Old Fart Rant on nothing

Um... that's a little extreme... Mastering requirements for LP records were notoriously deleterious when it came to pop or rock records. You had to deal with high frequency slurring and lots of other things. All this happened before they'd apply the RIAA curve to the transfer.

Then you can take the other side of the coin: The feel of the instrument. I love my '62 RI jazz bass (which is really a remake of the 1960-61 two knob jazz bass)... it's got thinner frets, a rounder fretboard radius and seems to be a very warm sounding bass without having to do anything to it... I spend most of my time with my 6 string fretless, and I don't consider myself a Fender guy, yet I find the 62 jazz very satisfying when I play it.

But if I pick up an American Standard Jazz bass, I find it's not very satisfying - it feels clunky in my hands and needs the help of a preamp to get that woody warm tone.

The easiest way to warm up any modern bass is to put mellow flat wounds or tape wounds on it. When you do that you have to be aware of the fact that your boutique modern instrument wont behave quite as boutique sounding or nearly as responsive.

 

I think that "old school" is a pretty broad term used to refer to a few things. It generally means seems to refer to bass tones pre 1970's, passive pickups and on the tone/clarity spectrum, is often seen as the opposite of the bright hi-fi tone of alot of today's players. It's also sometimes used to imply things such as vintage or vintage styled 4 string basses, flats or "dead" rounds, tube amps and a "warm" sound.

Of course it's kind of a wrongheaded term, as some of the "old school" of players (like Entwistle) liked bright tones, and hi-fi sounds and solid state amps, but it's still a fairly accepted way to get across what kind of tone you like. I use the term, and I use it to refer to most of what I said above. I prefer passive, 4 string instruments, tube amps, and "warm" tones.

 

i think when people refer to "old school" or "vintage" tone... they just mean a nice warm sound with a bit more of a lo-fi quality all around.

it is hard to acheive because of all the great gear available today and i think that is why it is still a bit of a mystery.

however, with the right gear and some technique...i think players should concentrate on getting their own sound, other than recreating a certain sound.

 

I wouldn't personally consider Entwistle a Hi Fi player...sure he often played through amps and subs that were designed for PA use but he was still playing Alembics and Status (Statii?) - they're pretty coloured through their unique filter design...

 

Easy. P bass+flats+Ampeg B-15. Iconic tone.

 

That's the combination usually associated with Motown, except it wasn't. (Also it was a B-12, not a B-15.) All those tracks were recorded direct! No amp was used for recording at all. It was just for monitoring while tracking. As were many other recordings. Bass amps pretty much sucked back then, so that's why DI was invented. Unless you are listening to Jack Bruce (or Felix P. or Tim B.), most of the distorted farty bass tones were unintentional.

My first good amp was a B-15n. it's a nice amp, but it actually lacks low end and high end. It's a bit drab and polite. Evert Hull didn't like loud rock music, and that amp was made for upright bass. But it worked well with a P bass. I think it's a myth that is was used as much as people think.

A lot of the amped recordings back in the day by people like Carol Kaye and Joe Osborn were done with open backed Fender Super Reverb and Fender Concert guitar amps with open-back 4x10 cabs! That's because those two GREAT bass players were really guitar players! And that's the amps that were in the studios. Kaye also used a Versatone Pan-O-Flex, which is also where jack Cassidy got that great fuzz sound on the Hot Tuna records. Monk Montgomery used one too. It was really more of a hi-fi tube amp. It was a bi-amp system with both power amps feeding a single 12" speaker. Some had an additional 8" speaker. THAT's the amp you hear on many old recordings by Kaye.

All basses came with flats well into the late 70's, so most people used flats. But it's not just one tone... listen to the Who's My Generation or Sly and the Family Stone. These days people think that's round wounds, but they were LaBella nylon tape wounds. So "vintage tone" does not equate to Motown.

Kaye says she never had time to change her strings, so every two years or so she would trade the bass in for a new one!

These days you see a lot of Jazz Basses, but you sure didn't back in the 70's! Players these days also don't know what a P bass sounds like... they think just deep thud, but listen to all the records done in the 70's, and they all have a different tone... some are very bright, like John Wetton with King Crimson and Freddie Washington on Patrice Rushen's song "Forget Me Nots".

 

Don't forget Fairchild compressors... They work fantastically with bass, if you can find one in good condition...

In my studio, we had this guy send us a number of items which did a pretty good job of giving us a warm tube front end, without all the "difficulties" of older tube gear.
http://www.tab-funkenwerk.com/

We had prototypes of these: http://www.tab-funkenwerk.com/id12.html
We would run our Neumans through it for obvious reasons, but when we ran the bass through it it was just incredible.

 

They look pretty cool.

I like solid state amps, but when I want a tube tone I use an old BK Butler Blue Tube with a 12AU7 in it (replacing the original 12AX7).

I never use my Mesa 400+ anymore. Too damn heavy.

 

I was using hi-fi to refer specifically to just what you mentioned, his exploration of bi-amped systems and "active" basses like the Alembic and Status that give a much more "HI FI" sound than the passive basses and tube amps that we typically refer to as "old school".

 

+1

Entwistle's tone was definitely hi-fi (for bass) at the time. He was one of the first to use roundwounds, and had quite a bit of hi-mid and treble in his tone even before he switched to active basses: Live at Leeds was done on a P-bass.

 

He actually worked with Rotosound on the roundwounds. It was his idea because the flats, except for the nylon tapewounds didn't vibrate well enough. I believe Rototsounds were the first roundwounds for electric bass.

Regarding Alembic and Statis basses. Alembics are very hi-fi, even with the filter. If you have the filter all the way open, and the Q turned down, that's an extremely wide and flat signal response.

High-fidelity means the reproduction of sound with little distortion, giving a result very similar to the original.

I would think either of those basses qualify. But it's really a term for an amplifier. A hi-fi amp will reproduce your vintage Fender as well as your modern active bass. A Gibson EB-0 plugged into a studio mic pre and crown amp will be a hi-fi reproduction of the mudbucker, in all it's muddy glory. But its still hi-fi.

 

I agree.

Or P bass+rounds+ampeg = my favorite iconic tone".

Also I agree that you never really know what kind of amp is being used for recording. I use my Ampeg SVT for recording all the time, but I can also get a solid state head to sound similar since it's only the preamp. A good vintage or old school tone is really through the power tubes IMO.

 

My idea of iconic tone is Peter Cetera's P-Bass on the early Chicago stuff. Oh, what a tone! Sends a chill up my spine... I wish I knew what the entire rig consisted of.

 

It's the output transformer, not the power tubes, that colors the tone. You have to really crank an SVT to get the power tubes to break up... if they even do.

Still, many vintage-old-skool tones were had with no amp at all.

I really dislike the tone stack on SVTs. It's not at all like the classic Ampeg's, so the most vintage you get with an SVT is early 70's. I think Acoustic and Sunn amps were more prevalent. At least that's how this old fart remembers it. First SVT I saw was in 1972.

 

Ok than it is the output transformer. No need for broken up tubes

 

Great tone!

The BP article says that on the first album he used the producer's P bass both direct and through an Ampeg B-15, at times with tissues stuffed under the strings. It said live he's used; Kustom, Acoustic, Sound City, Phase Linear, Orange and Ampeg.

 

I've been wanting to check out the Warwick Hellborg amp. It's solid state with an output transformer! Crazy ideas from the bass player who never smiles.

(got to see him with John McLaughlin once... man he was good!)

 

How is this different from any other bass amp? My EA has a giant toroidial transformer - I believe it's even a jensen...

 

Thanks!