Apr30Written by:Joel Braverman
Thursday, April 30, 1998 6:00 PM  I was tired of turning up the inputs on my mixer to record my hiss, um, I mean my Bass guitar and decided it was time to get a direct box. I didn't know what to get, so I asked the folks who made my bass - Warrior Instruments (http://www.warrior-w1.com) what to get - they recommended the Bass Driver DI. I on the other hand didn't want to spend the $250 dollars to buy a little box.
I went out and bought a Rolls Adb 2 for $40, which actually sounds great on my acoustic guitar with a Dean Markly Pro-Mag soundhole pickup, but not really what I wanted for bass guitar. After annoying my favorite salesguy at Banana's At Large, testing various doo-dads and processors, I decided to blow the bucks and get the Bass Driver. (My advice to the cheap and those on tight budgets - give it up, spend the money, do it right, you won't be sorry, and you can always sell it if it's worth anything in the first place)
The bass driver admittedly doesn't sound anywhere near as good as plugging into my friends JoeMeek compressor, (give it up, spend the money...) but it does sound good. The Bass Driver DI sports 6 knobs - bass, treble, presense, drive, level and blend, and a stomp switch. Turning up the drive and adjusting the blend hard clockwise gets you a kind of heavy metal distortion bass sound. I don't personally have any use for that. But adding ever so slight an amount of distortion does add a kind of interesting edge to the bass sound.
The documents bill the Tech 21 as also being a "Tube Simulator". Well, I don't own any tube hardware to directly compare it to, but it does sound somewhat organic. Mostly I use it to fine tune the sound of my bass guitar a little bit, and it also has a little bit of compression circuitry that seems to keep the levels from getting out of hand.
There are three outputs - XLR, 1/4 inch and a "parallel" output that is just a passthrough. You can run the Bass Driver off the phantom power on your mixer, or off a 9 volt battery. It also has the usual ground-lifter, so if you ever want to get yourself fried to a crisp you can do that too. (Memory of a friend of mine saying "it sure is weird, but every time I touch the door frame and the guitar I feel like I get stung by 1000 bees!" pops into my head)
Overall, I would say say the Bass Driver is a useful tool for recording and it has a nice solid warm sound which is why I bought it in the first place. I'm looking forward to testing out the new Acoustic Guitar DI box in the near future, and I will report back on it as well (but I'm still happy with my Rolls ADB2).
By the By - Tech 21's web site is really cool - check out the "onmouseover" stuff in yellow at the bottom of their home page: http://www.tech21nyc.com (make sure you put in the nyc part - there's another company named tech 21)
Tags: |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|