Bass Rig

This is my live bass rig. I mainly use this for playing live shows with Angel Vivaldi.

The heart of it is the Hartke HA7000 bass amp. These are killer amps for the money. For me, the selling points were the dual blendable preamps (solid state or tube), the front 10 band graphic EQ (I'm a sucker for front mounted graphic EQs :) ), built in compressor, and the bi-amping/crossover capabilities. I picked this up in late 2007, just after I got the Carvin 6 string fretted bass. Those 2 are my primary live bass pieces.

With the writing of Angel Vivaldi's "Universal Language," a more aggressive bass tone was becoming necessary, and I began to experiment with using distortion in my signal chain. I settled on a Boss ODB-3 bass distortion due to it's capability to blend in the original undistorted bass tone with the crunch sound. It gave me the edge and the sound I was looking for, but I'm not a "pedal" guy. Since this was going to be always on, I wanted to rackmount it and keep the floor clear. Initially I velcroed the pedal to the top of the rack, but when the switch started giving me issues, I gave myself a project. For the geekiest of the geeks, you can check out the conversion process here:

Boss ODB-3 converted to rackmount

The addition of the overdrive brought with it the inescapable noise issues. I began using the ART CS2 compressor/gate in lieu of the Hartke's compression (which works just fine for basic compression) since it added in a noise gate to eliminate the ugliness. I've also lately been bypassing the Hartke's preamps, and running my bass in passive mode, so there is only one preamp circuit (the Boss ODB-3) in the chain. I run the overdrive first so I can control the amount of gain with my pick attack (the way most rock/metal guitarists do it) then the compressor after, to level THAT sound. That runs into the return of the Hartke. So I basically use the Hartke now as a tone control (Low/High contour and EQ) and a power amp.

Be prepared for this to continue to change and evolve :)


I still haven't secured a permanent bass speaker cabinet setup. When playing live, I alternate between whatever is at certain venues already, a Hartke 4x10 Transporter, or a Mesa 6x10 shown here. The Mesa is an absolute tone beast! However, it is also an absolute size and weight beast. Thus far the Mesa is my favorite sounding cabinet, it's just overkill for certain venues, and hard to move.

Be prepared for this to change and evolve as well :)


-={E-Mail Jake}=-