TesseracT's Amos Williams - GEAR MASTERS (Revisited) Ep. 56

Hey, I'm Amos from Tesseract, I'm the bass player. So what I have here is a prototype that I've been working on with Jeff Kiesel. This is the second one, and just this morning I was finalising some details for the final production model that you should be seeing sometime next year. I was playing Warwicks before this, I had a Warwick FNA Jazzman which I will still be using tonight, and a Warwick Fum, which are both wonderful basses. I just felt the need to find something new for touring, and I managed to speak with Jeff at an opportune moment. It's a very simple bass, well aside from the surprisingly unusual lack of headstock, but what we have is a solid swamp ash body. And on this one there's a chestnut top, it's chambered, we have a Music Man style pickup by Kiesel. Just the one volume knob on the top, inside are where the rest of the control knobs are, but I don't tend to play with the tone, so leave it as is. This is 18 volts this one, so it's quite a high output bass. Yeah, I mean it's great, it's got a different tone profile to a lot of modern basses, this is almost a more old school bass in that it's got a lot of mid range, a lot of growl, up in the high mids, so I find it really cuts through. The tone doesn't really change from not having a headstock, at least in my opinion, it is simply a different style of bass. I picked one up, I really liked the feel of it, and that's quite important to me now, and decided, cool, I'll give it a shot, I'll work with these guys for a few years, see how it goes, and it's turning out really well. The company itself is wonderful to communicate with, which is fantastically important for a touring musician. And they've been really nice, they've done things that you don't get as standard, there's a little scallop away here, taken away the top fret and added a little pocket, so to say, which is just for my thumb, so it goes through, hits the wood, and doesn't hit the fret there, which is nice, you know, it's help saving me and giving me a nice happy thumb in essence. You know, it's a slightly different process obviously, you've got the tuners down here instead of up here, and you've got your lock system down there, but aside from that, it's fairly easy to deal with, and it's quite quick to restring as well. The strings I'm using on this bass are D'Addario, they've got a few sets out now, off the top of my head, I think this is ELX160, but it's the type of strings that are designed primarily for slap that they use. They're cool, they've got a nice scooped tone to them, which helps clear up mud that you get with a lot of other bass strings. So yeah, it's quite nice, they've got a good balance of high end and low ends. I use this bass for the majority of the show, I reckon close to 70% of the songs now are in this tuning. There's only a few songs that are in, this is standard E with a drop A there, and the other tuning is A flat, and then the rest of the strings are scooted up. It's based around dadgad tuning, but dropped down two steps. The main goal for Tesseract is to take the studio to every venue, try to give you as close an approximation of what we have recorded for our albums in the live environment. This means that we decided to bring along our own stage box, which, this is this, this is the, we've got a Behringer X32 core here, which is essentially the brain of the larger console, which we have in front of house. This is connected via a network cable to our front of house console, and then connected to that is a stage box, where as you can see, every signal we have comes in here, and all the outputs that are needed for our in-ear monitor mixes come out of here, through the various mix ports, and into this setup here. So this is our, these are our transmitter system, this is an AKG SST4500. That basically just sends to a transmitter pack that we're all wearing, a receiver pack I should say, that we're all wearing, and those go into headphones. Above that you see an Avalon U5 DI, this is my be-all and end-all when it comes to bass gear, I've only had one piece of gear, I'd be happy with this piece of gear, it's a perfect wonderful DI that takes away all the mud and shows you all your faults, so you have to be on your game constantly with it. So both guitarists don't use amps, as well as me, I don't use an amp, what you have here is the Fractal Axe FX, in this particular instance we're using the Axe FX Ultra, in the studio we have the Axe FX 2, but we're able to travel around the world with these Ultras and all they are are pre-amps, I'm sure you guys are very familiar now with the concept of pre-amps instead of using amps. So what we have up here is an RME Fireface UFX, this is basically a sound card that we have plugged into our laptop down here, and we're running Cubase, and it's our sequencer track, so we have loads of stuff going on, we've tested it at all points, as you can see there's, at any one point there's 20 tracks, so we use this to control outbursts, various things like that, there's three clicks, there's sequencer, some EVs, even some extra guitars here and there, so it's kind of like where the glue comes from for the rest of Tesseract. Well, thanks a lot for listening to me, and checking us out, if you want to see more about what we do, you can check us out on TesseractBands.co.uk