As some of you may have read yesterday JGR brought his pre amp to my house for some real world testing by myself and fellow TBer Fuzzbass. We were lucky enough to be the first people to actually witness what I like to refer to as "
The Mythical Unicorn" in action.
To give you some background on my current gear selection check my profile as well as Fuzzbass'. We both use rack mounted Sansamp RBI's and RPM's with a power amp. Ken (Fuzzbass) uses Sadowsky 5'ers as his main axe while I prefer EBMMs and the occasional Fender. Ken plays in several different bands spanning different genres of rock. I'd refer to him as a man of the decades who can cover anything it has to offer, while he called himself "an old rock hack". I say he's being too hard on himself. I mainly stick to heavier rock but have spent plenty of time at the helm of some poppy outfits as well. I offered my place up for proving grounds as I have a decent collection of popular basses in my possession- I'd guess many of you play something I have or a variant of it.
The following were used in yesterdays romp:
Ken brought his Sadowsky's. A very tasty Precision 5 and a Nordstrand equipped Musicman esque 5'er. You'll have to ask him exact models because I unfortunately am not very familiar with with Sadowsky models. His Benavente and another 5 string J with flats was also present briefly.
I had a Stingray, SUB 'ray, Sterling, ATK300, MIA P, Jaguar, MIJ Precision Lyte. All of my Fenders have Seymour Duncan Quarter Pounder pickups. Most of my basses have DR Black Beauties on them.
JGR brought his Warmoth Koa Dinky J with P/J pickups by Seymour Duncan (Basslines, hot version strung with Lo Riders).
First impressions:
First of all, it exists. Its hand built, althought you wouldn't think this was made on his dining room table. The pre is pleasing to look at. Simple to the eye and no BS. I cant stand pieces of gear that have knobs, jacks and switches that really dont serve much purpose. This pre has an easy layout thats simple to read. You can tell what everything does and when you adjust something, it works- effectively. The chassis is thick. Definitely not some cookie cutter box here. It was just as rugged if not more than any other pre I've ever racked up. Plenty of venting on the top cover for the components to keep cool. Tubes are placed directly underneath. Upon examining the inside, JGR went over some of the details he put into it. Cleaning the powder coating off the chassis to keep continuity for grounding, placement of the power components, wire management, etc. Solder joints are clean. Point to point wiring is sexy and would make troubleshooting pretty easy for you DIY repair guys but I doubt you'd have issues. Every nut has a star washer. Screws are loctited in place. Tubes and other sensitive components have supported adhesive foam in all the right places for safety and longevity. It's all top notch. The front panel looks great. Simple black with white lettering in an easy to read font. Switches, pots and front mounted LED are all in a straight layout. I personally love the chicken head knobs, which aren't the cheap kind, they have brass inserts. If the difference is in the details, this thing is different.
Playing it:
JGR plugged up his rig. The pre went into a SWR 750 which fed two Bag End cabs loaded with a 15" woofer in each. Later we also used Kens Berg 610. No stinking tweeters, just how I like it. JGR dialed up his Warmoth bass, grabbed a pick and proceeded to pound out a very pleasing pick tone with all knobs at 12 o'clock which is basically flat with the gain half way up. Immediately, the pre had my attention. I don't typically use a pick but when I hear a good pick tone, it usually works just a great for finger style playing.
Ken got first crack at it after JGR ran us through a brief demo of each knobs and the tight/deep switch. I really liked his Sadowsky P. Strung with some DR's it was right as home with me. Plenty of warm tone from the P pickup. No matter how we manipulated the EQ and gain, you honestly couldn't get an unusable tone from this pre. You all have probably heard this before, but here I'm telling the truth. I don't work for any magazine, I'm not getting paid for this review and this isnt an advertisement. JGR isn't going to give me a thing for this thread but if he feels like letting go of that Warmoth, I'm your Huckleberry... I think the main thing that I noted as we swept through different settings on different riffs was that if you found there was a certain characteristic of setting that you didn't like, it was easily corrected to your liking with the gain, low, low mid, hi mid or treble controls. The points on the EQ are damn near perfect, if that's possible. I wouldn't change anything about it. The controls are so smooth when manipulated. Nothing comes on too fast or harsh. The gain is all many would ever need. Its true overdrive, not fuzz like some other tube or SS pre's can sound. JGR describes it as "grind" and I have to agree. If Websters had a bass dictionary on tone, this pre would listed there amongst many other adjectives. We did find that you could reach Big Muff proportions of distortion if you dimed the gain and then drove the EQ up pretty high on most of the frequencies. I think JGR was even surprised at that. This was achieved through Ken's P which is active, set totally flat on board. Your results could vary with a passive bass but I think throwing something like a Boosta Grande in front would do the trick easily should you want it.
Ken briefly broke out his 5 string that had some flats strung up on it and something really interesting happened. Ken was playing and JGR was doing some tweaking to explore what he could find from his pre. As I sat at my drumset listening, I stopped JGR and asked him to turn up the hi mids and turn the treble down a little under flat. What came out was an awesome flat wound sound that I could only describe as an upright bass. But this was even better. The electric added more sustain and depth to it. I could see someone in a jazz setting just killing it with this sound.
After watching the others go through the paces I decided to check out how it would fair with a more modern or universal tone. I ran the gain down around 9 to 10 o'clock and plugged in the Sterling, both Stingrays, the MIA P and the ATK300. I was very pleased with the results. JGR shot a video of my Sterling at a more moderate setting since most of his videos are little more driven with a passive bass. For me, finding a pleasing grind/distorted tone is usually easy but finding a universal clean is much harder. There is usually something that I frown upon somewhere especially when I find something I like on my Sansamps for one bass, then have it lost when I switch basses. The JGR unit requires little adjustment if any at all when you switch basses. About the only thing I had to do was dial the master up or down because some of my actives are alot "louder" then others that I own. The gain never needed changing which was impressive because many times I find this to be the first thing I have to change on my Sansamp when I switch from one bass to another.
I think one of my favorite features is the ability to bypass the EQ and take your clean bass signal straight to the power amp. Doing this with EBMM Stingray yielded an awesome tone. Probably the best I've ever heard my Ray sound! Honestly, if you don't like how this sounds, then you aren't playing the right bass to begin with. The independent knob on the back for this definitely cool. It would make for a KILLER biamp/stereo style rig if you ran the clean signal to one side of a stereo power amp and the dirtier side to the other then out to separate cabs. If he made the output foot switchable between the stripped signal and gain/eq signal- holy crap.
The only thing that I couldn't test was the Jensen DI because I had no recording interface setup to do so. I'm sure it would function well, especially with the pre/post and ground lift switches wired in. Ken and I got to spend about roughly 5 hours with this thing Sunday and I'd spend another 500 with it in a heartbeat. Usually I get tired of messing around with something after 30 minutes but this unit keeps my attention easily.
We didnt have a bunch of effects to try out with the pre because none of us use a bunch but JGR did bring a new EHX Bass Big Muff. It turns out, I have an old green Sovtek Russian Big Muff thats modded with a true bypass. Both pedals sounded really nice through the pre, but I have to say that I preferred my older Muff to the newer because it had a very creamy analog sound.
To sum it up, this preamp gets two thumbs up from me.
"It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up." - Ferris Bueller.
Feel free to ask any questions, your comments are appreciated.
If I built this thing, I'd be smiling too!
