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This is Joe Basso with Music Radar and I've been giving some bass lessons to this guy
here; Billy Sheehan. >>They seem to be paying off thank you very
much. >>That sounded pretty good before. So we're
here with Billy at the EBS Booth and Billy you have your own little pedal you've been
working on. >>Yeah, it's this guy down here, we'll take
a good shot of it later. Oh there it is right there, that's an even better shot. For years I've always had a kind of
double signal, actually in some cases triple. 2 outputs from the bass, one of the outputs
split between clean and distortion also and so it was a great way to be able to get real
bass tones, that you need to function in a band, but still be able to get a thing on
top of it to give you that extra schmutz, that extra...not sure what that actually
means, that extra thing. And so for years I tried to get a kind of a version of my Pearce
pre-amp which was made back in Buffalo, I think I got it in 19.., I remember I it in
the rack when I was on tour with Van Halen in 1980, opening for Van Halen in 1980. And so it's been
around a long time and I've still got that one, that's still the one I mainly use, but
I'm worried about it, because it's the only one and it's failed a couple of times I've
had to get it repaired. >>Now you've been working on this one for
a while. >>Yeah so a little over 2 year. So we basically,
did a pedal and approximation on what that Pearse does on it's on, basically it's a 2
channels of a pedal,one channel does one thing, the other channel does another then they sum and
combine later on. So that's kind of what we did here.
>>Cos you were telling me, that sometimes when you get distortion the bass goes away.
>>Exactly. I mean it's most evident in Dance to the Music by Sly and the Family Stone. But
suddenly Larry Graham kicks his distorion pedal and you hear...You don't hear much low end because
of the distortion on there. Now that's kind of just an anecdotal example of that. But
in fact any bass player basically you need a big fat, perfectly formed sound wave to
get a lot of low end. When you start mushing it up with clipping, it's no longer a big
fat sound wave, you don't get that that depth of low end that you get from like, when you hear a car stereo way off in the distance
with that subwoofer. It's a soundwave travelling through space and time.
>>So what did you do with the EBS now to circumvent that?
>>Well we kept the one channel, we split the signal and the 2 seperate paths. One channel
is clean and one channel has distortion on it. Now the good thing about it is, you can
effect both of those independently with a little loop, you plug a tippering sleep quarter
inch jack and you've got the centre return. So on the clean you could put compression,
EQ whatever else you want. On the distortion you can put the EQ, or whatever, chorus or
whatever else you want on it. Because of these 2 seperate signal paths that combine later
on and that prevents you from losing the deep low end and again it approximates what the
Pearce does, not exactly but it's close enough that I love it. And its supremely useful for a lot
of bass players that are going for that, because they sometimes hear what I do and I get all
kinds of emails for months, how do you, I'm doing that but my band hates me and they can't
hear any low end. So here's what you do? >>And how do you do that, can we hear some
of this? >>Yeah we'll basically. I hear some low end
in that tube but by taking the clean signal off. That's what you get when you distort
bass, pretty useless, I mean you could maybe do a solo.
>>Well I can do that. >>I'm sure you can. But there's no low end, you
see you need to bring that clean channel back in. So get all that...you get with
the distortion but now you have the low end, that's bass. So it's really important so I
always get in trouble for ruining bass players because they'd start using a distortion sound
but they'd lose their low end and I try to tell them all the time. Now this bass does a thing
on that too with a seperate output for low end completely, but that's a different story.
This is designed for anyone with any bass and I think guitar players are going to like
it a lot too because you get a totally clean guitar tone, mixed in with however much distortion
you want and I know a couple of guitar players I know who are pretty famous that have been
doing that lately. >>I was going to say guitar players can use
it too? >>Guitar players can use it too. Will it core apples?
It will core an apple! >>Honeymooners! Cool.
>>So that's the idea and to put it in a pedal, there's a lot of companies that make pedals
but I've used some of the EBS stuff for years, they're octive pedal is, I think the best stock
pedal around. I mean I don't play 5 or 6 string bass, but with that octive thingie I don't
need to. It saves money on strings. Like just play that low B note here, it's really solid and
together, tracks perfectly. So I knew of them from that and several other of their pedals that are
little pre-amp they do and the micro bass is a great little add on for anything that you
need a great fixer for any problem you might have. So we talked a little a little bit about doing the
pedal, starting a little over 2 years ago and I think it shipped here yesterday, the
1st ones. I had the 1st prototype which was cool, we fine tuned it, did a second prototype,
few more suggestions did a 3rd and then there was a couple more tweaks and here we have
it. >>And is it good for spear fishing?
>>No, but if you threw it hard enough when the fish surface that the water clonked them
right in the head, you'd probably. But then you've got to go in and get them, so that's
a big pain in the ***. >>Ok well thank you very much
>>My pleasure >>We've been here with Billy Sheehan at the
EBS booth and it's the Billy Sheehan signature drive pedal and why don't you take us out with something?