thinkin outside the box

Comments section has been alive with the conversation of me building a new bass.   Something mentioned brought back a memory or two about my touring days and some of the regional sound I used to do.

I was doing some festival on the Newport Levee (sorry many many moons back, and they all kind of blur together other than key points) and one of the ‘more interesting bands’ arrived for set-up and sound check.  The drummer had his entire kit in one of those old Boiled Leather Trunks that used to get used for ocean liners back in the early part of the 1900s.  This thing was decrepit as all get out, covered in ink and paint from all the travels it had been on, but that wasn’t the interesting part.   The interesting part was when he started setting up his kit, that trunk was laid on its side and the kick pedal attached to it.  IT was his kick drum.   And truth to tell was the best damned sounding kick I have ever heard.  Didn’t need to EQ the heck out of it to get rid of the overtones and harmonics that badly tuned kicks are notorious for.  Didn’t need to patch in a noise gate or compression,   Just twiddle the gain and add to the mix; Ouila! Kick drum.

Out with another band, short-run (three weeks), and playing “what the hell; let’s try sumpin different”, we took a 12” subwoofer, bolted it to an angle iron frame (the kind that has all the holes in it,( like an erector set thing) and wired it into an XLR cable.   We set that in front of the kick drum first, drive side facing the kick, and ran it to a side channel in the snake, just to see ‘what the hell’.   Nice big boomy signal!!!   It was really quite amazing to hear that kick represented so faithfully by a SPEAKER, but really, shouldn’t be all that surprising, after all, a microphone is a miniature speaker wired in reverse.  We then put it in front of the Bass amp and had a similar return on effort, but needed too much gain for it to be feasible in a live event. Would have worked awesome in a studio where you wanted to capture the sound of the bass/cabinet faithfully, but would pick up too much ambient for live. 

I started thinking outside the box again tonight.  I don’t really want to go ‘all in’ on gear, I have no intentions of playing out, I just want to sit at home and noodle around, practice stuff, maybe learn some new tunes for those rare occasions when someone busts out a guitar at a campsite or something.  But no matter how I look at it, something to amplify signal is mandatory for bass.  Even if it’s an acoustic, amp needed or it sounds tinny.   But I saw something that blew me away.  These weren’t around when I was active, at least not as anything other than a novelty and not a serious instrument.   But digging around in Utoob, I found these U-basses and was flat intrigued by the idea of something little, doing the things these guys are doing with them.

Gotta love that ‘funk face’, LOL.  yeah, it funks,,,

Now, me wants,,,,**

SO many groove tunes and a U bass would travel better than a full-sized bass, especially when you just want to noodle around, maybe bust out a little bottom end when the liquor is flowing and the guitars come out around the campfire.   

BUT,,, what to use for an amp.

Another round of “outside the box thunkin’ “ 

I have a rather large amplifier built into a subwoofer for a computer sound system.  Its operating voltage is 15volts transformed and rectified from wall voltage.   I got to thinking how I could adapt a Dewalt battery or somesuch and bypass that transformer/rectifier stage and just go straight in with the battery.   

Still thinking on it, as I do still use the system at work for background noise and to help the day pass along, but with a small pre-amp* and something similar, I would have a portable ‘bottom end’ compliment that could fill the bill.

Just another day in the life of ME, never settle on one thing but gotta have my hands in it all.  LOL.  And most of this thinking was while I was sewing up a kayak,,,,

* there are practice ‘amps’ that plug right into the jack of most guitars that work well as pre-amps, and already have headphone jacks built-in.  The input on this system is a 3.5mm TRS headphone jack so no adaptors or impedance changes needed there if I went that route.

** There are several brands available of these ranging from affordable to “Jeez, I could’ve bought an Alembic for that”. The one I am looking at is available on the Zon for under 2 C-notes, including a headphone amp I mentioned. Tempted, mighty tempted.