Mark Schenker

A couple of years ago, I bought this Fender Power Jazz Special bass on eBay. I had been looking sporadically for an original 80’s model for a number of years and had never seen even one, let alone in the color I’d want. I’ve always liked Duff McKagan’s bass sound on the first G&R record, it’s got all the things I love to hear in a bass tone. It cuts in the mix, it’s got great top end (no doubt due to his choice of using a pick when he plays) and has round, tight, very defined low end. For whatever reason, in my opinion, he was never able to duplicate that sound since. He used a made in Japan Fender Power Jazz Special, and still does as far as I can tell from pictures. I’ve always kept that little factoid in the back of my mind for the occasional bored-at-trying-to-find-whatever-else-I-was-looking-for eBay hunt. What makes this bass slightly rare is a combination of several things; Fender manufactured them for only a few years in the 80’s, it is a Precision body with a Jazz neck, a P-J Bass active pickup configuration – active being a highly noteworthy item for a Fender back then – hence the designation of special.

The problem with this bass is, I totally hate the color. It’s Miami Vice teal. I love Miami Vice, but this color makes me want to go push over old ladies at the mall. I almost didn’t buy it just because of the color, but like I said, I had never seen one for sale and I might not ever see one in a color I was crazy about. It was cheap enough so I figured what the hell.
This ugly little girl with the silky rosewood neck has been sitting around here in my house for about three years, once in a while getting my attention enough to pick it up and play it. It’s kind of like that one girl who like maybe has a really nice physical attribute, but you look further along and she’s got other problems that are not so evident. Or like she’s rather bland in every other way other than she’s really super smart and you have a cool conversation with her once in a while. Like she has one memorable thing that makes you say, “yeah I know you got a little something going on there…” but there are other aspects that kind of cancel the one thing out that you can’t forget about or rationalize away. I’ve used it on a couple of my own demos and on one track I recorded for my bud Scott, and no matter what I’ve tried while tracking, it’s always sounded rather poor – on a good day – but it plays freakin’ great!  The neck is very much like the Warwick LX I use all the time so I have consistently felt right at home whenever I pick her up and play. But man – it sounded just awful! How can that be? I could be sitting there tracking, fiddling with eq and compression to try to bring this thing out of the gutter, get frustrated, unplug this bass, plug in a Warwick with the exact same signal chain setup and it would sound stellar. It had to be the bass. Pickups? Strings? Bridge? I dunno. All of the above? One odd thing about this bass, it sounds so good just “in the room” – like it has a great ring to it when I just sit there and wank around on it without plugging it in. I generally won’t buy a guitar or bass if it doesn’t have that “ring” to it when I pick it up and play it without plugging it in. Of course, buying shit on eBay, I’m rolling the dice a little but if it’s something I want, who cares right? Ebay has a good “return” policy that I use in my own mind to justify a purchase like this, if you buy something you hate you can turn around and sell it to some other mook the next week. You may lose a few bucks but I consider any losses incurred a rental fee to try something out that I couldn’t otherwise find at the local Overpriced Musical Instruments and Accessories Conglomerate store.

I tried putting passive Duncan pickups in it one time and it still sounded pretty lame, I reverted back to the original pickups just to keep it stock for the time being. Finally, since I desperately wanted to give this girl a chance I decided to go all in and change everything I knew sucked about her to fix her, or just put it away in the case so she will stop tempting me. I bought a Bartolini 4.7 AP kit and paired that up with the passive Duncan Basslines SJB-2 Hot Jazz and SPB-3 Quarter Pounder I had bought a while back. I figured a Leo Quan black (if it ain’t black, send it back)  Badass Bridge couldn’t hurt. The bridge that was on her was definitely a problem, it was made out of some cheap non-sustaining pot metal, the same thing the Toyota Celica logo on your high school girlfriend’s car was made of. I wouldn’t even use it for a fishing weight. Garbage as far as creating good tone goes.

The installation was fairly easy, I’ve always repaired and modified my own instruments, drawing the line at refretting, but the bridge install ended up being a bases loaded with a tired pitcher situation. The screw holes from the old bridge were not even close to the holes on the Badass bridge. So with a straightedge, some serious eyeballing and highly questionable deductive measurement procedures, I nailed the bridge in a spot where I figured I could intonate it even if it was at the limits of sharp or flat and faithfully sank the slick black screws into their new home. Side to side was another story, all I can say is that it looks symmetrical so it must be OK!  

I put a new set of DR High-beams on her and messed around with the EQ switch and boost/cut knobs for a while until I understood what each one did tonally and how the interaction made the bass respond differently to my touch.
Here is a song I wrote to try out the new tone and see how it sits in a mix. The bass is the resurrected ugly Fender, DI’d through a Radial JDV Mk3, then through an SSL E Signature Channel and then through an 1176LN compressor. I then made a copy of the track in Pro Tools, shelved off the low end at about 200hz, put a Massey Tape Head plugin on it with the bright switch on, then brought this track up underneath the DI track in the mix to give it some bark. Check it out…

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OK so this is all the material I have for the Rocklahoma trip. I had a bunch of videos and pictures to sort through. I figured I’d keep it to my personal experiences here because you can always go visit KIX’ MySpace or fly around on YouTube to see pictures and videos of the band. I know it’s a little late (and probably largely irrelevant by now, even more so than it was a week after I got home lol) but with changing the Funny Money web site over to the new format and working with Dean to finish up some of his tracks so we can finish up working on the three new Funny Money tracks we recorded drums for, I just have not had the time to edit this mass of video footage together into something worth publishing – until now.

Scott, Jimmy and I got to Oklahoma City at about 3:00 am or so. Of course the hotel where all the bands were staying had no rooms available but we figured it was worth a shot, our rooms wouldn’t be ready until noon. No biggie, we went down the street and plopped into the Ramada for some well earned sleep. When we got back to the hotel around 1:00 the next afternoon, I saw Nuno Bettancourt from Extreme hanging around the lobby. They were playing Friday night and I was looking forward to seeing them. We decided to check in and head on over to the festival grounds to see what we were in for. Night Ranger was on the bill that day too, Scott especially was ready for that.

We caught the shuttle from the hotel over to the grounds, about a 45 minute drive to Pryor, and I was immediately impressed with the SIZE of the place. Campers, RV’s and crap just as far as the eye could see. The stage building was enormous and you could see the Jumbotrons from far far away. As clear as if you were holding one in your hand, even in the blazing bright southern sunlight. As we came through the gates, our driver commented on a crowd of big burly guys hanging around, apparently helping festival staff doing whatever was needed, saying, “there’s THC…” The were dressed in all black, wearing leather jackets (in 100 degree Oklahoma heat) with Texas Hippie Coalition logos on the back and the occasional cowboy hat. I’d kill for one of those jackets they were so cool! These were some downright serious looking dudes. Much later, like three weeks ago, Scott figured out that when he lived in Texas way back when, he used to play in a band with the guitar player. Small world indeed. At the time I didn’t know if they were a band or a motorcycle club or a pot smoking club (THC and all) or what, but I knew they had a cool name and I wanted one of their leather jackets!! Check out their MySpace, they are a killer southern rock/metal band, sort of like Pantera meets Lynyrd Skynyrd – and I dearly love me some Skynyrd! THC has some good songs and cleary they are good players in classic southern tradition. Buy their CD, you’ll be glad you did.

On Aug 15th, Jimmy, Rob and I ascended into the Virginia hills arriving at Dragonfly East Studios to record three new songs for the upcoming Funny Money CD. Our host and engineer was our good friend Scott Spelbring. Dragonfly has a tremendous live room for drums, and Scott has a very impressive collection of mics. Probably more importantly, he knows his live room very well and knows how to get the best sound out of it. In fact it’s so live and loud, that when I told Scott that Rob and I intended to sit in the same room as Jimmy to try and get that live vibe down, he did a double take and said “man are you sure?” I said we were and he just gave me that kind of chuckle that people give you when you are about to do something stupid while they get to be endlessly entertained by your ignorance and discomfort!

Jimmy used Scott’s kit and brought his snare and cymbals. Scott got everything mic’d up with some nice super-high room mics to get all those pretty reflections of those drums bouncing off the wooden walls. We did some test drum tracks with Jimmy using his Zildjian snare, the one made from cymbal brass that he got from them back when he had an endorsement. It’s possibly THE loudest snare ever made. It sounded really good with some ringy overtones, and we weren’t sure if that whas what we were looking for. Scott suggested we try his Ludwig Black Beauty just for fun. Jimmy played for a few minutes and we recorded it and took a break to listen back. Jimmy decided he liked his Zildjian better. It did sound great, so did the Black Beauty but they were too different to compare really.

With the drum sound set, Scott took off for a few to get his dogs from his house and bring them over for company. Jimmy Rob and I decided to run through the arrangements of the three songs and we did quite well! Originally Rob and I had the idea of recording my bass and his guitar at the same time to capture the live vibe as best we could but we spent alot of time working on drums and we figured we’d probably want to redo some parts later anyhow. We decided we’d just sit in the room and Jam with Jimmy as he tracked his drums.

There is a famous story about Keith Moon’s antics in the studio during the recording of Who’s Next. He and producer Glyn Johns along with the first engineer had spent about three hours working on drum sounds, moving mics, changing drums, tuning drums, etc. When they finally “got it” Moonie asked the guys in the control room if everything was just how they wanted. They answered “yeah man we really got it” and Moonie asked “are you sure” they replied, ”oh yeah perfect Kieth, just perfect.” Then Moonie promptly stood up, and walked right through the front of the kit, brandishing that wide evil grin of his. Great story.

The point of that story as it applies here is this. The room we recorded drums in was very live and hyperactive. I was sitting about three feet from Jimmy and his pounding the kit was so boneshakingly loud that I had to look up from what I was doing because it sounded like he was walking through the kit continuously! At which point I would be in rather serious danger of big heavy things falling on me. I play with Jimmy alot and I’m pretty used to being in close proximity of his powerful drumming, but when he has something he does not normally have – a gargantuan reflective room as an amplifier – it’s downright scary shit!

Here’s a video of some of what we did. It’s long and mostly pretty boring, it’s kind of like watching a video of somebody at work, nothing exciting about a bunch of people taking their job seriously. Even in a cool studio making music. But that is how it is in the studio and so here you go!