You don't see many bass amps with built-in effects. We get to pick between active or passive and that's it. And I'm not talking corny DSP presets or a one-button compressor, I mean the old-school effects guitarists get from classy amps like Magnatone, Fender, et cetera. Effects that get their own input. Like vibrato. Like the Aqueduct vibrato.
With eight modes and convenient Flexi-Switch Technology which allows the choice between latching and/or momentary switching simply by pressing and holding the footswitch, the Aqueduct vibrato expands the musical possibilities of frequency modulation galaxies beyond normal or vibrato.
Aqueduct's Flexi-Switch Technology makes it easy to pop the vibrato effect in for a note or phrase without throwing your singer off pitch. And with Sine, Triangle, Ramp, Square, Random, Envelope-controlled Depth, Envelope-controlled Rate, and Envelope-controlled Pitch modes to choose from, there's plenty for bassists to love about the Aqueduct, from vocal fretless melodies (which I'll let Juan Alderete demonstrate) to disgusting randomized pitch bends (which are a little more my speed).
Vibrato, that's what Fender amps have, right?
Wrong. There';s a lot of confusion around this, so let';s set the record straight: though Fenderamps are labeled Vibrato, the effect the vibrato channel produces is actually tremolo, or amplitude modulation. We hear this as a change in volume. True vibrato, like the kind you get when you bend a string back and forth in tempo, is a fluctuation in wavelength, which our ears hear as a change in pitch. So how did this happen?
In 1954, when Fender placed ads for a new space-age guitar called the Stratocaster, the headline mentioned something called Tremolo Action. This, of course, was in reference to their new floating bridge mechanism which allows all six strings to bend at once and return to pitch. The key word in that last sentence is pitch. One can only speculate as to the Fender marketing department's logic for going with Tremolo Action as opposed to Vibrato Action, but the terms tremolo and vibrato have been used interchangeably ever since.
But what has EarthQuaker Devices ever done for us?
Well, for starters, we get all your Monty Python jokes. Beyond that, we designed the Aqueduct vibrato to be simple enough that you could treat it as a replacement for built-in amp vibrato, but deep enough to inspire new musical ideas, and if you really crank it, weird enough to be down for whatever. <
