2005-10-22
Bass Rig
So I went back to Guitar Center. No place seems to stock flat wound bass strings and I was going to just order them online anyway so I went there. As I was walking through the bass area I noticed that there was a SVT 350 demo for sale. It was marked $499 which is right about $100 cheaper than normal. I asked about it and was told it was not actually for sale. So I waited until the next day and talked to the store manager. I think he realised that there were legal issues with having something marked $499 and then trying to sell them one for $599. He immediately offered it to me at that price and I took him up on it. So I'm now the proud owner of an SVT-350 mated with a SVT-1510HE and SVT-212.
So this got me to thinking about my bass rigs. I recently, in the last year, was reunited with my first bass. It's had a rough life! In the rough life I'm not including the time I through it across the road in front of the high school... or the multiple times the head stock was set on fire... those were easy on it apparently. It still plays good and is one of my little projects now, it will be in a playable state soon.
So back to amps. Dad bought me the bass for my birthday and that subsequent Christmas Mom bought me an amp. She got me a 30W Fender Bassman. I really liked that little amp. It had a really "Fendery" look with the sparkly grill cloth. I think it sounded pretty decent too. I don't remember since I didn't have it long. The nut holding the input jack had come off and the jack fell inside. We took it back to get repaired and they gave me a loaner amp. The loaner was an Ampeg SVT-??? combo. It was a 1x15" combo. I remember parts of it being blue. That thing sounded awesome but for the many months I had it I never felt like it was mine.
I played my first show ever (the band was called The Tea Party) with that amp. I learned many a Sabbath tune with Jon Stubblefield on that amp. I even put it on my skateboard and rolled it a block to the Methodists where there was a lock-in. Jon had his amp too and we played a little while gawking at all the girls. Every 13 year old knows that church lock-ins are for checking out girls!
So my stupid 13 year old butt wanting "mine" finally got fed up. I wanted MY amp back. So we took the Ampeg to Worldwide Music and demanded my own amp. I ended up with a Crate. At the time it was so much cooler. The SVT was "old sounding." The Crate was bright and had a tweaky EQ and since I was discovering slapping (*bleh*) it was perfect.
The Crate lasted until I started trying to really play in bands. It did not cut it. One weekend when I was 14 Dad took me to get a new amp. We went to some guitar store that no longer exists and I saw this big Peavey rig. Being from a small town where all the musicians played country meant that I though Peavey was the good stuff.
So at 14 I could play the bass... I mean really play some flashy impressive stuff. I was definitely technically better then than I am now. Trying out this rig was my first big ego boost. I plugged in a bass and played a little. The salesman had the volume down really low. After I played a little be he just reached over and cranked it up. People in the store were looking over at me with these funny attentive looks on their faces. There was all 4'11" of me beating the hell out of a bass to an audience.
Luckily I've outgrown the music store showoff phase. Damn that's annoying. We bought the rig. It was a Peavey Mark III and a 1820 cabinet (18 and 2 10s). That rig was awesome sounding and imposing with that huge, heavy cabinet. It worked good until my first show in K.C. Experiment Gone Bad played at The Daily Grind and I couldn't fit the cabinet in my car. I'm not sure how it got there but I couldn't get it home. My friend Matt lived close by and we hauled it up to his apartment. The next day I picked it up and took it immediately to Big Dudes and traded it for a Gallien-Krueger 1x15"
The GK cab was setup with a passive crossover. After abotu a week the capacitor in the crossover exploded. I thought the amp sounded funny and I pulled the back panel off. There was crap everywhere. Exploding caps are horribly messy. The cabinet sounded WAY better after I ripped the crossover network out. I played that rig for quite a few years until 2000.
In 2000 I got the Ampeg bug. I picked up a B1 (1x12 combo) and separately picked up my two Ampeg cabinets. I used the little 1U B1 head to power those two cabinets for quite a while. It was always reasonable. The sound was good but 150W is a little light.
After EGB broke up and His Last Chance started I was playing guitar so it's been pretty much the same. I did start using the Hartke 3500 head that John Hull left at Ryan's. It's not a bad head, just not the sound I want. I didn't really care since I wasn't playing bass.
So now we're to the Bad Ideas and I'm playing bass again. The B1 was not doing it. When there's a good PA it's not bad but after we played some dates in Manhattan with minimal PA I decided to get an amp. I didn't like Hartke much (and didn't like the freeloader feeling) so I bought the SVT-350 that lead to this post.
Now you know the history of my bass rig!
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