QuickSound Comment

For those looking for a good, solid bass guitar to get started on, check out Performing Musician’s review of the Gear4Music Black Knight. Available in both 4 and 5-string versions, it’s a good example of how ‘entry-level’ instruments are so much better than they used to be in my day! Check out the Black Knight bass range on QuickSound here.

Check this out, Lakland have created a custom bass guitar for Spinal Tap’s Derek Smalls (aka Harry Shearer) especially for the Live Earth event. The bass features a graphic of a flaming earth as-seen from space, and no less than six pickups. More details at Lakland.com, and more pics up on MySpace.

Somebody took the time to review flippin’ loads of different compression pedals and rack units on bass guitar. If you’re in the market it’s probably worth a read. Check out this one man’s opinions here.

I had the good fortune to pick up a Boss GT-6B last Friday and 24 hours later I gigged with it for the first time at a wedding in deepest Northumberland.

The GT-6B is a few years old now, but still crams a helluva lot of functionality into its solid floor-based format. One of the selling points for me was analog true-bypass, and the fact Victor Wooten is known to sometimes use one was a good sign this is a professional unit.

If you look-up reviews of the GT-6B you will probably read a few mixed opinions on its ease of use. I sat with the thing for a couple of hours on Friday night (how sad is that?!) and I had it pretty much figured-out - it’s really not that bad. It is very flexible, and although there are some helpful features to get you going quickly, the real power lies in the extensive tweakability of all the effects. It will definitely help if you have experience in sound-shaping terms such as frequency, Q, threshold, ratio etc. (newbies might be a bit lost), but if you’re comfortable with these concepts you really have a powerful tool at your disposal. One thing - don’t even bother with the presets. They are there to show you what can be done I suppose, but I can’t imagine using any one of them in a real-life situation.

For my gig on Saturday I set-up a default patch for my Musicman Bongo which used just the parametric eq to cut 8dB around 350Hz (a sweet-spot in my experience for helping impart a ‘hi-fi’ tone and eliminate ‘honk’) and a little high-end roll-off to taste as I was DI-ing from the GT-6B straight into a full-range PA. This became the basis for a small but useful range of other sounds which used at various times compression, octaver and touch-wah. The built-in tuner and expression pedal (assigned to volume by default) were invaluable - I could tune-up in silence and, having turned down my volume with the pedal, I could unplug my bass without upsetting the sound man.

I’m sure there’s more experimentation to be done, but I’m already very happy with the GT-6B and I think it’ll be going with me everywhere from now on. It really is the swiss-army knife of bass effects, and having everything in one unit with one power supply is great for someone like me who tries to keep faff to a minimum. At a fully PA-supported gig with good monitors you could easily turn up with just the GT-6B and your bass.