On the nerd side, I have been a largely self-taught electronics geek since the 1960s.
On the artistic side, I have been a bass guitarist in rock bands since the early 1970s.
You might not think these two pursuits would have a lot in common. But in my case, they do.
I’ll start with the music side. I had been playing French horn since grade school in the mid-1960s. My dad got a classical guitar as a going-away gift when we moved in 1968. He never really developed much skill with it, but I picked it up and started having fun. A year or two later and I got a cheap electric guitar and amp for Christmas. I had more fun with that.
But what I really wanted was a bass guitar. Hanging around the junior high school band room, I thought the bass guitarist in the jazz band was the epitome of cool. Plus this was the era of the Beatles breaking up and Paul McCartney going solo, John Entwistle was playing “lead bass” on any number of The Who’s hits, John Paul Jones pushed Led Zeppelin’s first couple of albums (JPJ’s bass solo makes “The Lemon Song”), Jethro Tull’s classic album “Aqualung” was making waves with its attitude towards religion and its sheer musical brilliance, in part propelled by bassist Jeffrey Hammond, and I was about to discover an up-and-coming band from England playing a new style called “progressive rock.” You may have heard of Yes?
My parents indulged me. They shelled out for a rental bass guitar and amp from the local music store, and I took weekly lessons for a while. Soon I found myself in a rock band with some schoolmates. Our band performed for the McGovern for President campaign in our town in 1972 – the mother of one of the guitarists was the local Democratic Party chair.
Two guitarists and a drummer playing rock music put out quite a lot of sound. My gear had two significant handicaps for playing in a rock band. First, I had a hollow-body bass. Hollow-body instruments are fine unamplified. Amplified to rock band levels, they are always threatening to feed back, making a horrible howl. Second, my bass amplifier was not really powerful enough to keep up with the guitars. Guitar amps get ridiculously loud, even the small ones our band could afford.
Dealing with this combination gave me some bad habits as a player. I would play extra hard so I could keep the volume control below the howl zone. I stuffed the body of the bass with paper towels in hopes of lessening its tendency to feed back. I struggled along with these drawbacks as my family moved to the West Coast and I found another band. I put up with them until I moved away from home and went off to college in the late 1970s.
I wasn’t playing much for a while. My first amp moved across the country with my parents, while I stayed on the West Coast. I briefly had a Fender Jazz Bass with a warped neck, and soon sold it off. I didn’t really take up playing bass in earnest again until the late 1980s. I picked up a new Peavey Foundation bass and TNT 130 combo amp, and I was rockin’ again.
Peavey’s claim to fame has always been value for money, and this pairing certainly gave me that. That Foundation bass was better than it had a right to be, at $200 in 1988 dollars with case, made in USA, baby! But I eventually found that the single 15″ speaker in the TNT wasn’t giving me the tone I wanted. Nothing against the TNT; it has what’s considered a traditional bass voice, and for a lot of bassists, it “sits in the mix” nicely.
But I had grown up with The Who’s Entwistle and Yes’s brilliant bassist Chris Squire as my idols, and I craved their bright, clangy tones. No way I could get them from a 15″ speaker. In a related development, I got my hands on my first 5-string bass in late 1990. The TNT wasn’t cutting it on the low B either. Plus the TNT was bulky and heavy, and with only a single strap handle on top, and no casters, it was a chore to lug around.
I started looking into boutique bass guitar speakers, and settled on the Acme Low B-2 (PDF). This was the point at which my obsession with audio power amps took root.
The Low B series’ claim to fame at the time was threefold, and these points are still valid today:
- It was specifically designed to support the fundamental of the lowest note on a 5-string bass guitar, the low B, at high power levels (hence the name);
- It was a 3-way system, with a midrange driver and a tweeter, so it could hit the highs too;
- The cabinetry was cleverly engineered to be very light, yet rigid enough for high volume playing. This was before high powered speakers with lightweight neodymium magnets were common. At the time, it was quite an achievement.
So I ordered a pair of Low B-2s. It was clear I would have to get an amplifier to drive them. Taking the amp head out of the TNT was out of the question, and besides, it wasn’t going to be powerful enough. While there were plenty of bass guitar amp heads on the market, I felt the Low Bs were going to need more power than a reasonably priced amp head could deliver. (This would prove to be an understatement.) I needed a “rack rig.”
A “rack rig” is so-called because all of its components are made to bolt into a standard 19″ wide equipment rack. Nearly all professional audio gear, whether for the studio or the stage, is made to this format. A rack rig for bass guitar contains at least two items: a preamplifier, which takes the bass guitar signal, tweaks the tone to taste, and amplifies it to “line level”; and a power amplifier. You can put other stuff in the rack too – many players put effects in theirs, and my first rack had a tuner that you could literally see from across the room – but at minimum it needs a preamp and a power amp. A power strip so you only need to plug one power cord into the wall, while not mandatory, is a huge convenience.
The real limits to a rack rig are what your wallet and your back can bear.
The beauty of a rack rig is the ability to upgrade components independently of one another. For a bassist, this means finding a preamp that gets the sound you want, and pairing it with a power amp that produces sufficient juice to drive your speakers to the desired volume. Modern power amps largely sound the same, so the tradeoffs revolve around the practicalities of power, price, physical size, and weight. (Or at least they did in the mid-1990s.)
Acme’s designer, Andy Lewis, recommended at least 500 Watts per Low B-2 cabinet. (“The more power, the better the sound.” See the linked PDF above.) I took this to heart and got my first power amp: a QSC Audio RMX 1850HD (PDF), which would feed each of my cabs 600 Watts all night long, without breaking a sweat or my budget. And it did fine, until I decided I needed less weight and more power.
Next time, the nerd side: Amplifier classes