B-Bender faking

[konasexone]

Have any of you ever used a pedal to simulate a B-bender? I've been wanting a real B-bender but I don't own a tele, and frankly I love my HP special. I only wish I could do some Pete Anderson stuff on it and was wondering if any pitch shift pedal like a Boss PS could do it.

[mhammer]

B-benders and Bigsby palm-pedals provide selective-string vibrato. While you certainly CAN stretch pitch electronically, doing so in a string-specific manner would require a special pickup arrangement. Specifically, it would require something that provides separate outputs for individual strings. presumably 5 of the strings would get mixed to mono, and the to-be-bent string would be processed separately and then mixed with the other 5 strings.

Here is where it gets tricky. Divided or "hexaphonic" pickups, like those used for synthesizers, are typically very low output. In order to retrofit close to the bridge, where they need to be for pitch-tracking accuracy, they are very slender profile, so the magnets and coil are all wrong for conveying your "inner Clarence White". Since they are simply being used to detect the pitch of the note being played, and that information is used to drive a tone generator of some kind, there is no need to provide a normal guitar-level signal with full bandwidth. Your aim is to mimic a B-bender Tele, so you would want something that could still sound like a Tele on all 6 strings. I may be wrong, but I'm guessing your aim is not to sound like Pat Metheny playing chords in a Roland trumpet voice while bending one note (though it would sound kinda cool).

Now, having said that, the quickest way to getting an output signal that could lend itself to use of a Whammy pedal or other electronic means of pitch-bending, would be use of a humbucker that had adjustable (usually Allen style) screws for all 12 polepieces. If it's your B that wants bending, then you take the B polepiece out of one coil, and take the E, A, D, G, and E polepieces out of the other coil. Wire up the 5-string coil to one output, and the B-string coil to a separate output, feed the B-output to the whammy, then back to a mixer to combine both outputs, and Bob's your uncle. Well, one very complicated and confused uncle.

If you have no problems with B-bending in the synthetic-sound domain, then that will be much easier to implement using a MIDI synth and an expression pedal, although there is one heckuva lot of MIDI-implementation reading ahead of you.

On second thought, installing a B-bender is starting to look easy, isn't it?

[mhammer]

While not as widely known as the B-bender, and probably not as effective either, I will put in a plug for the Bigsby Palm Pedal. This is a Bigsby that allocates a lever to a specific string. The nice thing about it is that it can be installed on a variety of guitars without necessitating routing. Here's a place with more info:

http://bigsbypalmpedal.com/

One of the great moments in my life was having none other than Mr. Ted McCarty (yep, THAT one) take a brand new gold Palm Pedal box off the shelf, open it up and show it to me like it was a Fabergé egg or something.

[suttree]

get the james burton DVD, and you can get a lot of great country guitar licks with all that pedal-steel goodness, without a b-bender.

[konasexone]

Guys, how's the hipshot, any good? A buddy of mine tells me those palm pedals are not easy to play.

[mhammer]

I think they make other units too.

It just occurred to me that while the B-bender has a preset range of de-tune, the palm pedals do not. They are essentially string-specific Bigsbys and would not behave any differently than if you had, say, a wraparound tailpiece bridge (like a LP Jr) and ran only one of the strings past the bridge to a normal Bigsby unit. It would still be incumbent upon the user to determine, on the fly, how much they wanted to bend the string at that point, and know how to get there.

[bagpipe]

Arlen Roths book also has a bunch of these "fake" pedal style runs that you can play on a guitar, prefereably a Tele. In this one, on the last note, you hold the A note on the E string, while bending the B on the G string up to a C#. If you can combine this with a volume swell, it should give you a great fake pedal steel effect:

|---12---10--9--8--7---5-----------------------|
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|s13--s11----9--8--7---4b6---------------------|
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