undefined
JEFF AMENT
"Jeff had two basses, NBA 1 and NBA 2, which were basically Warmoth necks and bodies assembled by Mike Lull at Guitar Works, who works for everybody in Seattle. Unfortunately Jeff destroyed both of those. Mike is making Jeff a new bass with a Warmoth neck and a body shape that Jeff kind of stole from an old Mosrite.
"Jeff has Bartolini 94-J's in all his basses, except for his Hamer 12 and 8 strings [which feature EMG's]. Right now, Jeff's main four-string is a custom-made Modulus Graphite copy of a 1960 Fender stack-knob Jazz bass." Other basses in Ament's collection are a Wal four-string fretless, a Gibson hollowbody Les Paul Signature Model bass strung with flat-wound strings and a Curruther's Sub-1 upright bass. Jeff's fretted four-string basses are strung with Dean Markley SR200 Mediums, and his fretless takes Medium-lites. He favors Dunlop Tortex 1mm picks. "The signal from Jeff's wireless goes immediately to a D.I. box so the house soundman gets a signal, and then to a crossover that splits the highs and the lows. The low-end signal gets sent directly to an SWR Grand Prix tube pre-amp and then to half of a dbx 166 compressor and to a Crest 6001 Power amp that drives three SWR Big Ben 18 inch speakers.
"The other half is the fun part: The signal get sent out to the foot-pedals...a SansAmp GT2 distortion pedal, a Dunlop Tremolo, a Boss CE-2 chorus and a Boss Octaver.. and then returns to an Uptown Flash MIDI switcher/mixer which divides the signal and sends it to four preamps. The signal from each preamp then gets sent back to the switcher. This system allows me to select whichever preamp I want at the press of a button, because Jeff likes to use different tones for different basses and different songs. The first two preamps and Pearce B2P's. They're two- channel units with a lot of eq capability, especially in the mids, which are parametric. One channel is meant to be dirty and one is meant to be clean, but you're able to use one channel at a time or combine the two to them; Jeff can get a really dirty, distorted sound and combine that with the thickness of a clean sound. Each channel has its own master output, so you can blend clean and dirty in any ratio that you want.
"The third preamp is an SWR SM900 that Jeff can get a couple of clean sounds out of for his fretless. He's also playing clean more and more with his regular four-string. Finally, there's an Ampeg SVP Pro, which is the only tube preamp that we use. It's basically an SVT preamp in a single rackspace that he uses mostly for his upright bass sound.
"The output of the Uptown Flash unit goes to the other half of the dbx 166 unit and out to two Crest 6001 power amps that drive three SWR Goliath II 4x10's."
