The Rackhead 1060 is the first foray into bass amplification for Germany’s Engl. Given the company’s reputation for pinpoint engineering and robust design, it should come at no surprise that the Rackhead 1060 offers a wealth of features and connection options that will serve the needs of many a bassist onstage and in the studio.
Two-for-One Special
The Rackhead 1060 is essentially two bass amps—one with a tube-powered preamp and one with a solid-state preamp—in a two-space rackmountable package. The first amp specializes in warm, vintage tones via its 12AX7 preamp tubes, while the second preamp’s solid-state circuitry delivers clear and punchy modern sounds. Each preamp feeds its own dedicated 350-watt class-D power amp. The amps can be combined for 700 watts of bone-crushing power. Thanks to a swap-preamp pushbutton, there’s no need for a cable dance to switch between preamps.
Each preamp’s controls harness its particular strengths. The tube preamp’s controls include gain, a switchable overdrive circuit with drive-level control, 4-band EQ plus presence, and pushbuttons for boosting lows, highs, and extreme highs. The solid-state preamp forgoes an overdrive circuit for a switchable midrange-contouring shape control. This preamp’s EQ section combines bass and treble shelving with 2-band semi-parametric EQ for the upper and lower midrange. EQ can be engaged or bypassed via a front-panel switch, while another switch activates a built-in compressor for smoothing out the tone. Each channel has a -12 dB pad switch.
The rear panel includes three jacks for connecting footswitches to mute/swap preamp inputs, engage the compressor and EQ, or activate the overdrive and shape circuits, plus a fourth jack for connecting Engl’s optional Z-17 master footswitch. There’s also a serial effect loop with balance control, a balanced line-out jack, a tuner output, a bi-amp out with crossover-frequency control, and separate jacks for slaving out from each preamp.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
I paired the Rackhead 1060 with an Ampeg 8x10 using a pair of Speakon cables, routing the tube-preamp channel to the cab’s top 4x10 section and the solid-state channel to four lower speakers. Plugging a Fender American Jazz into preamp A, I set the EQ controls to noon and the gain knob to 10 o’clock. The preamp’s four 12AX7s generated warm, detailed tones with plenty of body and definition.
It was a great starting sound, but I wanted a bit more thickness in the mids and lows. The trick I use to achieve this with tube amps is to push the gain a little higher than normal, and then roll the bass’ volume control down slightly to remove unwanted grit. On the Rackhead 1060 this technique added a tubbier midrange thump while removing hi-fi edginess—perfect for old-school Stax R&B grooves.
Ratings
Pros:
Two independent amps with tube and solid-state preamps. Copious clarity and power. Versatile connection options.
Cons:
Non-adjustable compressor. Ultra-bright setting can sound grainy. Expensive.
Tones:
Ease of Use:
Build/Design:
Value:
Street:
$2,199 street
Engl Bass Rackhead 1060
englamps.de
The preamp’s bright and ultra-bright switches are clearly intended for funkier slap and pop styles. That said, I felt the ultra-bright switch added a little too much emphasis to the attack and highs, making the tone a bit granular and edgy. Switching on the bass boost opened the sub-harmonic floodgates, releasing bowel-shaking lows that I felt almost as much as I heard.
Engaging the Rackhead’s overdrive circuit added rich, snarling grit to the mids and highs. No, the overdrive circuit doesn’t have tons of gain on tap, but its voicing helps the channel avoid oversaturation even at the highest drive-knob settings. Tones remain dynamic, punchy, and full, yet free from over-compressed lows and mids.
Fast and Fat
The solid-state circuitry of preamp B provides a decidedly different set of sounds. While not as warm and organic-sounding, its attack is much faster, and the additional EQ controls provide greater tone-shaping authority. With the input-gain and EQ knobs at noon, the tone has crisp highs, smooth lows, and rubbery mids, ideal for modern rock and country tones. Engaging the compressor—which is, unfortunately, not adjustable—and dropping the treble to around 9 o’clock yielded a rich, detailed sound perfect for blues and jazz grooving.
Note clarity and separation are absolutely over-the-top. I could play four-note chords without generating a jumbled mess, even after rolling down my bass’s tone knob and dialing back the amp’s treble. When I pushed the shape control past noon, tones maintained wicked precision with even greater aggression and power.
The Verdict
Engl’s first bass amp embodies many of the qualities that have made the company well regarded among guitarists. The Rackhead 1060’s versatile connection options let it adapt easily to most rigs. It’s simple enough to master on the fly, yet its powerful controls and independent tube and solid-state preamps provide a wealth of tonal possibilities.
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Duane Denison of the Jesus Lizard, EGC Chessie in hands, coaxing some nasty tones from his Hiwatt.
The Jesus Lizard’s sixth album, Blue, served as the band’s final statement from the frontlines of noisy rock for the next 26 years. By the time of their dissolution in 1999, they’d earned a reputation for extreme performances chock full of hard-hitting, machine-like grooves delivered by bassist David Wm. Sims and, at their conclusion, drummer Mac McNeilly, at times aided and at other times punctured by the frontline of guitarist Duane Denison’s incisive, dissonant riffing, and presided over by the cantankerous howl of vocalist David Yow. In the years since, performative, thrilling bands such as Pissed Jeans, METZ, and Idles have built upon the Lizard’s musical foundation.
Denison has kept himself plenty busy over the last couple decades, forming the avant-rock supergroup Tomahawk—with vocalist Mike Patton, bassist Trevor Dunn (both from Mr. Bungle), and drummer John Stanier of Helmet—and alongside various other projects including Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers and Hank Williams III. The Jesus Lizard eventually reunited, but until now have only celebrated their catalog, never releasing new jams.
The Jesus Lizard, from left: bassist David Wm. Sims, singer David Yow, drummer Mac McNeilly, and guitarist Duane Denison.
Photo by Joshua Black Wilkins
Back in 2018, Denison, hanging in a hotel room with Yow, played a riff on his unplugged electric guitar that caught the singer’s ear. That song, called “West Side,” will remain unreleased for now, but Denison explains: “He said, ‘Wow, that’s really good. What is that?’ And I said, ‘It’s just some new thing. Why don’t we do an album?’” From those unassuming beginnings, the Jesus Lizard’s creative juices started flowing.
So, how does a band—especially one who so indelibly captured the ineffable energy of live rock performance—prepare to get a new record together 26 years after their last? Back in their earlier days, the members all lived together in a band house, collectively tending to the creative fire when inspiration struck. All these years later, they reside in different cities, so their process requires sending files back and forth and only meeting up for occasional demo sessions over the course of “three or four years.”
“When the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.” —Duane Denison
the Jesus Lizard "Alexis Feels Sick"
Distance creates an obstacle to striking while the proverbial iron is hot, but Denison has a method to keep things energized: “Practice loud.” The guitarist professes the importance of practice, in general, and especially with a metronome. “We keep very detailed records of what the beats per minute of these songs are,” he explains. “To me, the way to do it is to run it to a Bluetooth speaker and crank it, and then crank your amp. I play a little at home, but when the time comes to get more in performance mode, I have a practice space. I go there by myself and crank it up. I turn that amp up and turn the metronome up and play loud.”
It’s a proven solution. On Rack—recorded at Patrick Carney’s Audio Eagle studio with producer Paul Allen—the band sound as vigorous as ever, proving they’ve not only remained in step with their younger selves, but they may have surpassed it with faders cranked. “Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style,” explains Allen. “The conviction in his playing that he is known for from his recordings in the ’80s and ’90s is still 100-percent intact and still driving full throttle today.”
“I try to be really, really precise,” he says. “I think we all do when it comes to the basic tracks, especially the rhythm parts. The band has always been this machine-like thing.” Together, they build a tension with Yow’s careening voice. “The vocals tend to be all over the place—in and out of tune, in and out of time,” he points out. “You’ve got this very free thing moving around in the foreground, and then you’ve got this very precise, detailed band playing behind it. That’s why it works.”
Before Rack, the Jesus Lizard hadn’t released a new record since 1998’s Blue.
Denison’s guitar also serves as the foreground foil to Yow’s unhinged raving, as on “Alexis Feels Sick,” where they form a demented harmony, or on the midnight creep of “What If,” where his vibrato-laden melodies bolster the singer’s unsettled, maniacal display. As precise as his riffs might be, his playing doesn’t stay strictly on the grid. On the slow, skulking “Armistice Day,” his percussive chording goes off the rails, giving way to a solo that slices that groove like a chef’s knife through warm butter as he reorganizes rock ’n’ roll histrionics into his own cut-up vocabulary.
“During recording sessions, his first solo takes are usually what we decide to keep,” explains Allen. “Listen to Duane’s guitar solos on Jack White’s ‘Morning, Noon, and Night,’ Tomahawk’s ‘Fatback,’ and ‘Grind’ off Rack. There’s a common ‘contained chaos’ thread among them that sounds like a harmonic Rubik’s cube that could only be solved by Duane.”
“Duane’s approach, both as a guitarist and writer, has an angular and menacing fingerprint that is his own unique style.” —Rack producer Paul Allen
To encapsulate just the right amount of intensity, “I don’t over practice everything,” the guitarist says. Instead, once he’s created a part, “I set it aside and don’t wear it out.” On Rack, it’s obvious not a single kilowatt of musical energy was lost in the rehearsal process.
Denison issues his noisy masterclass with assertive, overdriven tones supporting his dissonant voicings like barbed wire on top of an electric fence. The occasional application of slapback delay adds a threatening aura to his exacting riffage. His tones were just as carefully crafted as the parts he plays, and he relied mostly on his signature Electrical Guitar Company Chessie for the sessions, though a Fender Uptown Strat also appears, as well as a Taylor T5Z, which he chose for its “cleaner, hyper-articulated sound” on “Swan the Dog.” Though he’s been spotted at recent Jesus Lizard shows with a brand-new Powers Electric—he points out he played a demo model and says, “I just couldn’t let go of it,” so he ordered his own—that wasn’t until tracking was complete.
Duane Denison's Gear
Denison wields his Powers Electric at the Blue Room in Nashville last June.
Photo by Doug Coombe
Guitars
- Electrical Guitar Company Chessie
- Fender Uptown Strat
- Taylor T5Z
- Gibson ES-135
- Powers Electric
Amps
- Hiwatt Little J
- Hiwatt 2x12 cab with Fane F75 speakers
- Fender Super-Sonic combo
- Early ’60s Fender Bassman
- Marshall 1987X Plexi Reissue
- Victory Super Sheriff head
- Blackstar HT Stage 60—2 combos in stereo with Celestion Neo Creamback speakers and Mullard tubes
Effects
- Line 6 Helix
- Mantic Flex Pro
- TC Electronic G-Force
- Menatone Red Snapper
Strings and Picks
- Stringjoy Orbiters .0105 and .011 sets
- Dunlop celluloid white medium
- Sun Studios yellow picks
He ran through various amps—Marshalls, a Fender Bassman, two Fender Super-Sonic combos, and a Hiwatt Little J—at Audio Eagle. Live, if he’s not on backline gear, you’ll catch him mostly using 60-watt Blackstar HT Stage 60s loaded with Celestion Neo Creambacks. And while some boxes were stomped, he got most of his effects from a Line 6 Helix. “All of those sounds [in the Helix] are modeled on analog sounds, and you can tweak them endlessly,” he explains. “It’s just so practical and easy.”
The tools have only changed slightly since the band’s earlier days, when he favored Travis Beans and Hiwatts. Though he’s started to prefer higher gain sounds, Allen points out that “his guitar sound has always had teeth with a slightly bright sheen, and still does.”
“Honestly, I don’t think my tone has changed much over the past 30-something years,” Denison says. “I tend to favor a brighter, sharper sound with articulation. Someone sent me a video I had never seen of myself playing in the ’80s. I had a band called Cargo Cult in Austin, Texas. What struck me about it is it didn’t sound terribly different than what I sound like right now as far as the guitar sound and the approach. I don’t know what that tells you—I’m consistent?”
YouTube It
The Jesus Lizard take off at Nashville’s Blue Room this past June with “Hide & Seek” from Rack.
Keith Urban has spent decades traveling the world and topping global country-music charts, and on this episode of Wong Notes, the country-guitar hero tells host Cory Wong how he conquered the world—and what keeps him chasing new sounds on his 6-string via a new record, High, which releases on September 20.
Urban came up as guitarist and singer at the same time, and he details how his playing and singing have always worked as a duet in service of the song: “When I stop singing, [my guitar] wants to say something, and he says it in a different way.” Those traits served him well when he made his move into the American music industry, a story that begins in part with a fateful meeting with a 6-string banjo in a Nashville music store in 1995.
It’s a different world for working musicians now, and Urban weighs in on the state of radio, social media, and podcasts for modern guitarists, but he still believes in word-of-mouth over the algorithm when it comes to discovering exciting new players.
And in case you didn’t know, Keith Urban is a total gearhead. He shares his essential budget stomps and admits he’s a pedal hound, chasing new sounds week in and week out, but what role does new gear play in his routine? Urban puts it simply: “I’m not chasing tone, I’m pursuing inspiration.”
