,
and then I blended some of the original tone
back in again.
- Yeah, but it's also musical and usable.
- Yeah. - It's really cool.
- Yeah, hopefully it doesn't get in your way.
- No, not at all. - Hopefully,
it just helps a little bit.
- Yeah, cool.
How about the equalizer?
- The equalizer is a 3-Band equalizer,
so it's got treble control and mid-control
and a bass control.
And the cool thing about this equalizer
is the mid-band is done with an inductor.
So, there are some classic bass amps
from the 60's and 70's that use inductors
as part of the mid-range sound control,
and it has a particular sonic signature
that's really cool.
- Maybe we should check it out.
- Yeah, that sounds good.
(bass guitar playing)
- Very cool.
I really like how this particular tone
with the mid stumped a little bit.
It might be good for some kind of slap thing.
(bass guitar playing)
Oh yeah.
I may have found my new favorite slap tone.
- Hey, while we're here, let's just talk
about the convenience features of this thing.
So, we mentioned it's got a DI output.
There's a switch on the back that allows that DI
to come from different places.
So, you can assign it to where it just picks off
the straight signal from your bass,
or you can set it to where it's after the effects,
or you can set it to where it's after the effects
and the EQ.
And what's cool about that is you can use the EQ
for just your bass amp on stage,
but keep the front of the house
to be able to have their own equalizer
which is kind of a cool feature.
There's a master blend control.
So, if you're, you know, mid-gig
and you need just a little more, a little less,
you can just reach down with your foot and kick it.
And then there's a separate tuner output.
So, you can have a tuner that's always on
and not in your signal path.
Some tuners have this way of magically
making things sound worse going through them,
so this keeps the tuner off of that,
and there's a mute foot switch over here
so you can silently tune.
- Right.
All right, well there you have it.
That's the Downtown Express Bass Pedal.
It's got a ton of great tones all in one box.
It would be awesome for when you're playing
a back line gig and you're not sure what amp you got,
so you know you'll still sound killer.
Check out the full line of Fender pedals
at Fender.com and stay tuned for more videos.
We'll see you soon.
(bass guitar playing)