How would you describe the band's sound?
Rock, you know! Definitely pop songs, but I have a wide definition of pop; I certainly don't mean any kind of strict 60's-style songwriting, but I figure anything I write will vaguely refer to anything I've ever heard... it's all fair game. Right now I plan on trying to make the new record sort of noisy and simple, but what you have in your head sometimes turns into something else by the time you get something that works in a recording. I think using the 12-string bass is going to have a big impact on the sound; it seems like this instrument makes you think in terms of big, bold sounds, and not little details. Anyway, there's my dreadful singing, so right away that keeps it from being like proper stadium rock or anything, although we probably do play at "stadium" levels. We are definitely a big-amps band, and our drummer Eric Marshall is a truly magnificent rock drummer.

How much of the Fiendish Minstrels material are you planning on using the 12 on? Do you find that it helps to separate the sounds of the two bands you are in with your wife?
100% is the plan! The bands sound different, anyway. In Shalini we consider "Highway to Hell" to be the greatest possible song so we've stolen as many elements of that approach as possible, while recognizing that nobody can hope to attain the mastery of AC/DC. (Although I just heard a live recording of Cheap Trick doing "Highway to Hell" live and holy shit!!  Surely Bon would approve.) The Fiendish Minstrels is a bit more open-ended noisy rock at the moment, lutes tomorrow, maybe. Although I doubt it.

Your 12-string has a pretty unique history! Can you tell us about it?
You may know more than I do. I found this one last fall. Adrian Chandler told me it had just come back from an Aerosmith session, and it was going to be the "shop bass" although they'd sell it to me. It took me about 5 seconds to decide "all right!" especially since they weren't going to make any more of them until sometime this year.

I'm not aware of any further Celebrity mojo...

Yeah... Tom Hamilton had that bass for a while, but Aerosmith had to leave to go on tour with KISS and Tom wasn't going to have much time to experiment with it so he sent it back to Chandler. I'm hopeful that Tom will order one in the near future.
Ah well, he should've bought this one, but I'm glad he didn't! Adrian told me it was used on the sessions though. I'm sure the fans will demand that he play more 12 once they hear it!

Had you played any other brands of 12-string basses prior to buying the Chandler? How did they compare to the Royale in your opinion?  What led you to the Royale?
A friend of ours, Jodie Forrest, gave Shalini the American Basses book last year, and I was paging through it and noticed the (way too small) picture of the Royale. It looked amazing to me. I thought "what's that??" I loved how grand and serious it looked. "Royale" is such a perfect name for it! I had to write Chandler and find out about it. I knew it would be good, all the other Chandler gear I'd seen was first-rate and always very cool, too. Anyway, Adrian Chandler wrote back and she remembered me from when I met her in the 90's during a Marshall Crenshaw tour. And she mentioned this particular instrument.

I buy guitars all the time without trying them out. I get a feeling about one and just go for it, and I'm hardly ever disappointed! I think maybe this is my one psychic area... but beyond that, anytime you get a new instrument, you have to get used to it and figure out what to do with it. So I never worry if feels strange at first- in fact, I think that's fun. Of course, the Royale arrived perfectly set-up, and perfectly in tune, for that matter! It had the tuning that Paul Chandler mentioned where one of the octave G strings is tuned to D for a sort of instant power chord up there- and I'm keeping it that way, I dig it. And if you play a E-shape chord with this tuning, you get a major 7th. Cool!

Around this time, I was recording a really great band from Wilmington, NC called Hungry Mind Review. Their bassist, Holt Evans, arrived with several notable basses including a big Gretsch hollow body and a Chapman Stick- obviously a bass hep cat!  I mentioned my 12-string interest to him, and it turned out he owned a Hamer 12-string which he offered to loan us to mess around with until the Chandler arrived. So that's the first one I ever played. It's the Korean one, and it worked great. I wrote some songs to try it on, and I started getting the idea that the 12 is really a different beast; it made me want to think in terms of big, sustained notes more and busy passages less. But that's just a starting point, and I think both the Royale and the Hamer are easy to play, so you really can do anything you want to on them. But sonically, it seems like you want to give the notes more room on a 12-string.

Six months ago I actually thought that maybe the only 12-string basses in existence were the ones Hamer made for Tom Petersson! I had no idea there were several manufacturers and such a scene for them until I found this web site. Where had I been all these years?? Anyway, to conclude, I probably would've tried to get a Royale back when they first came out if I'd known about them. It is just about the most magnificent-looking thing I've ever seen! Not only is the finish lovely, I love the pearloid material on the head, the deco look of the pickups, and the scale of the whole affair. It's huge, but the proportions are so right. The output wiring is clever (this one is the two-outputs version) and the humbucking / single-coil selection on two of the pickups allows for lots of sounds. 

What do the other members of your band think of the 12?
Everybody who has seen it is sort of stunned. Nobody much has ever seen or even heard of a 12-string bass, and the very concept freaks them out. Which is a perfect reason to use one!

You have quite a collection of gear that you've acquired over the years. What components are you building a bass rig out of? Have you tried anything unusual that you thought really hit the spot?
I've always loved the plonky, muted sounds of the electric bass on old Bert Kaempfert records, or on, say, "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" by the Yardbirds. Carol Kaye was a wonderful practitioner of that hand-muting / pick sound, and I read that she used a Super Reverb for all those famous LA sessions. So when Let's Active recorded its "Cypress" record, we used a silver-face Fender Twin Reverb for the bass- that was the closest thing I had to a Super Reverb, and we got a pretty interesting sound with that. Unless you were playing pretty quietly, you'd normally blow up an open-back amp like that with bass, but this Twin I've got has these massive EV speakers, and they can take bass, no problem. I've gone back to recording with this amp every now and then, and it's always good.

Another great amp is, of course, the Portaflex Ampegs. But small amps like this make no sense to most bass players who are used to 800 watt solid state things! Those big amps are great onstage but in the studio they often have very little character. The whole thing about hearing bass in a dense rock track is to have some distortion which generates useful upper harmonics. I loved Ronnie Lane's tone in the Small Faces, Ron Wood's tone in the Jeff Beck Group, and of, course, Andy Fraser's playing in Free. These days people often use modern hi-fi bass amps to accentuate the mechanical noises of the bass, you know, that clanky sound which cuts through, and like anything can be cool, but is sometimes fatiguing. The approach of actually letting your amp distort some is a lost art to some degree, I think. SVT's are great for their power and ability to handle anything, but even they sometimes sound like a direct box on tape because they are so powerful and clean. So if I'm looking for an interesting tone I usually gravitate to a smaller amp, or what people usually think of as a "guitar amp" like a Marshall or Matamp with a 4 x 12 cabinet.

Personally, I reject the idea that an amp, microphone, etc. is "for" a certain sound- they're for whatever you use them for! Another great bass amp is anything from Kustom's golden age. I have a 2 x 12 Kustom 150 that's a stellar bass amp. For these new sessions I'll probably use Shalini's blue 120 watt Matamp, with a 4 x 12 Matamp cabinet, along with either the Twin or a very old Matamp 2000, a 30 watt class-A amp, and another 4 x 12. Maybe with a direct box, maybe not. I'm thinking one of the bigger Kustoms with the high-frequency horn would be pretty spectacular along with the blue Matamp for the 12. That may become the stage rig.

Coming from a '60s / '70s rock background with influences like yours I would expect that you have an affinity for vintage gear. Even though the Royale isn't a vintage instrument it does have that vibe. Do you lean towards vintage amps with the Royale?
My influences are all over the place. I'm just as interested in how they make jazz records as rock records and I'm happy to steal anybody's good idea! Of course, I know more about rock music than anything else. It's true that the 60's and 70's are more "romantic" for me than any other period. For me, nothing beats imagining how they did, say, "Axis: Bold as Love", you know? Because it was an amazing time, and recording and playing techniques were wide open. And the performances were real. That is always the most exciting thing- It Really Happened is always more exciting than a carefully-crafted studio effect. I love what the studio can do but I mostly want to hear people, not machines, unless I'm specifically listening to electronic music. Despite much activity and lots of smart people, things are simply more buttoned-down now, and to me present-day commercial rock music usually comes across more like "work" and less like "inspiration". So, if for no other reason, those old days are appealing.