Master Of The Obvious

I'm totally lovin' the Digitech Whammy pedal my wife gave me for Christmas. What the Whammy does is modulate the pitch and/or splitting and harmonizing the signal. In other words, by using the foot control I can raise or lower the pitch one or two octaves, harmonize with a raised or lowered fifth, third, fourth, etc, and detune. Additionally, there's a "dive bomb" feature where I can simulate dumping the bar and flapping the strings Floyd Rose style. Of course, the latter feature isn't that kewl or novel when I've got three guitars with locking tremolos, but it's still there, and if I wanna go all Van Halen or Dimebag-y without taxing the hardware too much, it's always an option.

Originally, what attracted me to the Whammy was the guitar playing of Steve Vai and later Magnus Karlsson of Last Tribe/Starbreaker etc., and how he incorporated whammy pitch bends in solos. Later, I also figured out that Herman Li and Sam Totman of Dragonforce use this extensively, and it makes for some pretty cool lead breaks/fills. And of course; most of y'all have heard the Whammy used in the rhytm/main riff of many a Rage Against The Machine song.

Last night, as I was recording guitar sections for the upcoming quiz, I had an epiphany, or rather a flash of the blandingly obvious. You're probably way ahead of me here, but what I figured out last night was that if I can lower the pitch with as much as two octaves........

...that's right; if I can lower the pitch by one or two octaves, I can add bass lines and make it sound pretty passable. Which is teh awesome, since I've been pondering my lack of a low-frequency rhytm section. All that was needed on the Line 6 Guitarport/Rifftracker was to adjust the amp and gain settings, and this actually works. Yeah, yeah it was pretty damn obvious.