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Me and My Basses – A Short Summary |
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My first serious bass was a 1964 Fender Precision that I played through a double stack Marshall 100 watt bass amp. The action on this bass was an absolute dream and it had a really solid punchy sound. With hindsight I now realise that this was the finest bass that I’ve owned. Unfortunately, as so often happens, I began to take this bass for granted and was always on the lookout for a sound that would give me that something extra. I played a gig where the bass player of another band was playing Fender Jazz through a Dan Armstrong amp. He was getting a really great sound and that convinced me to swap my Precision for his Jazz. At the same time I gave him my Marshall top in exchange for the Dan Armstrong top (what a loony). I never got the sound that I wanted from that combination but the upside of this experiment was that by this time I had heard Jaco playing and decided to remove the frets from the Jazz and fill up the grooves with wood filler. It worked like a charm and suddenly I had a Jaco sound. Playing fretless has always since been close to my heart. Then I stopped playing pro and did what many people do; I sold all the gear. (big mistake) A while later I started gigging again and picked up a Fender Mustang short-scale. I still have this bass but am not a fan of short-scale basses. The sound is simply not growly enough. This brings me to the new bass that I purchased 6 months ago; a Cort Artisan B5 5-string fretted. I’m playing this bass through an SWR 80 watt practice amp which I acquired simply because the other amplification is an Orange 120 watt top and Marshall reflex bin and is simply too cumbersome to move around. The Cort is an absolute beauty to behold and one can fall in love with it just for its looks. It has two Bartolini Mk1 active pickups that are tremendously powerful and tricky to handle at first when one is used to passive pickups. It has a full twenty-four frets and the controls comprise of volume, fade between pickups, treble, mids and bass. The range of tones available is really vast. |
