Big bass sound and plenty more from a pocket-sized package.
What’s in a name? Not much when you consider the BigHead headphone amp from Phil Jones Bass, a company known for big sounds from small drivers and enclosures. The not big 2.5" x 5.3" x 1" BigHead could very well fit in your back pocket if you’re so inclined, but its size makes it ideal for the accessory compartment in an instrument case or gig bag.
Though it will work for a variety of active or passive instruments, the BigHead’s 2-band EQ system is optimized for bass, and the unit carries 200 milliwatts of power output to drive a set of headphones. On opposite sides of the stacked EQ dials are a volume/gain stack and three LED indicators for power and the rechargeable lithium-ion battery status. When I plugged a Fender P into the rear-panel jack and set all the dials to noon, the BigHead produced a clean, big, and warm tone with zero noise or coloration. The responsive dials quickly got me to a nicely aggressive and biting sound by moving the treble to about 4 o’clock and pushing the gain. Awesome—though 250 bucks for a headphone amp is not exactly chump change.
But the BigHead is not just a headphone amp: It’s also a wee digital interface that feeds data and charges up via the micro-USB port located in the back next to the auxiliary jack. I tested the BigHead’s interface functionality (48 kHz 16-bit conversion) using GarageBand and had a hassle-free tracking experience with no latency issues. When you consider that the BigHead can also be used as a headphone booster for audio players or as an analog pre for an amp or mixer, the $250 tag is much easier to swallow.
Test Gear: 2001 Fender Precision, Urbanears Plattan Plus headphones, GarageBand 10.0.3Ratings
Pros:
Compact and solid box that provides sweet tone and digital-interface functionality.
Cons:
Even with all it offers, it’s still a touch pricey.
Street:
$250
Phil Jones Bass BigHead
philjonesbass.com
Tones:
Ease of Use:
Build/Design:
Value:
The famed luthier opens up about getting his start more than 30 years ago, finally building John McLaughlin a guitar, and how many hot wings he can eat in one sitting.
Paul Reed Smith is no stranger to Premier Guitar: He has joined us for NAMM demos, opened up his factory for private tours, and even performed for the PG cameras during Experience PRS. Just in time for his company’s 30th anniversary, Smith gave fans and PRS owners an opportunity to ask him questions when he took over our Facebook account for about 90 minutes. Thanks to all of your inquiries, we uncovered a few nuggets of the luthier’s personal and professional life that were previously kept under wraps. Here are the highlights:
1. One door closes on a guitarist, the next opens for an award-winning guitar builder.
I started making guitars because I wasn’t a good enough guitarist and I somehow viscerally understood how to build instruments. I wanted to have a big impact ... I thought I had a lot to offer, but the people around me, for the most part, didn’t think so. So the main inspiration was to spend a life of trying to build guitars the best I could, rather then being one of those people who dies saying they could’ve tried harder.
To get my first guitar off a piece of paper, it took me over three years of drawing and redrawing, cutting bodies, and then more drawing [laughs]. If you take a Strat and a Les Paul Jr. and you average the lines, the body shape that comes out looks god-awful. It took a long time to get the body shape to the point that it was comfortable to the eye, comfortable with the way it felt, and comfortable to how it works as part of a musical instrument.
If I went to Washington Music Center and opened a case with a guitar I’d made, it would draw a crowd. But if I played guitar there, no one would show up, so I guess I made the right choice.
2. Proud like a father.
My two current favorites that are mine would have to be the Private Stock McCarty and Paul Signature. We recently got a chance to record “Machine Gun” and I used a DC3 that sounded lovely, too.
3. Don’t get it twisted—25" is the primo choice.
Everybody has it wrong, including the companies that use 24 3/4" as their scale length. The reason I made it 25" is because when you hit a low E string hard using a set of .009s on a 24 9/16" scale length, the low E goes sharp and then comes back into pitch. The reason I didn’t go all the way to 25 1/2" is because Hendrix and SRV were tuning guitars down to Eb or D because the strings were too tight when tuned to pitch. So it was an experientially based decision, not a compromised guess. I’ve always been surprised at how well it worked—especially when I saw other companies building 25" scale fret-slotting machines. Another problem with either the 24 3/4" or 25 1/2" scale-length instruments is that if somebody grew up on a short-scale guitar, they wouldn’t play a longer one and vice versa. With the 25", I was getting a simple “yes.”
4. And while he’s talking about measurements, Paul wants to clear the air on fretboard radiuses.
People think that old Les Pauls have a 12" fretboard radius—they don’t, because all the ones I’ve measured had a radius of 10". I’ve just felt it’s the most comfortable to most hands and so that’s why I’ve pretty much always stuck by that radius. I’ve never had an artist complain about the 10" radius. However, there have been a few times players have requested a flatter one because that’s what they’re used to. But for the most part, a 10" radius works perfectly for our guitars and most guitarists in the market.
5. A guitar three decades in the making.
One of my all-time guitar heroes is John McLaughlin. John is a genius musician who is one of the fathers of our musical industry. He has been telling me for nearly 30 years that one day my company would be good enough to make him a guitar [laughs]. Finally, after playing one of my Paul’s 28 Violin models he said, “Okay, I’m ready to order a guitar.” We made it three times until he was pleased with what he saw on the computer screen.
Essentially it’s a Violin guitar with a tremolo, 57/08 humbuckers, rare curly maple, rare ribbon-striped mahogany, a pernambuco neck, and black rosewood fretboard. Most recently we made him something very similar with the skyline of New York City as a fretboard inlay. His picture is on my door playing that guitar along with another photo of me holding onto Chuck Brown (the godfather of go-go) who recently passed away. Being able to build instruments that John not only enjoys and loves, but uses on a regular basis, is one of the biggest accomplishments of my career.
6. Need an extended-range axe? You should probably look elsewhere.
We’re really limited on our 7-string production right now because we haven’t tooled up for it at this point. PRS bridges are proprietary and as a rule we would not buy a 7-string bridge off the shelf from another manufacturer, so that’s why we haven’t expanded production to include models with tremolos. Our main concern is that other manufacturer’s bridges wouldn’t have our exact specifications on them and we’d either have to compromise our own design or invest a bunch of time and money in R&D to outsource the hardware—and that’s not something I’m comfortable doing right now. Furthermore, we’ve come to rely on our own innovations to make the instrument stay in tune and sound great. No compromises at PRS. As far as an 8-string goes, there are no plans at this point to do anything like that.
7. Chasing the sonic magic.
We develop new pickups because of a need we find in the market or a need we find internally. All of this is done to make musicians a more useful musical instrument and because these needs are fairly constant in the guitar community, we find ourselves continually working on new pickups or using different winding techniques.
That’s the place the Narrowfield pickups came from—we found a hole in the guitar industry that could be filled with a pickup that presents a focused, articulate string attack. The Narrowfields are like a single-coil but are hum canceling, and the result of this is a new sounding pickup system that blends features of single-coils, P-90s, and humbuckers.
We don’t really do pickups because they’re cool, we design them to fill a void, but we’re currently working on something more esoteric, like Filter’Trons and Gold Foils, though these aren’t replicas. When all the bugs are worked out, hopefully we will release them.
8. Robot tuners? We don’t need no stinkin’ robot tuners.
About three to four years ago we were offered the auto-tune system technology when it was first invented, but we passed. If you put a whole bunch of contraptions on the headstock of the guitar, my experience is that the guitar doesn’t sound as good and can become unbalanced. However, I do think the fact that they [Gibson] are putting automatic tuners on all their instruments is awesome and I’m glad to see they’re embracing the future!
If you’re driving a car, you need to be checking the rearview mirror a good percentage of the time while you are also looking through the windshield. It’s a good idea to look left and right once in a while, too!
9. When I close my eyes and imagine what a guitar should sound like, I think….
One would have to be Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? because it started something so powerful. As far as the tone in my head, I hear something in the middle between Jeff Beck, Carlos Santana, and David Gilmour with an oboe, viola, and low D whistle thrown in. [By the way, check out the sound of a low D whistle.]
10. We move forward by trying to identify the goals of Leo and Ted.
I keep thinking there is no space left to explore, but on a daily basis this ends up not being true. We discovered something yesterday that we have been working on for 30 years, and I’m almost positive it is going to make it to market in the near future and impact our industry in a good way.
The problem is that we didn’t invent the electric guitar, the humbucker, the single-coil pickup, the tremolo system, the scale length measurements—we’ve refined them. What’s starting to happen is that we are understanding what the people who invented our industry wanted and why they did it a particular way. We’re starting to understand what they were shooting for, what their goals were, and what they were thinking when they were in their workshops years ago. From that mental position, we can make real advancements in guitar design and break the mold. Another analogy would be, instead of understanding the gun they shot with, we are figuring out where the target was. But in short, yes, there is a lot more room for new designs and improvements on old models—what fun!
Bonus fact: Paul Reed Smith caps his hot-wing quota at 15 in one sitting.
How does your picking hand control harmonic content?
Image 1 — Photo courtesy of basslab.de.
Musicians are fond of platitudes, and we bassists are no exception. A good companion to the evergreen “Jaco only needed four” is “it’s all in the hands.” Every instrument has its sonic characteristics and limitations, so it might not be all about the hands, but there’s no denying your plucking hand plays a key role in shaping your sound.
One of the first things we learn when taking up the bass is that the plucking position matters. Attacking the strings closer to the bridge gives you a greater proportion of upper harmonics, while you get more of the fundamental when you pluck a string near the neck or even at the 12th fret.
As bassists, the lowest frequency in our spectrum is the half-wave of the open string or scale length, and ideally the complete harmonic spectrum contains additional frequencies that are whole number multiples of the fundamental frequency (Image 1).
While the frequency mix in this spectrum is partially determined by the construction of the instrument, pickups, electronics, and cabs, we influence the outcome by how we play. Not only can we make our instrument sound different by using such techniques as fingerpicking, slap ’n’ pop, or tapping, it also matters where, how, and at what speed we attack the strings.
And while our guitar mates rarely have a problem getting heard, bass players often do. When that happens, instead of simply reaching for the volume knob, a better choice can be to select the appropriate plucking style for that particular moment.
The complex ways that a sustaining tone evolves over time has been subjected to much scientific analysis. Image 2 shows two Fourier-analyzed spectrographs of a single note played on two different instruments. The X-axis represents time, the Y-axis represents frequency, and the color represents the amplitude with red being the highest. Frankly, there is a lot of information in the graphic—perhaps too much.
When grappling with a concept, it often helps to work with simplified pictures to get an idea of what results come from a specific action. These basic rules and perceptions can help us as long as we don’t stretch them too far, as they are not physically correct in every way.
So let’s try it: What happens when you move the position of your plucking hand from the neck area to the bridge? Imagine you’re watching a right-handed bassist facing you (i.e., the plucking hand is to your left). Revisit the fundamental and the upper harmonics represented in Image 1, and then think of the marked nodes as the position of the plucking hand. It’s easy to envision that the more a player’s hand moves toward the bridge, the more it triggers the higher harmonics of the spectrum.
Image 2 — Photo courtesy of basslab.de.
Here’s another simplified picture concerning pickups and the size of the so-called “magnetic window.” The wider the magnet along the axis of a string, the larger magnetic area it covers, and this limits its ability to pick up higher frequencies. The upper limit of this resolution is reached once the half-wave of a given upper harmonic no longer fits within this window. This statement ignores some other facts and influences, so it doesn’t provide the whole picture, but it’s not completely wrong, and it helps us imagine what’s happening.
A related idea: Why does hitting a string with a sharp pick add more upper harmonics than doing so with the wider and softer fingers, or the even longer contact length of the thumb? It’s as if the length of the contact area somehow exerts a limit on higher harmonics comparable to the magnetic window.
These concepts offer a good way to perceive that initial attack, although we’re ignoring everything that happens after the string is hit, and it’s wobbling out the energy from that first triggering. Here physical reality strikes again, because even our original premise of whole-number multiples of the fundamental isn’t 100 percent correct. Why? The stiffness of a string’s core alters the numbers by a small percentage, as do a few other factors. This results in a very complex and lively frequency shift of harmonics in the sustaining note. That’s probably why we love bass and don’t get very excited by the scientifically “ideal” waves of electronic keyboards.
In the end, the benefit of these simplified perceptions and mental images is that they allow us to draw some basic conclusions about an instrument by just looking at its parts and construction. And that’s what we’ll explore next time.