Gear and Gadgets Thread

[NewsFromHome]

We have a share the music we make thread but what about what we use to make music! I'm not a huge gearhead, I kind of love being forced to work with a limited tool set - still though the right bit of kit can really open up inspiration. What have you been using BEA to make your own music!

Lately I've been using Earthquakers Afterneath a lot. It's ostensibly a reverb pedal but it's got this drag function that extends out the transients individually that really opens up space and the oscillator can really make things overwhelm when you need them to.

[craola]

i've really embraced "lofi", so i record into a digital four-track br-532 with some sm 57/58 or a i'll sketch on a tascam field recorder. my pedalboard has changed a little since this picture, but i think my staples are all represented.

Thumbnail. Click to enlarge.

i pretty much always use one of the taken, atom smasher, moomindrone-t or the bitquest.

[NewsFromHome]

[Tha1ChiefRocka]

I've still got a shitty offbrand drumkit with a broken tom and no crash cymbal. Now, that I live in an apartment (on the second floor no less) I can no longer play. It really sucks, because I finally have the money to afford a better kit, but I can't use it.

However, If I could have anything in the world, then it would always be a Sonor. They just sound incredible everytime I watch a video.

This kit is particularly sexy.


Link

[RoundTheBend]

I've always enjoyed Mesa Engineering's take on their amp/cabs. Something along the lines of we don't do scientific measurements, we do what sounds good to our ears. So I splurged about 8 years ago and got a M6 Carbine and a 6x10 powerhouse. I really like the ability to scoop the mids with pedals on this because a ton of bass tone control has to do with placement of the mids. Pretty cool I can bump the mids and sound a little more punk rock or drop the mids and sound a little more motown with just the tap of a pedal. It also has this feature called like a bass pull where it immediately opens up the presence of deep bass, regardless of scooped or popped mids. I suppose that's why I bought this - it's presence and tone. Loudness is overrated. Anything can be loud, but does it have presence? (most important to me as a bassist)

I used to care way more about all this, but recently got a little giddy when I restrung my Danelectro 90s longhorn. I had some intonation issues with it, and now I'm wondering if I had dud strings because it sounds soo much better, like it did when I first got it. It has some flatwounds on it, so deciding to learn a bunch of those 60s thumpy bass sounds like from motown or beatles.

Like I said, I used to geek a lot about this stuff. So I buy two Sterling active pickup basses - the squire version for Music Man, which I think was Fender's last project or something. Anyway, I then take it to the store where the $1,400 Music Man is sitting and I play all three. I bought the two because the story goes that a lot of those low end guitars often just have lemons a lot because their process is way less "human". I confirm that the bass I bought for $400 isn't worth $1000 to upgrade for a minor tone difference, but mostly an aesthetic difference - way more lacquer, or better hardware, etc. But it's not really $1000 worth better, imo. So I return the lesser of the two cheap ones and keep it and am super glad with my choice. I really dig that tone, so this is why I wanted it - think Rage Against the Machine first album bass tone or RHCP bass tone.

Then a few years back I got a $50 squire P bass. I had no plans to mod the hell out of it, but it turned into a fun project. I replaced the neck with a jazz bass neck, partially because I'm a fan of Adam Clayton, who does the same thing (P bass with a J neck) - he says it feels more lady-like. It's a smoother/smaller neck to play that's for sure. I then pop in some '62 Fender P-bass pickups, and to top off the J/P frankenbass thing, I decided to get a jazz bass bridge plate. The jazz neck lucked out to have some really nice birds eye effects on it. Turned out to be favorite.

Lastly I got suckered into buying a Jazz bass because the "custom shop" pickups in it were freaking amazing on the mids. It was bright yet warm and just sounded really good. There's a part of me that thinks I should sell it because it was the most expensive... especially since I play like 1% of what I used to. I went from probably 15 hours a week to once a month to once a year. Pretty pathetic.

If I were to get back in the saddle, I might be interested in getting an SG bass for that mudbucker sound and then I've had my eyes on the neckthru tone of a rickenbacker for a while. But money and use.

I've contemplating selling it all and seeing if I can make a custom bass with all these different tones, but the reality is I never would really pull it off. It's not that I need/want these different basses, but I really do care about the tonal differences between them. Timbre/tone is pretty important to me - as important as the notes/emotions themselves as the tone communicates those emotions for me.

Oh lastly - I was really into bass fuzz for a while, so some synth/fuzz/distortion stuff with expression pedals to screw with the synth side of things. My amp does a pretty good job on the compression, so don't really want/need that (pretty important to a bassist to have a more flat sound cuz nobody likes a noisy bassist).

I could post pics but I'm lazy. hehe.

[craola]