
Big tube bass rigs will always be a part of the low-end landscape, even as advancements in digital and solid-state technology and performance requirements make smaller rigs more prevalent.
Big tube bass rigs will always be a part of the low-end landscape, even as advancements in digital and solid-state technology and performance requirements make smaller rigs more prevalent. After helping pioneer bass amplification with the original Bassman combo Fender ceded the big bass amp market to other manufacturers in the late ’60s and ’70s. But with the new 300-watt Super Bassman, the company has taken an old-school turn back to the heady days of stadium rock, when bass amps with gut-churning volume ruled the day.
Ace of Bass
The Super Bassman derives its classic looks from Fender's blackface era, right down to the silver grille cloth, black panel, and witch hat knobs. The head weighs in around 65 pounds—close to 15 pounds lighter than the comparable Ampeg SVT Classic—and is relatively easy to lift with the pair of spring-loaded side handles.
The signal path starts with a pair of 12AX7 preamp tubes, which are fed to a 12AX7 driver tube and 12AT7 phase inverter, and then sent to a sextet of 6550 power tubes—generating a whopping 300 watts of vicious, tube power. And the power tubes are constantly monitored by Fender's Automatic Bias system, which guards against failure and wear. Located on the rear of the amp, the system's control panel also indicates when the tubes are warming up and when the amp is ready to be taken off standby. Additionally, it enables adjustment of the bias in the range of a cool 23 mA to a warm 33 mA, which changes the amp's overall response and tonality.
The amp’s seemingly endless amount of controls contrasts with its streamlined, classic style. But Fender designed the Super Bassman with the intent of covering as much tonal ground as possible, so they packed two footswitchable channels in the circuit with unique and dedicated voicings. The first channel uses Fender's classic, passive tone stack for warmer vintage tones, and utilizes a simple three-band EQ and volume control to shape the sound. Both the bass and treble knobs pull out to expand the low- and high-frequency range, respectively. Gritty-to-highly overdriven tones are handled by the amp's second channel, which has a modern, active tone stack, quicker attack and more vigorous tonality than its counterpart. This channel has a similar layout as the first, but also additional controls for preamp gain, wet/dry blending, and midrange frequency adjustment—which is super handy when you want your overdriven tone to cut through the mix. And because the tone stack is active, the EQ controls are designed to have huge sweeping capabilities, with 15 dB of cut or boost for the bass and treble controls, and 18 dBs of adjustment for the mid control. Once a player adjusts the balance between the two channels using their respective volume controls, the master volume knob handles the final output level and even has a clever mute function when pulled out.
The back panel of the amp is home to a balanced XLR out with a dedicated output-level control and switches for setting either the preamp-affected or direct signal to the output. There is also a switch that will completely mute the main and secondary speaker jacks and allows the head to be run without requiring a cabinet for recording the pre-amp section. Single jacks for power amp output, preamp input, tuner out, and the included footswitch round out the remainder of features on the rear of the amp.
Fender Super Bassman Ratings
Pros:
Terrific vintage cleans and modern overdrive tones. Highly responsive controls. A tube monitoring system that should be mandatory on most amps.
Cons:
Excessive volumes could be too much for a lot of players. Pricey.
Tones:
Playability/Ease of Use:
Build:
Value:
Street:
$1,799
Fender
fender.com
The Super Bassman is a seriously powerful amp, so Fender crafted several brand-new cabinets to compliment its sound. The Bassman Pro cabs are loaded with Fender Special Design Eminence speakers backed with neodymium magnets, which lighten the load considerably while still providing a healthy amount of power. Along with a compression driver horn for added top end, Fender went with a lightweight plywood material to construct the new vintage-looking cabs, and included two 1/4" and one speakON jack—all wired for 8Ω. For our review, Fender shipped us a 500-watt Bassman Pro 410, outfitted with a set of removable casters and spring-loaded handles to better transport its svelte 55 pounds. Other models in the Bassman Pro cabinet series include 1x15, 6x10, and 8x10 configurations.
One Bassman To Rule Them All
The amount of low-end power and pants-flapping sound that Fender’s 300-watt behemoth throws out is impressive. It’s an amp that you probably don’t need to consider if most of your gigs take place at the local coffee house. Yet with all the clean headroom that’s available, the inherent detail of an instrument is allowed to shine through in ways that most amps out there aren't capable of producing—making the Super Bassman more than just a ear-bludgeoning stack of doom.
With a 2008 Fender American Jazz Bass, the amp's vintage-voiced first channel emitted the classic Fender Twin-type cleanliness and sparkle, but with a solid low-end foundation and plenty of volume on tap. The characteristically smooth top-end and juicy lows of the Jazz Bass translated superbly, with an almost hi-fi quality that revealed the slightest details of both my fingers and pick plucking the strings. After a while, I wanted a slightly warmer, more rounded tone for some smooth Jack Bruce-esque rock work. Adjusting the bias to a hotter setting, speeding up the attack, and applying a little more gumption in the midrange got me there. Since the highs took a slight dive in volume, the cab's onboard horn adjustment made it a snap to retain some presence and deliver a nice, tasty cut to the tone. And when I transitioned from jazzier, freeform playing to slap-happy funk, the amp responded in kind by tightening the lows and mids with my more forceful playing style.
One of the amp's best traits is how dead quiet it is, even at relatively high volumes. In fact, my first time hearing the amp was while making a few notes for this review. Not realizing the standby switch was not engaged, I quickly found out after accidentally hitting a very loud, low E on the Jazz. I thought this was pretty impressive, especially considering the fan on the amp’s back panel for keeping the tubes cool. These fans can often add a slight whine to the sound's background with a lot of amps that use them. Not so here.
Fender Bassman 410 NEO Ratings
Pros:
Handles lows incredibly well. Adjustable horn is a godsend for tweaking high-frequency response. Very lightweight.
Cons:
Horn can dish out too much high end at higher settings with clean tones.
Tones:
Playability/Ease of Use:
Build:
Value:
Street:
$699
Fender
fender.com
The amp's overdrive channel is a force to be reckoned with, and it has a really meaty vibe without being buzzy. The brawny muscular nature was perfect for overdriven modern rock, and the channel's blend control provided an easy route to dialing in a crisp overlay of dry punch. In addition, the dual midrange controls for level and frequency help you tune the amp for a given musical style more readily—lower settings working especially well for speed metal, and higher ones more appropriate for hard and raunchy rock.
Most impressive was how well the preamp overdrive worked with the amp's copious amounts of clean headroom, which is something that's hard to come by in amps with this much power. In many instances, having a ton of preamp distortion running against a lot of volume can sound tinny and thin, making the highs annoyingly piercing. This is not the case with the Super Bassman's overdrive, which kept a full, robust body with plenty of detail.
Another aspect of the Super Bassman that sets it apart from other amps with brutish volume is how effective the EQ's push-pull controls work with the amp cranked. Even with the master volume at deafening levels pulling out the bass and treble knobs for more subs and brightness has a drastic effect on the tone. Everything got meaner and tougher the more I pushed it, which ultimately revealed some of the best overdriven tones the amp has to offer. Unfortunately, the volume required to get there were beyond what some people would be able to handle, making me wish for some sort of attenuation control that would let the power amp cook at volumes that weren't so face ripping.
The Verdict
The Super Bassman is an amp for players who need serious volume to fill large venues, or have a sound guy cool enough to let them crank it up to Shea Stadium-caliber levels. That being said, the immense power also gives the amp headroom that makes it a great amp for playing at lower levels, provided that you want your tone to be crystal clear with great tube warmth. When it’s overdriven, there isn't much out on the market that can stand in its way, making it a king among men in the world of high-powered tube amplification for bassists.
A phaser with vintage vibes and modern control from Stewmac—win the Phasor II Kit in the I Love Pedals giveaway! Enter today and return daily for more chances!
StewMac Lightcycle Phasor II Pedal Kit, With White Enclosure
StewMac Lightcycle Phasor II Pedal Kit, With White Enclosure Shop StewMac Lightcycle Phasor II Pedal Kit at StewMac. Our take on the revered Mu-Tron Phasor II—the most versatile phaser ever made! StewMAX FREE Shipping!The National New Yorker lived at the forefront of the emerging electric guitar industry, and in Memphis Minnie’s hands, it came alive.
This National electric is just the tip of the iceberg of electric guitar history.
On a summer day in 1897, a girl named Lizzie Douglas was born on a farm in the middle of nowhere in Mississippi, the first of 13 siblings. When she was seven, her family moved closer to Memphis, Tennessee, and little Lizzie took up the banjo. Banjo led to guitar, guitar led to gigs, and gigs led to dreams. She was a prodigious talent, and “Kid” Douglas ran away from home to play for tips on Beale Street when she was just a teenager. She began touring around the South, adopted the moniker Memphis Minnie, and eventually joined the circus for a few years.
(Are you not totally intrigued by the story of this incredible woman? Why did she run away from home? Why did she fall in love with the guitar? We haven’t even touched on how remarkable her songwriting is. This is a singular pioneer of guitar history, and we beseech you to read Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie’s Blues by Beth and Paul Garon.)
Following the end of World War I, Hawaiian music enjoyed a rapid rise in popularity. On their travels around the U.S., musicians like Sol Ho’opi’i became fans of Louis Armstrong and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, leading to a great cross-pollination of Hawaiian music with jazz and blues. This potent combination proved popular and drew ever-larger audiences, which created a significant problem: How on earth would an audience of thousands hear the sound from a wimpy little acoustic guitar?
This art deco pickguard offers just a bit of pizzazz to an otherwise demure instrument.
In the late 1920s, George Beauchamp, John and Rudy Dopyera, Adolph Rickenbacker, and John Dopyera’s nephew Paul Barth endeavored to answer that question with a mechanically amplified guitar. Working together under Beauchamp and John Dopyera’s National String Instrument Corporation, they designed the first resonator guitar, which, like a Victrola, used a cone-shaped resonator built into the guitar to amplify the sound. It was definitely louder, but not quite loud enough—especially for the Hawaiian slide musicians. With the guitars laid on their laps, much of the sound projected straight up at the ceiling instead of toward the audience.
Barth and Beauchamp tackled this problem in the 1930s by designing a magnetic pickup, and Rickenbacker installed it in the first commercially successful electric instrument: a lap-steel guitar known affectionately as the “Frying Pan” due to its distinctive shape. Suddenly, any stringed instrument could be as loud as your amplifier allowed, setting off a flurry of innovation. Electric guitars were born!
“At the time it was positively futuristic, with its lack of f-holes and way-cool art deco design on the pickup.”
By this time, Memphis Minnie was a bona fide star. She recorded for Columbia, Vocalion, and Decca Records. Her song “Bumble Bee,” featuring her driving guitar technique, became hugely popular and earned her a new nickname: the Queen of Country Blues. She was officially royalty, and her subjects needed to hear her game-changing playing. This is where she crossed paths with our old pals over at National.
National and other companies began adding pickups to so-called Spanish guitars, which they naturally called “Electric Spanish.” (This term was famously abbreviated ES by the Gibson Guitar Corporation and used as a prefix on a wide variety of models.) In 1935, National made its first Electric Spanish guitar, renamed the New Yorker three years later. By today’s standards, it’s modestly appointed. At the time it was positively futuristic, with its lack of f-holes and way-cool art deco design on the pickup.
There’s buckle rash and the finish on the back of the neck is rubbed clean off in spots, but that just goes to show how well-loved this guitar has been.
Memphis Minnie had finally found an axe fit for a Queen. She was among the first blues guitarists to go electric, and the New Yorker fueled her already-upward trajectory. She recorded over 200 songs in her 25-year career, cementing her and the National New Yorker’s place in musical history.
Our National New Yorker was made in 1939 and shows perfect play wear as far as we’re concerned. Sure, there’s buckle rash and the finish on the back of the neck is rubbed clean off in spots, but structurally, this guitar is in great shape. It’s easy to imagine this guitar was lovingly wiped down each time it was put back in the case.
There’s magic in this guitar, y’all. Every time we pick it up, we can feel Memphis Minnie’s spirit enter the room. This guitar sounds fearless. It’s a survivor. This is a guitar that could inspire you to run away and join the circus, transcend genre and gender, and leave your own mark on music history. As a guitar store, watching guitars pass from musician to musician gives us a beautiful physical reminder of how history moves through generations. We can’t wait to see who joins this guitar’s remarkable legacy.
SOURCES: blackpast.org, nps.gov, worldmusic.net, historylink.org, Memphis Music Hall of Fame, “Memphis Minnie’s ‘Scientific Sound’: Afro-Sonic Modernity and the Jukebox Era of the Blues” from American Quarterly, “The History of the Development of Electric Stringed Musical Instruments” by Stephen Errede, Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL.
In our third installment with Santa Cruz Guitar Company founder Richard Hoover, the master luthier shows PG's John Bohlinger how his team of builders assemble and construct guitars like a chef preparing food pairings. Hoover explains that the finer details like binding, headstock size and shape, internal bracing, and adhesives are critical players in shaping an instrument's sound. Finally, Richard explains how SCGC uses every inch of wood for making acoustic guitars or outside ventures like surfboards and art.
We know Horsegirl as a band of musicians, but their friendships will always come before the music. From left to right: Nora Cheng, drummer Gigi Reece, and Penelope Lowenstein.
The Chicago-via-New York trio of best friends reinterpret the best bits of college-rock and ’90s indie on their new record, Phonetics On and On.
Horsegirl guitarists Nora Cheng and Penelope Lowenstein are back in their hometown of Chicago during winter break from New York University, where they share an apartment with drummer Gigi Reece. They’re both in the middle of writing papers. Cheng is working on one about Buckminster Fuller for a city planning class, and Lowenstein is untangling Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s short story, “Three Paths to the Lake.”
“It was kind of life-changing, honestly. It changed how I thought about womanhood,” Lowenstein says over the call, laughing a bit at the gravitas of the statement.
But the moment of levity illuminates the fact that big things are happening in their lives. When they released their debut album, 2022’s Versions of Modern Performance, the three members of Horsegirl were still teenagers in high school. Their new, sophomore record, Phonetics On and On, arrives right in the middle of numerous first experiences—their first time living away from home, first loves, first years of their 20s, in university. Horsegirl is going through changes. Lowenstein notes how, through moving to a new city, their friendship has grown, too, into something more familial. They rely on each other more.
“If the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band, without any doubt.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“Everyone's cooking together, you take each other to the doctor,” Lowenstein says. “You rely on each other for weird things. I think transitioning from being teenage friends to suddenly working together, touring together, writing together in this really intimate creative relationship, going through sort of an unusual experience together at a young age, and then also starting school together—I just feel like it brings this insane intimacy that we work really hard to maintain. And if the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band without any doubt.”
Horsegirl recorded their sophomore LP, Phonetics On and On, at Wilco’s The Loft studio in their hometown, Chicago.
These changes also include subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in their sophisticated and artful guitar-pop. Versions of Modern Performance created a notion of the band as ’90s college-rock torchbearers, with reverb-and-distortion-drenched numbers that recalled Yo La Tengo and the Breeders. Phonetics On and On doesn’t extinguish the flame, but it’s markedly more contemporary, sacrificing none of the catchiness but opting for more space, hypnotic guitar lines, and meditative, repeated phrases. Cheng and Lowenstein credit Welsh art-pop wiz Cate Le Bon’s presence as producer in the studio as essential to the sonic direction.
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little.”–Nora Cheng
“We had never really let a fourth person into our writing process,” Cheng says. “I feel like Cate really changed the way we think about how you can compose a song, and built off ideas we were already thinking about, and just created this very comfortable space for experimentation and pushed us. There are so many weird instruments and things that aren't even instruments at [Wilco’s Chicago studio] The Loft. I feel like, definitely on our first record, we were super hesitant to go into territory that wasn't just distorted guitar, bass, and drums.”
Nora Cheng's Gear
Nora Cheng says that letting a fourth person—Welsh artist Cate Le Bon—into the trio’s songwriting changed how they thought about composition.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Devices Plumes
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- TC Electronic Polytune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex .73 mm
Phonetics On and On introduces warm synths (“Julie”), raw-sounding violin (“In Twos”), and gamelan tiles—common in traditional Indonesian music—to Horsegirl’s repertoire, and expands on their already deep quiver of guitar sounds as Cheng and Lowenstein branch into frenetic squonks, warped jangles, and jagged, bare-bones riffs. The result is a collection of songs simultaneously densely textured and spacious.
“I listen to these songs and I feel like it captures the raw, creative energy of being in the studio and being like, ‘Fuck! We just exploded the song. What is about to happen?’” Lowenstein says. “That feeling is something we didn’t have on the first record because we knew exactly what we wanted to capture and it was the songs we had written in my parents’ basement.”
Cheng was first introduced to classical guitar as a kid by her dad, who tried to teach her, and then she was subsequently drawn back to rock by bands like Cage The Elephant and Arcade Fire. Lowenstein started playing at age 6, which covers most of her life memories and comprises a large part of her identity. “It made me feel really powerful as a young girl to know that I was a very proficient guitarist,” she says. The shreddy playing of Television, Pink Floyd’s spacey guitar solos, and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan were all integral to her as Horsegirl began.
Penelope Lowenstein's Gear
Penelope Lowenstein likes looking back at the versions of herself that made older records.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Westwood
- EarthQuaker Bellows
- TC Electronic PolyTune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex 1.0 mm
Recently, the two of them have found themselves influenced by guitarists both related and unrelated to the type of tunes they’re trading in on their new album. Lowenstein got into Brazilian guitar during the pandemic and has recently been “in a Jim O’Rourke, John Fahey zone.”
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument,” Lowenstein says. “And hearing what the bass in those guitar parts is doing—as in, the E string—is kind of mind blowing.”
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little,” Cheng adds. “And also Lizzy Mercier [Descloux], mostly on the Rosa Yemen records. That guitar playing I feel was very inspiring for the anti-solo,[a technique] which appears on [Phonetics On and On].”This flurry of focused discovery gives the impression that Cheng and Lowenstein’s sensibilities are shifting day-to-day, buoyed by the incredible expansion of creative possibilities that setting one’s life to revolve around music can afford. And, of course, the energy and exponential growth of youth. Horsegirl has already clocked major stylistic shifts in their brief lifespan, and it’s exciting to have such a clear glimpse of evolution in artists who are, likely and hopefully, just beginning a long journey together.
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“In your 20s, life moves so fast,” Lowenstein says. “So much changes from the time of recording something to releasing something that even that process is so strange. You recognize yourself, and you also kind of sympathize with yourself. It's a really rewarding way of life, I think, for musicians, and it's cool that we have our teenage years captured like that, too—on and on until we're old women.”
YouTube It
Last summer, Horsegirl gathered at a Chicago studio space to record a sun-soaked set of new and old tunes.