I'm pretty sure if I were a chaos marine I would be a Noise Marine.
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| One of these freaky fuckers. |
SO. I bought a bass rig recently. This is not just any bass rig, it’s a really NICE bass rig. I’ve been playing bass for the last year or so, and have been using our drummer’s gear. First, an Ampeg SVT amp with a 6x10 “refrigerator” speaker cab (these really are the size of a refrigerator) which I managed to almost explode one day (thankfully the repairs were minor, I was really worried and pretty upset about it) and then, not wanting to take any chances with the Ampeg any more, a Gallien Kruger RB800 amp with an Eden 4x10 cab, which sounded GREAT, much more in line with the way I play which, no matter how I try to hide it, is rooted in my experience as a guitar player rather than as a bassist. The Ampeg rig is one of those things you feel more than you hear, the GK is the other way ‘round. They are both amazing pieces of equipment, but they way I play tends to work better with the GK’s more modern (to my ears at least) sound.
But having access to two world-class bass rigs wasn’t enough for me, and when I got a little bonus from work, I decided I should get my own. Mainly this was motivated by the desire to mess with and push the gear a bit and not worry about breaking something that belonged to someone else. After traveling around the area for a while trying out different gear, I narrowed it down to two main contenders –Mesa/Boogie, and this company I had never heard of before: Glockenklang. I was looking through some internet post where people had named a bunch of “boutique” amp manufacturers, and the name Glockenklang came up along with Demeter and Trickfish. I started researching the company a little and liked what I heard. One of the big problems with getting something boutique is that you almost never get a chance to try it out before you actually buy it, but here I got lucky. The amps are made in Germany and are very difficult to find in the US - there are three guys in here who act as distributors, I think one in New York and one in Nashville, and the last one of them works out of his house and happened to be about a ten minute drive from me - so I actually had a chance to go over there and try it out. I wound up choosing the Glockenklang (amplifier and cabinet). I don’t think I have ever heard an amplifier that is so incredibly transparent before. I learned after the fact that apparently a lot of high-end bass luthiers use these as their reference point because of this transparency – you hear the true character of the bass itself without very little coloring by the amplification. For a bass with a great sound, that sound translates perfectly. It transmits the bass and the way the bass is being played, no more or less – and in some ways that makes it kind of an intimidating piece of gear because it also means there is no hiding – you can’t bury your fuckups in a bunch of low frequency gunk, whatever you play is going to come through clearly. But if you play well, conversely, that comes through too.
Also, it’s fun to say. “Glockenklang.” Go ahead. Say it. Out loud, not in your head. Don’t mind the strange looks.
Now say it with a German accent.
Fun, right?
I also got really, really lucky when I bought my bass a year or so ago. I knew I wanted a five or six string, I knew what my price range was (not huge - the bass amp and cab are the first pieces of musical gear I've spent a decent chunk of money on in my life, honestly - like, I spent more on the 28mm Reaver I have than I ever spent before on musical gear), other than that I didn’t know a hell of a lot about basses. There are two mom-and-pop music shops near me. One is really new and bright inside and it smells nice and it’s in a pretty nice area, and there are a bunch of long haired high school kids who work there. They offer lessons, and it is not unusual to see some mom or dad dropping off their little kid for a lesson. Overall it’s a pretty good shop, when I have something minor to pick up like strings or a cable or something, it’s where I go, and it’s where I would probably send someone who was brand new to playing, because the both the proprietor and the kids he hires are always ready to come out from behind the counter and help you with something or explain something.
The other shop is old, and a bit dark inside, and it smells a bit like a bar, and that may be because of the bar attached to it next door which looks like a true dive, or it may be that it actually was a bar at some point. The other businesses nearby are a pawn shop and a motel with "nap" rates. There are odd corners stacked with ancient, battered gear, most of which is covered with a fine layer of dust. It’s ambiguous if this gear is actually for sale; there are no price tags on it, and it is certainly not displayed in the way that one would expect stuff in a store window to be displayed. I think some of it probably belongs to the folks who work at the shop, but it is difficult to tell.
The proprietor, a guy named Mike, looks a little like a plump Weird Al Yankovic, has a last name like Wyczolkowski and one of the thickest south-side Chicago accents I have ever heard. The kind that’s like “Hey, ma, I’mma take my sammich ta da frunchroom so I can look out dat liddle winda in da door.” He is always hunched over behind the counter working on an instrument. I mean ALWAYS. There’s usually a literal pile of guitar cases next to him, literally he will have 50+ guitars to do set-ups or repairs on at any given time. He only very rarely will interrupt his work to come out from behind the counter and help with something. This is where experienced musicians go for repairs and tweaks to their instruments, and I think that’s what he makes most of his money on. We are both ex-guitarists who switched to bass, and we share a love of goofy old BC Rich guitars with SUPER pointy shapes. That’s actually how I met him – when I wanted to fix up my old Warlock a couple of years ago, our guitar player recommended him to me.
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| The Warlock, after being customized. I bought this in 1990 and it's the only piece of gear I still have from that time period. It was cheap and pointy, which suited my pocketbook and my sense of style as a teen. The nut came off in about '98, and I tried to replace it myself and fucked that up pretty pretty pretty bad. Last year, in a labor of love, I fixed it and then some - new handmade brass locking nut, bridge, and tremolo from Glen Graff, who used to work at the BC Rich Custom Shop, all new electronics, and Seymour Duncan Nazgul pickups. This thing fucking SHREDS now. |
So I happened to be in Mike's shop picking up the Warlock after getting a setup done on it. I had just started playing bass, and had been using all borrowed gear, but I figured I was probably in it for the duration and would need to get my own stuff sooner or later. I asked him if he had any five-string basses he would recommend, and he was like “Yeah, actually I just picked up a Warwick so my old one is for sale if you want to pay cash,” and he named a price that felt a little like I would be stealing. That’s how I wound up with mine, which is a Fender five string. And it is just a fantastic bass. As our drummer remarked, it is one of those instruments that sounds good no matter what you plug it into. And when I plugged it into the Glockenklang, the sound that came out just made me really happy. The transparency of the amplifier really worked in this instrument’s favor.
Anyway! Back to the amp! When I bought this amp, the guy who sold it to me gave me a pair of “rack ears” in case I wanted to put this amp into a rack. And I was like “huh. Maybe I will.” Racks are kind of outdated now, when you can literally bring a pedalboard with a modeler on it and plug right into a house PA, but when I was a kid, a lot of the professionals I knew had rack gear, and while it’s fallen out of favor for live shows, it’s still fairly common in professional studios. But in the old days, guys would slide the amplifier in there, sure, but then there would be all these other units in the same rack: compressors, equalizers, effects units, power conditioners, tuners, exciters, limiters, all sorts of shit with cool, mysterious blinking lights on it.
Shortly after I bought the bass amp, I happened to see a dusty-ass Alesis Quadraverb at Mike’s shop. Perhaps the best bassist I ever had the pleasure of working with, this guy James who sadly passed away in the late 90’s, had a Quadraverb, and he used to use it both for his live rig and for home recording. I loved the way the reverb and delay effects sounded and seeing one in the corner of stuff that might or might not actually be for sale got me thinking. I asked about it, and if it was for sale, and he laughed and said “I don’t even know if that thing works.” I told him that when he found out, to let me know, I was interested. He shrugged and was like, “Tell ya what, if you want to take it home and test it, you can. Then just let me know. Thing is, it doesn’t have a power source.” I have a piece of gear that is a power source with a bunch of adapters for different connections – it even has a nine volt battery connector. So I was like, I bet I have something that will work, and off I went with the Alesis tucked under my arm.
Well it turned out I didn’t have the right power source. It was this bizarre thing with a four pin connection. But they do still make them – they are called 4 Pin DIN connectors for what it is worth – and it turned out that one of the things they powered was a multi-effects unit that I know our guitar player used to have. I called him up and he actually still had the whole unit. I borrowed it from him, and plugged the Quadraverb in, and lo and behold it worked! I scrolled through the presets – most of the original factory presets were still there, though some anonymous former user had modified preset number 97 and called it “I LOVE PUSSY” while #98 was “FELLATIO” and #99 was “THE HUMPER.” I plugged in a latching footswitch I have and even THAT worked. So I called Mike and asked him what he wanted for it, and he was like “it’s yours man.”
I probably should not have gotten so excited. The damn thing was made in 1987 – it’s almost as old as I am, and I barely function, so I should not have been surprised when, a couple of days later, the LCD screen suddenly went dark and the clipping ladder lit all the way up and stayed there. All I could get out of it were these kind of strangled, decimated little noises that sounded like someone had bitcrushed them nearly into nonexistence. I opened the unit up, hoping it might be just dust and stuff causing a short – the midi through jack in the back was missing, leaving a hole a small animal could crawl into, and I half figured I would see a bunch of cobwebs or something. But it was surprisingly clean inside, nearly no dust at all. I’m pretty sure one or more of the capacitors finally went bad, but I don’t know enough about that stuff to tell for sure, or even how to discharge a capacitor safely, so I backed off. I may get it repaired at some point – I’m guessing it’ll probably cost me something like 75 bucks at a place not far from me that does amplifier and other electronics repair.
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| The Alesis - you can see the clipping ladder on the left, all lit up :( |
The thing is, the Quadraverb and the rack ears got me thinking about the Frankenrig. I started poking around and researching rack equipment and it turns out that used rack equipment, because it’s a bit dated at this stage, is insanely cheap compared to when it was new. There are still a few holy grail pieces out there that are thousands of dollars, but you can get a lot of top-notch units for next to nothing. A lot of guys are like “oh man racks are really heavy, that’s too much to lug around, and they are too complicated, and miniaturization should be embraced.” But you can get a shallow 4 or 6 unit rack and it really is NOT that heavy and I like being able to case everything up and protect it when it’s moving so the potentiometer settings don’t get accidentally changed, and honestly, to me, it feels much more organized to have everything in a rack than it would to have a massive pedalboard with a rat’s nest of cables going every fuckin which way, and if one of those cables dies you can spend an hour trying to figure out what went wrong and why your gear isn’t working. So I wound up getting a rack and sticking the amp in it along with a power conditioner and a tuner. The tuner is WILD, crazy red and blue and purple lights zinging all over the place, I think I might leave it on even when I don’t need it just for folks on LSD to have something to watch. I kept an eye on reverb.com for a bit and wound up finding a really nice and fairly modern effects unit, this Digitech from the late 200's early 2010's, and the foot controller that goes with it for probably 20% of what it originally cost, and that went into the rack as well. I have come to think of my bass setup as “The Frankenrig,” - this stitched together thing made from too much technology and derangement. The Frankenrig has been born from this combination of a really nice standard bass amplifier and cabinet married to a few more modern utility rack pieces and a couple of crazy old effects units. The one I have in there currently isn’t THAT old, I guess, probably 2010ish – one thing I have to say about musical gear is that it is actually still made to last, unlike washers and dryers and TVs and EVERY GODDAMN THING UNDER THE SUN that seems to work for between 8 and 12 years and then breaks and winds up being more expensive to fix than to simply buy new. For some reason it REALLY pisses me off that they make stuff like this. We have two refrigerators. One looks like it is from about 1981 and the other looks much nicer, steel doors, and I think it’s probably from about 2015. I would be willing to bet green American dollars that the newer fridge shits the bed before the older one. But musical gear is still made to be repaired rather than replaced, and I actually like the reverb and delay on the Alesis unit a lot. It’s lush, ambient; it feels wide in a way that the reverbs on the Digitech don’t. But the Digitech has the single best pitch shifter I have ever used (outside of like six thousand dollar Eventide modules anyway), and I really like a lot of their other effects. I’m still in the process of menu diving and getting everything dialed in the way I like it – after that (and when my bank account recovers a little) I will probably look at either repairing the Quadraverb and slotting it into the rig or getting something like a 31-band EQ.
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| The Frankenrig Mark I. I can't get over how much it looks like an like an altar to the gods of volume. Kneel, dog! Kneel in supplication to the LORD OF LOUD! |
It was seeing a dual equalizer that got me thinking about the Frankenrig Mark II. I was browsing through EQ units (as one does) and saw that a lot of them were stereo. I started wondering why you would want two different 15 band equalizers if you weren’t playing a keyboard, and then I recalled seeing I think Stanley Clarke back in the 1990’s and realizing he had two output jacks on his bass, and wondering at the time what the heck that would be used for, but knowing that whatever the hell he was doing it sounded fucking GREAT. He was using a form of bi-amping. It turned out he had each pickup running to its own jack so that he could equalize them differently. Bi-amping in general involves using a device called a crossover to create a split in a signal at a chosen frequency so you can send the signals to different places, often to different amplifiers which would then be equalized differently. You can, for example, send everything 1500hz and below to one amplifier and everything 1501hz and above to another amp. It was kind of a holy grail of bass tone back in the day, because it allowed you to do things like run overdrive on the mids and highs of a bass signal but keep the bottom end clean, so you kept the clarity and punch of the low tones but still got the growl, grit, and dirt of an overdriven signal.
Then I thought a bad, bad thought. And that thought was: “Well, you’ve got a pretty nice guitar amp just sitting at the practice spot with no one using it.”
So I started looking into crossovers and splitters, and somewhere in there I started thinking about not just sending the upper frequencies of my bass signal to the guitar amp, but maybe sending a signal with a raised pitch to my guitar amp so I could play guitar and bass at the same time. I realized that I could probably do what I wanted to do with an Octavizer as long as it had two outputs one for the signal with the effect on it, and one that is a “dry” out, without the effect even when it is turned on. This would allow me to run the bass into the pedal and then split the signal and run the “dry” out to the bass amp and the effected out to my guitar amp. There are couple of units that have this, Boss makes one and so does Electro-Harmonix. And I would still have space in the rack for the Quadraverb (if I ever get it over to Deltronics to get repaired) or I could probably take my Orange combo guitar amp, remove the amplifier from the chassis and slot it in somehow, and then use a cab for speakers instead of a combo. That would take some doing. Removing the head from the combo is easy enough, and there is a standard quarter-inch speaker connection in the amp, typically used for the speaker in the combo unit (but it's not hardwired in, which many combos are). The big problem would be finding a casing to replace the wooden panel on the top and cover the interior of the amp. Though I may be making it too complex - it's possible that the orange panel wouldn't interfere as much as I think and I could just screw a pair of rack ears on the thing and call it done.
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| Pics to help clarify what the hell I am talking about. This is what my guitar amp currently looks like. It's what is called a combo, where the amplifier and speakers are all in the same chassis. |
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| Someone removed this amplifier from the combo chassis. The thick orange bit on top is what I would probably need to replace if I wanted to actually put it into my rack, but I have never seen this done, and have no idea how to go about fabricating the piece myself. |
Splitting the signal also allows me to run different effects to each “instrument” on its specific line so if I want to, I can, for example, run an envelope filter/auto-wah on the bass signal to get some funk there and run a digital whammy on the guitar signal so I can control the pitch real time with it while not changing my bass signal. Or there are a bunch of pedals that will mute an instrument. I could run one of those on either my bass line or my guitar line to turn the different “instruments” on and off at will and thus do things like play accents with the “guitar” while playing a constant bass line. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. And I talked to my drummer, asking him if he was interested in a two piece dancepunk thing were I did the guitar and bass and he did drums and vocals. I’ve been contemplating a couple of side projects – one was a one man thing, bleak industrial shit, no guitar at all, just me using a massively overdriven and downtuned bass, a drum machine, and doing my best to sing. And that’s the thing, I absolutely suck at playing and singing at the same time, all I can really manage is this kind of ghostly, one word tenor stuff, but with enough delay on it, it works. It was really heavy, but I also kind of wanted to do something fun. Hence the dancepunk thing, atomic energy and inappropriate innuendo filled semi-adolescent (and only semi-sung) lyrics. I figured my drummer would say no way, but surprisingly, he’s open to the idea. He's got a great voice and has the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time, unlike me.
I’m not the first guy to come up with this idea. In the recent past, Mike Kerr from Royal Blood is probably the most well known example of someone doing this. But man, it really sounds like it would be a blast, and I’m eager to get it going. I am absolutely tapped out at the moment – buying any more gear right now would probably cause a serious rift in my marriage – but once I regenerate a bit I’m going to grab the octave pedal – the one thing I’m missing that would allow this foolish idea to work – and get things going. And when I do, I’ll cackle madly and call out to the sky:
“It’s alive…..It’s ALIVE!!!!!”
