When I look back on my career in this business, there is a trend of me staying with a project for about two years before I start looking for a different touring project to keep myself inspired and fresh on my main gig. Maybe I’m a restless soul, a vagabond, or even non-committal to a certain degree. All I know is that I am always looking for any way possible to make playing bass new and interesting at all times—even if it includes non-traditional changes in my equipment. This month, I’d like to share two of my “bassist life hacks” that I’ve found to be very helpful over the past few years.
Bringing stage to studio. In addition to incorporating non-Fender-style instruments into my regular rotation [“Get Over Your Tone,” October 2016], the most major thing I have changed lately is the way I record bass. I’ve enjoyed many years of working in studios and playing on albums I really love between tours, but I have never enjoyed recording as much as playing live. I’ve just never felt like I was able to get the tone and the feel in the studio that I can achieve while playing live.
When I moved to Nashville many years ago, I was told to get an Avalon U5 direct box, and I did. Many studio house engineers love them and it’s what I’ve mainly used for recording sessions. In spite of its large headroom and clear tone, however, I never felt truly inspired recording with it. I also try not to use too many pedals when recording unless I need an obvious effect to the tone, like distortion. So what could I do to bump up my game?
On tour this past year, I’ve been using a small, relatively inexpensive class-D amplifier. And I use the DI (Photo 1) in the back of the amp post-EQ instead of pre-EQ, in spite of FOH engineers generally preferring pre-EQ for the most control over the sound. I’ve been using the EQ sparingly, but enough to where I don’t feel like I am playing through a DI only. As a result of this live experience, I’ve also been using this small amp’s DI in the studio instead of the high-end units my colleagues are using. I’ll tell the engineers and fellow musicians to avoid judgment until they hear it, and the result is often overwhelmingly positive comments like, “I am not doing anything to your signal.”
There is a reason why certain units are classics, and I fully realize that records have been made using said units for decades, but music is art and individual expression. So, if bypassing the use of products with a reputation of admittedly proven excellence is what it takes for me to be truly excited about playing sessions, then that is what I am going to do.
Breaking rules for tone’s sake. In a column about three years ago [“Dont Get Mad, Get Even,” September 2013], I talked about the importance of note-to-note evenness when deciding on what bass to purchase. The issue of the lower strings overpowering the thinner strings often gets more pronounced on extended-range instruments, so it’s a concern since I primarily play 5-string basses. And while I consider the basses I own to be fairly even, I’ve started to break the rules of many world-class guitar techs regarding pickup height.
Photo 2 — Rather than relying too heavily on compression to correct imbalances, the steep angle of this bridge pickup helps ensure that the volume and attack stays even between the heavier-mass strings and the thinner strings.
What I do is position a pickup as close as humanly possible to the 1st string without the string actually hitting it (Photo 2). On the opposite end, I make sure the part of the pickup that rests under the 4th and 5th strings is positioned significantly lower than the part of the pickup under the thinner strings.
I do this by ear and by feel, notby measurement. I won’t even look at an input meter until I first listen carefully to each string and determine that I hear the same volume and feel almost the same amount of rumble through an amplifier. Not a single bass I’ve purchased in a store or received from a custom builder has arrived with the pickups adjusted to actual string mass. Even some of the greatest setup guys here in Nashville—and I think we have the best ones in the world—don’t really adjust for volume imbalance completely to my liking.
In conclusion, I’m not saying that I am right and the people who are legitimately more skilled than me in their respective fields (in this case, engineers and luthiers) are wrong. What I am saying is that to hear what I want to hear and to feel inspired, I’m going to do whatever is needed with my equipment.
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Tom Bedell in the Relic Music acoustic room, holding a custom Seed to Song Parlor with a stunning ocean sinker redwood top and milagro Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
A born storyteller, Bedell doesn’t keep his passion to himself. On Friday, May 12, at New Jersey boutique guitar outpost Relic Music, Bedell shared some of the stories he’s collected during his life and travels as part of a three-city clinic trip. At Relic—and stops at Crossroads Guitar and Art in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, and Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center in Wheaton, Maryland—he discussed his guitars and what makes them so special, why sustainability is such an important cause, and how he’s putting it into practice.
Before his talk, we sat in Relic’s cozy, plush acoustic room, surrounded by a host of high-end instruments. We took a look at a few of the store’s house-spec’d Bedell parlors while we chatted.
“The story of this guitar is the story of the world,” Bedell explained to me, holding a Seed to Song Parlor. He painted a picture of a milagro tree growing on a hillside in northeastern Brazil some 500 years ago, deprived of water and growing in stressful conditions during its early life. That tree was eventually harvested, and in the 1950s, it was shipped to Spain by a company that specialized in church ornaments. They recognized this unique specimen and set it aside until it was imported to the U.S. and reached Oregon. Now, it makes the back and sides of this unique guitar.
A Bedell Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides.
As for the ocean sinker redwood top, “I’m gonna make up the story,” Bedell said, as he approximated the life cycle of the tree, which floated in the ocean, soaking up minerals for years and years, and washed ashore on northern Oregon’s Manzanita Beach. The two woods were paired and built into a small run of exquisitely outfitted guitars using the Bedell/Breedlove Sound Optimization process—in which the building team fine-tunes each instrument’s voice by hand-shaping individual braces to target resonant frequencies using acoustic analysis—and Bedell and his team fell in love.
Playing it while we spoke, I was smitten by this guitar’s warm, responsive tone and even articulation and attack across the fretboard; it strikes a perfect tonal balance between a tight low-end and bright top, with a wide dynamic range that made it sympathetic to anything I offered. And as I swapped guitars, whether picking up a Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides or one with an Adirondack spruce top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides, the character and the elements of each instrument changed, but that perfect balance remained. Each of these acoustics—and of any Bedell I’ve had the pleasure to play—delivers their own experiential thumbprint.
Rosette and inlay detail on an Adirondack spruce top.
Ultimately, that’s what brought Bedell out to the East Coast on this short tour. “We have a totally different philosophy about how we approach guitar-building,” Bedell effused. “There are a lot of individuals who build maybe 12 guitars a year, who do some of the things that we do, but there’s nobody on a production level.” And he wants to spread that gospel.
“We want to reach people who really want something special,” he continued, pointing out that for the Bedell line, the company specifically wants to work with shops like Relic and the other stores he’s visited, “who have a clientele that says I want the best guitar I can possibly have, and they carry enough variety that we can give them that.”
A Fireside Parlor with a Western red cedar top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
