(bass playing)
- Right now, we're looking at my dream come true.
My man Vincent basically created the best bass
I've ever played, the best bass I've ever owned.
And it incorporates everything I love about the bass.
When Vincent created this masterpiece,
I finally realized that is really time to make music.
(bass plays)
(jazzy music)
Being a child of the hip hop culture,
I always say that there's nothing more important
than the bass and the drums.
So my whole life, my whole career
has always focused on making sure
that nucleus is sound.
And coming up with this,
I was looking at a lot of Vincent's work.
And one thing that really struck me in particular
is that he has this incredible bass
where from here up it's fretless.
- [Vincent] This just evolved from an idea
that I had about making it half fretless
and seeing how that would work.
So I made a neck like that.
The fretless part is raised.
So it was left with the frets.
- Right, that's something that really tripped me out a lot.
It feels so natural.
It's actually so natural to play the fretless
that when you play, you don't even realize
that you're not even hitting a fret.
That design allows you to really go crazy
over here and stay within the confines
of the frets over here.
So you have a choice, just that alone
takes this bass to a whole 'nother level.
(bass plays)
(piano plays)
(bass plays)
One effect that is rarely ever used on things
is fuzz.
This is the bass sound.
(plays bass)
So that's the, that's the bass, right?
Fuzz.
(fuzzy bass plays)
And we're not talking distortion,
we're talking about fuzz and something that is,
it's like a science, you know,
you have to get the right pedal to get it right.
We'll ask you,
is there any way we could squeeze that into this bass?
And your response was.
- We gotta talk to Stan.
(both laugh)
(jazzy music)
- [Stan] Okay so this is a custom shop bass.
It was made for Adrian Younge
and it's just been the coolest, most fun project.
Vincent and I went down and had a conversation with him
and it turned out that he really liked
this extremely obscure fuzz.
- So this, is the ace tone bass nine.
And what I loved about this sound is that it reminded me
of old Curtis Mayfield bass fuzz.
Bass fuzz is something that's very rare.
You don't hear it much on 60's and 70's music,
but when you hear it, it hits you.
A couple examples are,
if you listen to Curtis Mayfield's Kung Fu
or you listen to Curtis Mayfield's,
If There's a Hell Below, you'll hear that sound.
I'm not sure what he used,
but I'm almost positive that he got ahold of an ace tone.
Out of all my vintage equipment here at Linear Labs.
This is the rarest, because I got this in 2008
and from 2008 to now, I've seen zero.
- I scoured the earth looking for one,
couldn't find one, ended up kind of studying
his a little bit.
And we just kind of went after the electronics.
Didn't take it apart, 'cause I didn't want to risk anything,
but I listened to it a lot and kind of characterized it.
The fuzz is really great because a lot of times
when you put fuzz on a base,
the fuzz creates a lot of high harmonics.
And the net result of that is that it can sound like
you lose all the low end.
So it just gets bright and fizzy.
This fuzz really sort of seemed to incorporate the low end
and just be part of the character.
So it would have this kind of great crunchy character to it,
but still like very much sound like a base.
And then there's a repeat percussion circuit in it.
Like you would find in some like Italian guitars
or even like organs.
It's kind of a 60's technology at its finest.
- You pull this up, the fuzz turns on, put it back down,
play your bass, if you pull this up, it'll-
(imitates an alarm)
it'll speed up.
(makes sound faster)
So, this is like an echo repeater.
It's really like a very hard square wave tremolo
that you could put on and off
and you can have it play with the fuzz
have it play with just the bass sound.
This basically encapsulated everything I wanted
in a bass sound, I wanted to be
punchy mid range with low end.
I wanted to be able to use a classic type of fuzz
that we never really hear at all.
This, basically,
because of you,
because of Stan, put me in the position
where my dream came true of creating
the perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect bass.
You could just make mad albums with this thing, man.
It's just-
one of the things when I actually first played it.
I was thinking to myself,
what would have happened if this bass
came out in '67 or '68?
How would that have changed music?
That's how special this bass is.
Wherever I'm at,
when that light shines and you hear that fuzz,
well you're hearing the sound of Vincent
the master-maker.
(Vincent laughs)
(drums crash)