The Last Bass Outpost

It was in interesting weekend!

I had a duo gig with my brother on Thursday night that was uneventful. I played my "Pinky" Musicmaster through my Yamaha Magic Stomp modeler into the PA system, all went well.

Friday and Saturday night were band gigs at our favorite Ocean City watering hole "BJ's On The Water" (keep your mind out of the gutter, Billy J. Carder owns the joint!). My SWR Workingman head is ailing and I bought a new amp via eBay (an AMP BH 420, more on that in a minute). Unfortunately, the seller sent it USPS and it took its sweet time getting here, not arriving until today, so I had to go with my Magic Stomp into my PowerBlock into an old 60s Guild single 15 cab (my only 8 ohm cab, which is what the PowerBlock wants to see). Friday night, no problem, sounded like a million bucks.

Ah, but Saturday night, I got this annoying crackling noise as soon as we started playing the first song. Man, that sucks, trying to first identify where the noise is coming from and then which component or cable is the culprit. I THINK that I might have been running the Magic Stomp too hot into the PowerBlock, and hence the lineout to the PA system was too hot as well. Anyway, I may have negatively affected one of the PA main speakers. It sure sounded like that was where the sound was coming from. However, today I noticed that the 15" speaker in my bass cab was loose (only two of the screws were holding it in, and it was definitely moving around!), so that may have had something to do with it as well...

So today the AMP BH 420 showed up. It's an amp from the 1980s, designed by Steve Rabe later of SWR and Raven Labs fame along with Russ Allee who had a lot to do with Eden amps, and it's kind of the missing link between the classic 70s Acoustic 360 (which these guys worked on) and their later amps. It's also the amp that Dave Funk based his Thunderfunk amps on.

Mine looks just like this one:



400 watts into 4 ohms, very tweakable. Damn, it's loud! I might break down and get a bigger speaker cab (I'm running it into my 4 ohm 2x10 Steel Sound cab, and I can easily imagine blowing the Eminence Delta speakers in it!).

I'm gonna gig it on Saturday, and will report back!

Cheers, Tim

Dave invited me over here a while back, but being the very (aging) poster child for ADD, I promptly forgot about it!  Fortunately, Dave is a forgiving soul, and mentioned the place again.  Thanks, Dave!

Looking over the members list, I see a few of y'all that I know from the TDPRI, who know about me from my relentless recycling of topics. 

For the rest, I'm a 48 year old beach town bar band bassist, playing in a band in Ocean City, Maryland called The Mood Swingers with my guitarist brother Mike and our drummer Bubba.  We play classic rock, blues, country, folk, and if the money is right we've done bluegrass, horn-driven blues (we have some guys we call) and zydeco.  One of the good things about living in a resort area: I made half of my modest income over the last few years as a musician!

I started playing bass and guitar back in high school in the mid-70s in Largo, Maryland, playing URB in the orchestra.  While I was in college, I played in a basement band with some buddies (as in we never left our drummer's basement for gigs!), using our guitarist's Gibson EB0:



I just erased the rest of my bass narrative, as it was achieving "War and Peace" dimensions, instead here's a timeline (note that I also was sometimes gigging as a guitarist, so there are some gaps):

1977- Gibson EB0 through whatever amp I could scrounge.
1982- Bradley (MIJ) Jazz Bass copy through same.
1985- Fender fretless P-Bass through 100-watt solid-state kit guitar head into 2x15 Fender cab.
1987- 60s Epiphone Wilshire Bass through same.
1988- 1988 Fender MIJ Jazz Bass through Peavey Mark IV head/2x15" Peavey Black Widow cab.
1992- late 60s MIJ Violin Bass (no brand name on it!) through 1968 Fender Bassman head into chopped Kustom cab (single 15" speaker).
1999- Crown MIJ P-Bass copy through Traynor YBA-1 Bassmaster head through 2x12 Carvin cab.
2002- Modded Tokai '57 P-Bass (Warmoth Tele Bass neck, Voodoo pickup) through Traynor YBA-1 into 60s 1x15" Guild bass cab.
2003- Same bass into SWR Workingmans 2004 head through Steel Sound 2x10 cab.
2004- Rogue Hofner copy through same.
2006- Mutant Fender Musicmaster Bass ('73 body, '73 neck, Hipshot Ultralite tuners, Kent Armstrong lipstick tube pickup) into same.
2007- Squier Vista Series (MIC) Musicmaster Bass with neck from above into same.
2008- Same bass with GFS twin-blade strat-sized humbucking pickup into same.

I should note that the SWR just died, so I've been gigging lately with my backup amp, a Crate PowerBlock, into the single 15" Guild cab, and I just bought an AMP Model BH 420 head (which Dave Funk based the Thunderfunk amp on), so will be gigging through that into the Steel Sound cab.

I also still have the '73 Fender Musicmaster body, and have acquired another '73 neck, and am having a luthier friend of mine refret the neck and paint the body, and I'm either going to get another of these GFS pickups (damn, it sounds GOOD) or put a Mustang pickup in it (I have one, along with the pickguard and control plate) and turn it into a Mustang.  Decisions, decisions...

Anyway, that's a little bit about me!  Here I am playing Pinky a few months ago:



Cheers, Tim