The bass guitar as an instrument, an industry and a recorded sound.
Section 03
From the Ampeg B-15 in Studio A to the Helix patch on a laptop — how the bass signal got to the desk, and what changed when it went direct.
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The Ampeg B-15 Portaflex became the studio standard in the 1960s — its single 15-inch speaker and tube preamp is the amplified sound on most of what Jamerson recorded — while the SVT of 1969, an 8×10 cabinet and 300 watts, was built for Woodstock. Covers both circuits and why one went to the studio and the other to the stage.
The Motown house engineers in Studio A, Detroit, were running bass signals directly into the console in the early 1960s — decades before DI recording became standard practice.
Line 6 Helix, the Kemper Profiler and the Neural DSP Quad Cortex each approach the same problem differently: how to reproduce the character of an amplifier without the amplifier being present.
Darkglass Electronics, founded in Helsinki in 2010, built a preamp and overdrive pedal — the B3K — that has become the default 'modern bass' tone in metal and progressive rock.
The DI box converts a high-impedance instrument signal to a low-impedance balanced line — a function the Countryman Type 85 has performed on more major-label recordings than any other single device.