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This is really quite simple. When it comes to hearing the sound of my bass onstage--the true purpose of any bass rig--I want the sound of an SWR preamp amplified as loudly as possible into SWR Goliath 4x10 speaker cabinets. Any questions?

Oh, OK, I suppose I'll go into detail. That's what this page is for, right? Click on any particular piece of gear below for the skinny. Or, if you're a true masochist, just read the whole damn thing.

SansAmp PSA-1
Programmable Preamp



SWR Mo' Bass Amplifier

Ah, yes, the amplifier that changed everything. For me, at least.

I had a perfectly fine rig going with the SWR SM-400 head, extra power from an additional amp, and plenty of effects on a pedalboard in front of the chain. But as time went on, I found myself looking for a simpler solution for distortion, especially in getting a good overdriven signal to the front-of-house mix. (See The Old Rig for more details.) So when I was appointed Product Development Manager for SWR in early 2000, the opportunity to help develop a new, high-powered head with analog effects onboard couldn't have come at a better time.

The end result is a complex, integrated, infinitely versatile solution that works great not only with Mike Keneally, but with any gig that requires more than just my typical bass sound. Here's how I use it:

The front end is a standard SWR preamp, with controls much like the Bass 350, but with two exceptions. First, the preamp is softer than the old SM-400 to allow for large boosts in gain by the various effects that come later in the chain. Second, the limiter/leveler in the preamp section is far superior to previous SWR models (IMHO). Keeping all that in mind, I boost the Bass about +5 db and keep the treble flat. For midrange I usually keep it flat as well, unless the room is doing something strange. I keep the limiter at minimum (which still leaves it slightly in effect). I run the Aural Enhancer lower ('3') than I used to on the SM-400 ('7'), again to keep the signal flatter so as not to send an "ultra-scooped" EQ through the effects. With the Mike Lull Custom 5 in the active position and mainly flat EQ-wise, I keep the Mo' Bass Preamp Volume around '4'.

The first effect in the chain is the Overdrive. I can't tell you how thrilled I am with the sound of this particular circuit. Touch-sensitive and as nasty as I need it, it can give me a Stone Temple Pilots-type rock overdrive edge, or a Rage Against The Machine tree-cutting grind if I need it. It's got two controls, Drive (pre) and Level (post). For rock sounds in the studio, I'll leave it on with both controls at around '3' and blend in the edge with the clean signal (I did this on the latest MullMuzzler record, Nick D'Virgilio's Karma, and some new stuff I did with Yogi that's not out yet). For live stuff, it depends on the song. "Ankle Bracelet" is Drive at '3' and Level at '2'. "Why Am I Your Guy?" is '4' and '3' respectively. For "Kedgeree" I open it up to '5' and '4', but during the verses I play lightly so not all the edge comes through…and then for the choruses and bass solos I start nailing it and it cuts the room in half. Any setting over '5' and '5' easily generates feedback any guitarist would be proud to call their own. It's really amazing.

Next is the SubWave, a very clean sub-octave. I keep the Tone control at minimum and the Mix control (clean bass vs. sub signal) at 10% past midpoint on the sub side. This shows up in "Kedgeree" in the solo section, as well as in "Killer Fish" in conjunction with the…

BassSynth. This is by far the most sensitive effect in the chain, with four controls: Filter, Resonance, Envelope and Mix. It converts the input signal directly into a sawtooth wave and sends it through a traditional, analog, four-pole filter. For the most part, I keep the Filter Control at '2', the Resonance at '7' and the Envelope at '3', but the settings for these controls are highly dependent on the amount of input gain feeding into the filter, and, of course, the type of synth sound you're looking for. I keep the Mix control (clean bass vs. synth-filtered bass) at around 25% to the synth side, as I need some of the hard attack of the actual bass signal to counter the soft impact of a sawtooth wave. And I always use the Mo' EQ at the same time, which enhances the BassSynth's sharpness factor by a considerable degree. I also use the Filter Sweep Pedal on the Mo' Control Master Footswitch when I want greater flexibility than the attack of my fingers can provide.

My Mo' EQ settings are as follows: Treble +7, Midrange +9, Bass +1. I kick this on whenever I use the Overdrive or BassSynth, and sometimes with the SubWave as well if I want to cut through more.

The Chorus onboard is deeper and richer than most I've heard, but it doesn't quite have the dynamic range of the T.C. Chorus/Flange. That being said, I've been using the Mo' Bass chorus live on a ton of songs and it's been sounding great in the house, as well as my own rig. Settings: Depth at '3', Rate at '2'.

For me, the most important aspect of using these effects is combining them in the right way for different songs. For the Boosty-ish sound in the intro to "Killer Fish", I use SubWave, BassSynth, Mo' EQ and Chorus. For the 5/4 solo section in "Kedgeree", I use SubWave, Mo' EQ and Chorus. For "Why Am I Your Guy?" I just use Overdrive and Mo' EQ. For something totally weird, like "The Boing-Ah Steroid" (from the Nonkertompf live performance in Groningen, Holland in October of 2001), I used Overdrive, BassSynth, Mo' EQ and Chorus, and in the end of the song I turned the Drive and Chorus Rate all the way up to maximum, causing feedback that sounded as if Jimi Hendrix was conducting a lunar landing.

This has gone on way too long already, so let me wrap this up as quickly as I can. Both live and in the studio, I send two XLR outs to the house--Direct Out and "Mo' Bass" (post) Out--both with -10db pads at their outputs. I send various other audio outs to external sources (see The Current Rig for greater detail). For a killer, post-everything EQ circuit, I run the Raven Labs True Blue EQ in one side of the stereo effects loop, and blend it back in at 50/50 on the Mo Bass External Effects Blend control. For power I bridge the Mo' Bass itself into one Goliath II 4x10 cabinet, which keeps the power amp at a relatively cool 8 ohms while other audio outputs reach other external power sources for plenty of juice all around. And the Mo' Control Master Footswitch makes switching a joy, either in and out of individual effects or up to four programmable groups of effects like I mentioned above.

All praise goes to Mo West (effects, routing, concept) and Steve Rabe (preamp, power amp), the twin daddies of the kick-ass circuitry contained within. Even more information, including details on the development of the project, can be found over at the SWR Website by clicking on "Products" and then "Mo' Bass." The Mo' Bass project has not been devoid of controversy and varying opinions; nothing this ambitious ever is. And it may be impossible for me to be objective at this point, for obvious reasons.

But all that matters here is that I'm using the SWR Mo' Bass as my main head, and nothing else out there allows me to express myself more clearly and creatively. And that's what gear is supposed to be all about, isn't it?




SWR Goliath II 4x10 Speaker Cabinet


The cosmetically modified Goliath II stack, with chrome grills for her pleasure

I've always been a big believer in 10" speakers for bass cabinets. Yes, 12's and 15's are bigger and provide a rounder, more bottom-y sound, but there's plenty of low end in a 4x10 cabinet, there's more speaker mass in four 10's than in a single 15 (making it louder), and most importantly, there's plenty of tight attack to cut through a mess of sound onstage. Instantly feeling the sound of my finger hitting the string is an essential and paramount requirement in any speaker cabinet I would use. The SWR Goliath II gives me just that, plus a stage-shaking boom, and tons of sweet tone in between.

Ever since 1990, when I got my first SWR piece, the SM-400 amplifier, I wanted an SWR 4x10 to go along with it. It wasn't until 1994, when I'd been settled in Los Angeles for nearly a year, that I finally made the trip out to the factory and got one. From a tonal standpoint, I haven't desired another cabinet since, period.

I was using a single Goliath II during the Bourbon Square era of MK/BFD ('94-'95), and quickly switched to two Goliaths in a stack when I realized I was blowing the 10's every six months in my single cab. Since the switch, I haven't blown a single driver. (Though I have switched them out for fresh ones, because…well, because I can.)

The same two Goliath II cabs have been on every American tour I've ever done, and just about every gig I've played since 1995. I did have a couple of custom mods done to them in 1999. First, I had new-model chrome grills (from the SWR Silverado Special) put on each. Second, I had the crossover panels switched out to newer models that feature Speakon jacks instead of banana jacks. Other than that, I haven't felt the need to do anything to them except stack them up behind me, plug them in, and smile.


 


Peavey DPC1000 Power Amp

I know, I know…Peavey? Laugh if you want, but this light, dependable workhorse has been a part of my main large rig ever since 1994.

It's real simple. Since I run everything at 8 ohms by philosophical design, I just take an audio out of whatever head I'm using (old rig: SWR SM-400; current rig: SWR Mo' Bass) and get it into this one-rack-space stereo power amp…and voila, double the SWR sound for the money, either two-sides-stereo or bridged-mono at 8 ohms--and all without loading down the SWR power amp of the main head being used.

In my original old rig (before I added the Interstellar Overdrive for distortion), I used to bridge it into the second (top) Goliath 4x10 cab. That's 1000 watts into one 4x10; suffice it to say that I never needed to turn it up all the way. When I added the Interstellar Overdrive and began using what I now call The Old Rig, I used an audio out from the SM-400 into one side and turned it up all the way before sending it to the top 4x10. Then the other side saw the Interstellar's distorted signal and powered it quite nicely at halfway into a Goliath Junior III 2x10. Since each side delivered about 400 watts at 8 ohms in stereo, it was plenty to get the job done. All this, in a unit that keeps full rack size at potentially three spaces. I've had one failure in seven years of solid use. Pretty remarkable.

Are there better-sounding, purer power amps on the market? Sure. At the volume/desired headroom level necessary to even require a rig like this, do those differences matter? Not in my book.




SWR Bass Monitor 12"

I've known about this piece for years, but I only started using it in my rig in early 2001. I was getting ready to do the Keneally "Dancing" Tour, and the band was a seven piece outfit, including vibraphone, sax, flute, and four vocalists. Something told me that bass in the monitors (something I've always enjoyed no matter how loud my rig is) might not be the first priority. Hell, I might not even get a wedge at every gig. So I brought this little baby to practice one day and hooked it up to the spare side of my Peavey DPC1000…and I never worried about incompetent monitor engineers or substandard monitor power amps ever again. One key element in making it work: a really long speaker cable, which I'm happy to bring with me.


 

 




SWR SM-400 Amplifier

The picture shown doesn't do it justice, but this amplifier is the single most important piece of gear I've ever owned. It's been with me since 1990. Through Berklee, through various Boston gigs, through Z, Keneally, through everything, this piece was there. In ten years and thousands of usage hours, it never failed once. Not even after I dropped it down a flight of stairs at Berklee did it malfunction.

But I didn't buy it to accommodate my clumsiness--I bought it because it was the greatest-sounding head I'd ever heard.

I was in my second semester at Berklee in 1990, and I had a Gallien-Krueger RB400, which sounded well enough. I distinctly remember walking by a rehearsal room and hearing a bass sound that encapsulated everything I'd ever wanted to hear out of my own rig. After crashing the rehearsal and grilling the bassist about what the head was and how he got it, I purchased my own SM-400 two weeks later and sold the GK head at a significant loss. And I didn't care.

In the beginning I used to bi-amp the head into a Trace Elliott 4x10 and a Mesa-Boogie 1x15. Why did I bi-amp? Because everyone told me to. It was a nice concept, separating highs and lows into two different cabinets and getting that "hi-fi" sound, but once I left Berklee I realized that I was basically cutting the full range potential of the amp in half by doing so. By this I mean that the "low" cabinet was only getting frequencies below 120 hz, and the "high" cabinet was only getting frequencies above 120 hz, while both cabinets were perfectly capable of reproducing a fuller range and increasing the perceived volume of the whole rig. Once I hit L.A., I began bridging the power amp mono, full range, into a single 4x10, which has been the basis for my rig ever since.

I was very consistent in my use of the SM-400's tone controls. From 1-10: Gain at 4, Limiter at minimum, Aural Enhancer at 6. Bass (clock face): 2:00 PM. Treble: 1:00 PM. Graphic EQ Sliders: #1 at +3 lines, #2 at +4 lines, #3 at center (or zero), #4 at +2 lines. Rotary Frequency Selectors for the Graphic EQ section: #1 at 11:00 AM, #2 at 12:00 PM, #3 at 12:00 PM (irrelevant anyway because the level was set at zero), #4 at 3:30 PM. I added the transparency control as a mod in 1998 and usually set it at 1:30 PM. I also eventually added the XLR variable pad and ground lift mod, as well as the separate pre-master effects loop.

But mainly I plugged this baby in and got a great sound right away, and that was why I used it. When it came time to expand it, I saw no need to run out and get a different head. I just ran the effects send (a post-master-volume line out) to an additional power amp and controlled all master levels with the SM-400 Master Volume control. It was great tone and tons of power made easy.

It was still my main head all the way up until late 2000, when I made the switch over to the Mo' Bass. Now this beloved piece of gear serves as my backup and occasional practice amp, but there's no reason it couldn’t be pressed back into service at any time. And in my humble (and potentially biased) opinion, I think that it belongs right next to the Ampeg SVT as one of the two most important and influential bass amplifiers ever made.




SWR Interstellar Overdrive Preamp

And to think that I was using a Boss Bass Distortion pedal until 1997. P'shaw.

This piece solved for me what was becoming an extremely annoying dilemma: how to get great-sounding bass overdrive and distortion sounds without losing all the bottom end of the original signal.

When I started working at SWR in January of 1997, I was an amp tester. One day a batch of fresh, new Interstellar Overdrives (or "Stella" for short) came down the line, and when I played through them I couldn't believe what I heard. It was the SWR sound, preamp and EQ section, but with power-amp-style touch-sensitive overdrive. That was the good news. The bad news was that it was a stand-alone preamp as opposed to an effects unit, and the gain structure reflected that fact (read: very hot). So I couldn't just stick it in front of the chain before my main amp, or else I'd get stacking of gain stages and nasty preamp clipping in the piece followed it (in this case, the SM-400).

Since I was already running two Goliath 4x10 cabs off of two different power amps (the Peavey DPC1000 and the SM-400), I got creative and tried splitting the rig in two. The way I saw it, one cab would get the original SM-400's clean signal all the time. The other cab would get the Stella powered by the Peavey, and I would switch back and forth between clean and dirty preamp sounds (Stella had great tones for both). This cab would be miked.

It looked good on paper, and I tried it in the first "expanded lineup" Keneally show, in 1997 at The Troubadour in L.A. But there were two problems. First, the Stella's distortion was always full range, so when it hit the tweeter of the Goliath II 4x10 it sounded buzzy, nasty as hell, and not in a good way. So I turned the tweeter off of that cab, and turned the treble up on the Stella to make up for the loss of high end when I was in the clean mode. But then the clean sound was weird, with a lot of treble in the woofers and the horn turned off…which led to the second problem, which was that the unhappy clean sound now had a mike in front of it all the time. The distorted sound needed to be miked, but I wanted the clean sound to be direct anyway--and now it sounded worse and was miked to boot. I never really could get a good balance between clean and dirty sounds in the Stella, and I had a perfectly great clean sound in the SM-400 already and had no real desire to change it.

Which led to my eventual solution, which was to set the Stella for the exact settings I wanted in a distorted sound and send it through a separate amp to a miked, dedicated speaker cab (a Goliath Junior III 2x10) with the tweeter off, and to only use this "B" rig as an additional signal to the main rig that would always be on and always go direct to the house. (Whew.) I promise that what I just said will be easier understood by checking out a schematic of what I now call The Old Rig.

For those who care, the settings were as follows: Drive at maximum (hell, yeah!), Blend at 11:00 AM, Aural Enhancer at 1:30 PM, Bass at 12:00 Noon (essentially neutral), Midrange at 2:00 PM, Treble at either 4:30 PM or maximum, Master Volume at 12:00 Noon. I came out of the ¼" unbalanced output and there you had it.

It sounded great and worked like a charm. I used it for the whole 1998 "We're Not Here To Help" double-tour, and more importantly, as one of three channels that made up the (IMHO) killer bass sound on Keneally's Dancing and Yogi's Any Raw Flesh?. When mixed properly in the house, it kicked so much ass I was beside myself. Unfortunately those occasions were too few and far between, and I eventually set it aside when I switched over to the Mo' Bass for good in early 2001. But not only is this a great overdrive unit, it's one hell of a clean preamp, and it's safe to say that I never used this esoteric piece of gear to its full potential. Perhaps that's because it does too many things well at once.




SWR Goliath Junior III 2x10 Speaker Cabinet

I bought this speaker cabinet to use specifically as the "dirty" cab in my old rig, but I've used it for plenty more than that. It's 8 ohms, so I can combine it with one of my Goliath II 4x10's for a nice little 6x10 rig. I can use it as a stand-alone cab for very quiet rehearsals. I've run it off my 8-ohm-converted SWR Super Redhead as an extension cabinet for a cute little 4-ohm 4x10 rig. No matter what I use it for, it's just a miniature version of the sound I've been using for years and years.

There's been a lot of discussion about the Goliath II vs. the Goliath III series, and you'll notice if you read this whole page that I own pieces from both. There's a slight difference in power ratings and some cosmetic changes as well, but the only real significant difference between the two is the porting. The II is rear-ported, while the III is front-ported. I've owned my 4x10 II's for eight years, and while I've played through 4x10 III's plenty of times and never been disappointed, I like the roundness of the II's slightly better. However, in a 2x10 configuration, I want the immediate bass response that a front-ported III cabinet provides to compensate for the smaller box.





SWR Super Redhead Combo Amplifier

I'd been borrowing a Super Redhead from the SWR factory for three years ('97-'99) before finally biting the bullet and getting one of my own. Once I brought one to a session, I never wanted to bring anything else. And neither have the engineers I've worked with.

It's just a basic SWR preamp with a decent sized mono power amp on top of a 2x10 speaker cab configuration similar to the Goliath Junior III, but over the years it's attained legendary status as the studio combo for bass guitar. Why? Because it sounds great, it's simple, it's small, and it never fails. I wheel it in and out of the recording room, do my thing, get out and go home. Just like Neil Stubenhaus (except maybe I need two or even three takes to get my shit right).

The other thing I can do with the Super Redhead is run an extension cab off of it and gig with it. It's literally got more power than it needs for its own box, so there's a ton of headroom available when used as a stand-alone, and more than enough to drive my Goliath Junior III, or even one of my Goliath II's. One thing to consider is that the internal impedance of the Super Redhead's 2x10 cabinet is 4 ohms. This means that if I want to run my 8 ohm Goliath Junior III as an extension, it would not get as much power as the Super Redhead's internal cab. That's how it works--the lower the impedance of the cabinet, the more power can be delivered to it by the same amp. (The topic of impedance and power ratings could easily occupy an entire website, but I won't allow that to happen here.)

Ideally, when running off of a mono power amp like the Super Redhead, you want multiple cabinets to have the same impedances so each gets an equal amount of power. In the case of the Redhead, a 4 ohm cab, this would mean adding a 4 ohm extension…but that would unfortunately cause the amp to operate at 2 ohms. Basically, that's like flooring your car's gas pedal every time you want to speed up--runs hot and wears faster over time. So I had my Super Redhead modified to be an 8 ohm cabinet, and now I can run my 8 ohm Goliath Junior III as an extension with equal impedances at a total impedance that the amplifier doesn't mind: 4 ohms. The only potential downside is that I get less power when I use it as a stand-alone (220 watts @ 8 ohms vs. 350 watts @ 4 ohms), but I'm never trying to blow the doors off of anyone in that application anyway, and if I was, I'd just end up adding the extension cabinet. So to me it's a win-win.

Tone-wise, I run the Aural Enhancer at 1:30PM, the Bass at 3:00 PM, the Mid-Frequency at 7:30 AM, the Mid-Level at 2:00 PM, and the Treble/Transparency Control pulled out to Transparency position and set at 2:00 PM. I've also been running the SWR Mr. Tone Controls in the effects loop for super-tweaky EQ'ing. When recording I usually set the XLR pad at 11:00 AM, but this and all settings obviously depend on what I'm using and what the engineer wants as well.

All in all, it's a valuable and flexible part of the arsenal, and I'm damned glad to have it.





SansAmp PSA-1 Programmable Preamp

This was the first piece of gear I got under any kind of "endorsement deal," and I didn't even really know what it was for. I knew that Keneally had recorded all of his first album hat with one of these babies, but I didn't know shit from shit about gear back in 1994, and so suddenly I had one in my possession and found myself trying to figure out ways to use it.

It didn't take long. The session for Keneally's Boil That Dust Speck was this preamp's debut, as I used a stock "SVT-type" preset (#30, I believe) for both "'Cause Of Breakfast" and "Deep Fried Skinks Are Go!". Then I started getting tweaky with it, and before long I'd programmed an SVT-type overdrive sound of my own that I used for a long time in live performances of "Performing Miracles", "…Breakfast", "Weekend", "Looking For Nina", and anything else I thought needed a little edge. I tried to get a wide-open distortion sound that I could use live, but it felt too unnatural and compressed when I got on it, so that remained a quest for another day.

It remained a part of my rig (as shown on "The Old Rig" schematic) until early 2001, when the Mo' Bass came along with great sounds for both mild and severe amounts of overdrive and distortion. It's safe to say that this piece was way ahead of its time, what with the advent and near-worldwide takeover of items like the Line 6 Pod. But since I've always been more of a live guy than a studio rat--and I've never been a home-studio rat, where the PSA-1 really shines--it was always something I only used for one particular sound.

 

Kustom 100 Bass Amplifier

I was in Daddy's Junky Music back in 1991, just about to buy a Mesa-Boogie 15" Speaker Cabinet, when I saw this less-than-pristine example of tuck-and-roll handiwork at its finest. I asked how much? Fifty bucks, the man said. I turned it on and it worked, but the huge, blue, jeweled power LED wouldn't illuminate. I told the man that if he fixed the blue light, I'd buy both the Kustom head and the Boogie cab. He did. I did.

It worked for about a year as a practice amp, and then kablooey. I still brought it to L.A. with me, and had it "fixed" at The Bass Center (R.I.P.). I put "fixed" in quotes, because when I plugged it in, it worked…but only if you wanted some mean, grinding distortion along with your bass sound. You couldn't dial it out. I thought for sure that it would eventually die again, because no solid-state amp was supposed to do that and live for long, but it just kept working.

For fun, I brought it into a Z Music For Pets session in mid-1994. Dweezil loved the sound of it so much that he had us record "Feminine SDH" immediately, live-to-two-track. That recording was eventually overdubbed upon by other guitars and vocals and became the version on the record.

I didn't play it for a while after that. Sure enough, several years later I plugged it in to see how much I liked that distorted sound compared to the SWR Interstellar Overdrive…and it wasn’t distorted at all. It had somehow "fixed" itself. All that remained was a mediocre, tubby, clean bass sound. I still have the head--who the hell would want it?--mainly just to look at, laugh, and remember that it sounded pretty good for no good reason for about a year.

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