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.
