The Bass Sax Pedal
Blowing Bass: Building an octaver for saxophones
The Problem: Saxophones feature a sonic profile which resemble the human voice - you can do everything from whispering to shouting. On a physical level, this similarty comes from the facts that they both do have acoustic spectrums that are defined by complex harmonic patterns of formants.
Formants are resonance frequencies that arise in both the human voice and musical instruments due to the shape and size of the vocal tract or instrument's tubing. This formant patterns result in saxophones sounding "unnatural" when simply down-octaved using regular pedals or VSTs. That's why, unlike the electric bass, it's nearly impossible to give saxophones the strength and power in the low-end that are so important for a modern sound.
The idea: The motivation to tackle this problem came in conversation together with amazing Kristof Konya who provided the integral knowledge about embedded programming which made this pedal possible. The solutions is to build a digital pedal featuring a DSP processor performing autocorrelation based pitch detection to feed a sub-oscillator. To give the bass the characteristic of a blown instrument, specific audio features are extracted from the spectral data and tweak several parts of the synthesis. The resulting output is a unprecedented mix of deep bass and familiar saxophone sound.
The implementation: In progress, first time successfully featured in Brass Riot’s concert on Fusion Festival 2023. We are collecting live experiences to optimize the pedal.