Monty's Random Bits of Genius

Chapter 2 - Amps & Cabinets

By Monty Colvin
For those of us who have a taste for something a little "out there" in a bass tone, we know how difficult it can be to get that sound in the studio. Different things work for different players and you just have to experiment. When I first started messing with distorted bass sounds, I tried different pedals. I found that the older, green Tube Screamers worked really well... And others, like the Metal Zone and Metal Master pedals were a bit too fuzzy. I eventually ended up using guitar heads for my distorted high end sound. For most of the Galactic Cowboy CD's I used a Boogie Dual Rectifier. It gave me some great, grinding distortion, but still had enough clarity for a nice ringing tone.

For cabinets, I usually use an Ampeg 8x10 for the low end and a 4x12 guitar cabinet for the high end. NOW... at this point I must warn you... using 4x12 cabinets for bass will cause ENORMOUS confusion for most sound engineers who have never seen this before! They will not understand why a bass player would want to mic up a guitar cabinet. But hopefully you can talk them out of the D.I. they want to use and get them to mic one of the speakers.

In the studio I usually isolate the highs from the lows so there won't be bleed-over. I want the low end to be clean, and I don't want the high end to be muddy. So I'll put the cabinets in two separate rooms. One cool thing we tried on the GC album "Space In Your Face" was to close mic the 4x12 with a 57 and put a second mic a few feet away. The second mic picked up the ambient sound of the room and we blended it in during the mix.

If all this sounds like too much of a hassle you can always go direct. I've actually started using the Bass POD in the studio the last couple years on my CRUNCHY CD's. I've also found the little "bean" guitar POD has some killer sounds for bass.

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