... or back to bass(ics)

A kind of chicken and egg situation.

I'd been playing bass for around 40 years when the urge to learn how to play a six-string guitar (I know, I was a traitor to my calling) overtook me as my mid-life crisis.

As my skill on the six-string increased, I found myself hunting for "that" sound. The sound that I could call my own. And this resulted in me designing and building the first of the now infamous Dragondreams T'Watt series of high-gain, low-output valve amplifiers.

The first of these was a basic lump: a simple two bottle affair with two stages of gain and a self-split, push-pull output. The controls were minimal too: a single gain, a treble-cut tone control, and a master volume. The triode valves were AC heated from a very basic power supply, and the HT had the bare minimum of smoothing and filtering. And I thought it sounded wonderful.

As my playing developed, I tweaked the design. As the amp developed, I improved my playing. This cycle continued for around a decade. The ultimate iteration of the T'Watt now boasted six stages of gain, regulated DC heater supplies (one per valve), and a useless (but decorative) magic eye valve hooked to the main output. It also had a line-level output and a dummy load resistor to enable it to be used without a cabinet for recording.

That now lives in Florida, following a long-winded process to convert it to US voltage operation.

Fast forward to Christmas 2018.

I woke up on Boxing Day and realised that I still prefer playing bass! I'd given the guitar a good try, but it simply wasn't my instrument.

I blew the dust off my bass and started to really work on playing it. Which led to me realising that I had never tried to develop "my" sound on the bass in the same way as I'd relentlessly pursued my guitar sound.

Over the next couple of months I gradually added more and more units to my "bass pedalboard" in an effort to create a unique sound. But there was always something missing.

At this point it's worth mentioning that, up to then, I had only owned a single bass, my Westone Super Headless, for the last 35 years. They say a poor workman blames his tools. But allow me this. The pre-amp circuit in the Westone is atrocious! I'd just never really paid attention to it in the past.

Up in the attic, where it had lain for the best part of three decades, I had a Precision Bass body. Out came the loft ladder. I collected together all the parts needed to turn the shaped chunk of ash into a playable instrument and spent a happy weekend building my very own piece of iconic bass hardware.

What a revelation! Through the pedalboard and my Hughes and Ketner Warp 7 it sounded amazing! The biggest revelation was that it sounded even better WITHOUT the bank of effects. At last I had the beginnings of the sound I could be happy with.

The next step involved building a valve amp for it. ThunderPump 1 was born. Four small signal pentodes running in parallel to feed four monobloc, solid state power amps into a stereo 4 x 12 and a stereo 2 x 8 cabinet arrangement.

The weekend just gone has seen the development of the latest prototype Dragondreams bass amplifier, Thunderpump 2. It comprises a single ECC82 feeding the same four monoblocs. And the circuit is pretty much the same as the first valve amp I built all those years ago! Gain, treble cut, master volume, and a dirt-basic power supply.

And it sounds awesome.

Less is very definitely more.

I think branching out into shredder guitarist territory has helped my bass playing enormously, both in technique and in insider knowledge about what's needed when I work with a guitarist now, having been one for a while.

But the biggest benefit has been in making me really focus on the quality of my tone. And stripping out all the bells and whistles has led me to another, not so startling conclusion. Tone really does come from the fingers. ;-)