Roy Mitchell-Cárdenas

Roy Mitchell-Cárdenas plays bass for Mutemath, a band that, in the words of JHS founder Josh Scott, "focuses heavily on the feeling and movement of the drum and bass rhythm section"¹. In a JHS Pedals interview about using guitar pedals for bass, he walked through his approach: a 1978 Fender P-Bass with flatwound strings, a small always-on pedalboard, and on at least one occasion no bass amp at all, with a JHS Colour Box preamp pedal standing in for it¹.

A JHS Colour Box in place of an amp

The most striking part of Mitchell-Cárdenas's setup is what is missing: the amplifier. As he put it in the JHS interview, "No amp. We're going to use the Colour Box [instead]"¹.

The JHS Colour Box, released in 2013, is a guitar pedal built to re-create guitar "direct-to-console" tones, using dual Neve 1073 style studio preamp topologies and a tuned Baxandall EQ²³. Guitar World described it as a pedal "designed to replicate studio desk tones," and "more comprehensive and advanced for those looking for something a little extra"⁴. Designer Josh Scott traced its origin to 2012, when he had "a crazy idea for a tone shaping device that had never been done before in the world of guitar pedals," an idea that grew into a full-blown Neve 1073 style studio-grade preamp in a pedal⁵⁶. It carries a bypass footswitch like any stompbox⁷, and its red-knob EQ section is where its distortion, fuzz and overdrive sounds live, the part JHS later simplified into the Crayon⁸.

For a bass player, the appeal of running a preamp pedal like this straight to the desk is the same one studio engineers have used for decades: a direct signal with real EQ and gain shaping, no cabinet, no microphone. Mitchell-Cárdenas's studio history points the same direction. As he described it, "We've used the Vox AC30 and other guitar amps for bass to get the grit and mix in with a clean DI"¹. The Colour Box setup takes that clean-and-dirty idea and puts the whole thing in one box on the floor.

His pedalboard

In the interview, Mitchell-Cárdenas named the pedals he normally keeps on, plus a few he reached for in a Mutemath-flavored jam¹.

One pedal he does not use, despite it being a bass-specific EQ: the BOSS GEB-7. Asked about it in the interview, he answered simply, "I just don't use it"¹.

Keeping low end under drive and fuzz

Mitchell-Cárdenas's core problem as a bass player using dirt pedals is one every bassist hits: drive and fuzz pedals thin out the low end. His fix is placement. "To compensate for that, I started adding EQ at the end to boost back the low end. That solved it"¹. In the session his GE-7 boost sat around 100 to 200 hertz, a few dB¹.

His other fix is blending. "We always combined a clean bass sound with something dirty, whether it was a pedal or a guitar amp"¹. A pedal with a parallel clean blend does the same job in one box: JHS points to the Morning Glory on bass, where "that parallel clean allows you to keep a lot of your low end and add just a little bit of that subtle fizz underneath your bass playing so that you can cut through the mix"⁹.

For players building a bass pedalboard on the same pattern, the pieces are: dirt pedals that sound good but eat low end, a parallel clean blend or a second clean path, and an EQ last in the chain to restore what the dirt took away.

Questions