Looking for good bass | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

firstly, hello, i grew up on spinalcracker and it's a real find to have re-discovered its offspring.  hopefully i can be as much help to former spinalcrackers such as myself as its operators were to me.

firstly, a little revisionism, which i realise is a tall order for a new user.  it must be noted, however, that sessions weren't logged the way they are today.  they kept very meticulous records, but not about instruments and amps and such.  generally an amp would be used for an entire album and you'd pick up whatever guitar you wanted.  the beatles anarchic system of studio habits were really getting messy by this point.

nobody knows who put that significant, crushing, jello rip of a bass line on Helter Skelter , but i'm fairly sure it's Paul because he uses that tone a lot and he knew how to get the sound he wanted.  this would be the sound he wanted for the most outrageous and raunchy recording ever to rival The Who (and destroy).

The bass doesn't matter really, if it has pickups and they work and some round wound strings (nickel not taped) you can achieve this sound.  amp doesn't matter either.  ears matter.  but i can tell you he probably wasn't using a Super Beetle bass amp.  Even though their deal with Vox would require the occasional slip of the pen so that Vox could say they were indeed using amps made by them.  The VI'er doesn't matter either.  You'll get different tones, sure, but nothing that can't be solved with EQ in mixing or on an amp.

I've been a recording engineer since I was about 16 (thanks to The Beatles and Spinalcracker's sparking my interest in their recording techniques).  It's not the equipment, it's not the time of day, it's not what kind of tea they smoked for breakfast.  It's about technique and EQ (Lows, Mids, Highs).

I'm going to go out on a limb here and give a very unpopular response to the question of amp used:  I don't think it was the Super Beetle, I think it was an early Ampeg.  Still incredibly costly, but incredibly close to Vox and without having to replace the fuses and repair the damned thing every week (as was the hang-ups of old Super Beetles).

I have re-created this exact sound (which is my favorite bass sound of all time as well) many times using cheap cheap gear, the most unlikely bass guitars, and a little EQ/distortion work.  VERY little distortion, as much as one would expect from a microphone being too close or the levels hitting the red every Now And Then .  You want a big bowl of ripped up jello coming out of your fingers and through the amp.

Buy any bass you like, but I'm also gonna make an unpopular call and say that he used a Rickenbacker because of the heavy use of the plectrum (something he bought the Richenbacher for…its amazing tonality when used with a pick).  On the bass, you want at least two pickups and a selector and tone control for each.  you're going to want the same tone on both pickups, and that's gonna lay somewhere between 2-3.  Very little treble.  Just enough to give it that bounce and edge.  I usually do this with an Ampeg B-15R Portaflex from 1966.  This was the quintessential bass amp for motown and the like in the 60's.  Motown just happened to be Paul's favorite place to look for good bass tones.  He did own several Ampegs,  as they were extremely common.  Vox was an infamously bad bass amp merchant at the time.  The Super Beetles were awful in general, so this is why i've chosen this.  You can sod it off.

Just look it up and see what controls you have, you want all these controls on a solid 60's sounding bass amp.  HI/LO cut being key.  It's also tube-driven and has its own gain section.  Other than that you have bandwidth (negatable for new users), Low, Mids,  Highs (Mids weren't available on the Super Bass–something he'd have wanted and needed for this sound).  It was a fairly simple setup, you'll find it on nearly every other bass amp on the market today, none of which I'll directly recommend because I don't wish to create the illusion that you need this to make it sound right.

So take your amp and simply dial the controls in until your close, flip on the album and listen carefully with no disturbance.  now just turn your mids to a little less than half, turn down the lows,  and turn the highs to just a tat above the halfway mark.  you'll have to play with it by ear, but it willl be extremely rewarding.

the key is juggling the tone:  mixing out those harsh highs and keeping that rubber band made of a quarter million tons of rubber-sound in mind.  lows may play a key part.  mids certainly will not.  negotiating the highs and lows (as is often the case in this wonderful great thing called strife) is key to the sound.  Use a plectrum, bash the strings with it and make sure to mute the strings between hits to get that plodding sound, you'll never know if you've capture it unless you can hear the plods by themselves.  You really don't want to attack the strings so much as strum them right on the head articulately giving a full bodied and textured sound.  a lot of it is to do with technique.  A rickenbacker or VI'er won't get it for you, neither will an Ampeg or a Super Beetle.  You alone must succeed, my son.

turn it up loud enough so that you can tell if you're getting the right sound at high volume levels as well.  sounds alter greatly when the master is down as compared to cranked.  and this mother was cranked.  A lot of the ferocity has to do with the riffs themselves, though.  Paul was into chaos,  but he would've been hitting those strings with precision.

It's unlikely that you'll ever get the exact sound (it's going through tube compressors, tube EQ's, a vast array of arcane and highly treasured technology and not to mention your speakers).  The compression gave it a lot of that thud in the low and mid-range.  you want plenty of room for that to come through in the high EQ.

In short, experiment.  If you can't get the sound, buy yourself a linear EQ system (7 range is plenty) for basses and you'll be able to drag any tone you want out of a scrap heap junk bass and a megaphone.  but try to get the best bass you can.  I use a large scale bass because the Richenbacker was a large scale bass.  My bass also has the Rich's metallic pick-up covers on both pick-ups.  It's an early 70's Fender J bass.  You can get a cheap version and get the pickup covers from musicians friend for around 7 dollars each if you think they'll change your sound/fit your bass.

I think you'll find with some patience, some know-how about the way a bass amp works and the way tonality on the bass works you'll realize how simple this tone is to achieve.  and it's absolutely friggin' wonderful to mess around with this mind-shattering sound.

But if all else fails:   It ain't the bass, it ain't the amp, you just need some more EQ'ing options.  A 7 range EQ unit will require some getting used to but it's about as hard to use as a home stereo EQ.  Which is to say real real easy.  But you'll be able to get any tone you like with one.  Lastly, don't be a sucker for fuzz and distortion.  It's tempting to turn that distortion knob up more than necessary, but listen to how thuddy the record is, with fuzz that would be lost in the mix completely and ruin your attempts.

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.  And Paul did it, right?  It's easy…

Luck to you, squier, and sorry for the length/general inaffection toward gear.  Believe me I own plenty of amps that are classics but without fiddling around on them and screwing up a few times you'll get nowhere.  This leads a lot of people to blame gear.  I say blame gear enthusiasts for making musicians paranoid about circuited instruments and amps or anything that isn't period.  All hogwash.

Most Sincerely,

Josh