I'm Árni Árnason and I'm the bass player from The Vaccines
and I want to talk about Tic Tac bass.
So the six-string bass was used almost on every record
that came out of Nashville from the late 50s, all through the 60s
and in so many other ways and so many other genres but the most
interesting application in my mind is that Tic Tac bass sound that
new Nashville sound that you hear so much in American 60s music especially
basically a 6 string bass doubling an upright bass and I guess the idea behind
it was your smaller speakers would carry the melody played by the bass so
you could still hear it due to the clicky-ness of a 6 string bass because you
wouldn't be able to hear the the thump of the upright bass
and I just found that Tic Tac bass was just a brilliant way of bringing
out a lot of bite, like a top and bite out of your bass and lots of really
weird character that you don't really associate with modern music really.
Seeing us it was doubling something that didn't have any attack or didn't
have any high end attack for that purpose I'm using this which is a Gibson EB-3
and it has a tone choke mode
where you just use this pickup with tone choke
I call it the dub setting because it
it's only you've got one practical application which is something dubby right?
The EB-3 is going into a DI where the signal is split and one channel is
going into this Dickinson preamp and then into a B15 being miked by a FET 47
and into the Audient iD44 and the other channels just going directly in.
So the first step is just to play some very subby bass so let's do that
Stage two is layering some 6-string bass and this is an Eastwood Sidejack it's very
weird as a guitar, weird as a bass, kind of widows both and whilst
the 6-string bass sounds spectacular with lots of reverb and tremolo and stuff like that
for this purpose you just want to be playing it
lots of muted picky
you literally play this note by note exactly like the bass line
which would have been really interesting at the time because
a lot of these bass lines they move around a lot you know they're like
they're not simple things so they would have had to decide in
advance like note by note what they were going to play which was kind of
weird at the time because there was lots of improvisation involved in
sessions you know but not in this, you would have to play exactly what was prescribed.
This is going through the same DI as the bass was doing earlier
with one of the channels just going directly to the iD44 and the other one
going again into the preamp but now into a Fender Princeton Reverb
miked by an SM57
In this instance I've just got like little bits of EQ and compression I've
put a little bit of slap back delay on the 6-string bass
yeah that's about it
Without the 6th string it sounds like this it's super subby
actually quite distorted but let's not think about that
and then together they sound like
Kind of punchy right?
And so the obvious upside that the 6-string bass
has over other bases that you can actually play chords on them
The obvious next step is to double that with a guitar
also known as a treble bass
So I guess this is the very basics of tic-tac bass
and I hope is useful, it's fun, it's fun to experiment with.