Hi, I'm Todd the music coach. And this is the setup and Buyer's Guide for the bass guitar. The bass guitar the electric bass guitar, which is the one that I'm holding is a fairly recent addition to the musical instrument family. Up until the 1950s. bases were always played as what were called double bases or upright bass that you may have seen in classical music or in jazz. And then when rock and roll came along, there became a need to have the bass be louder and be played in different venues, bigger venues and have amplification attached to it.

And the fender musical instrument company came up with the Precision Bass in the 1950s, which was the same format of strings but instead of being played upright, it was played like a guitar, which is why it's called the electric bass guitar. Now the most common format for the electric bass guitar is four strings, which is what this one is. However, there are five strings, six string, seven string all the way up, even all the way up to like a 12 string electric bass guitar. But for now, the most common one is a four string electric bass guitar. So the strings on the electric bass guitar are the same as the four largest strings on an on a regular guitar, which are E, A, D, and G. A question I get asked a lot by my students is should I rent a bass or an amplifier before I buy it?

And my recommendation is if you live in a large urban area or close to a place where there are music stores that do rental programs, definitely go ahead and rent something before you buy it. The price for rental is usually very low, sometimes as little as seven or $10 for a single day. And if you want to try it out for a whole month, usually there's a button $30 charge. And if you're planning on spending hundreds of dollars, I often think it's just a good idea if you can try it out, even just for a day, get at home. Really try it out in your own environment because trying out things in a music store can be very challenging, especially if you're there on a Saturday when it's really busy and there's lots of people trying different things can be hard to hear really clearly what's going on with the amplifier or basically you're trying out.

Now when you're getting into playing the electric bass, the good news is is that the price point at the bottom is very low. And there are lots of packages now that are offered, where you can get an electric bass guitar with a practice amplifier cables, a tuner, everything you need to get started playing for a very low price sometimes between two and $500. You can get all of that in one package, which I recommend if you're just getting started. When you get above In price point, you can get to things like this bass, which is made by fenders, lower end company, which is called Squire. And this is a remake of a very famous bass called a jazz bass. And this guitar was about $400.

And it's a little bit you know, it's a little bit nicer finish and a little bit better pickups than the cheapest end. But it didn't come with an amplifier cables. So that price just included the base itself. On any electric instrument, most of what's generating the sound is coming from the actual pickups, which you can change out on a bass so you can start with a very low end bass and decide that you want to upgrade the sound of it just by changing out the pickups. Now the controls for the bass guitar are slightly different on each guitar on this one. There are two separate volume knobs which control the front pickup and the back pickup.

Up so you can blend how much of each one is coming through the signal and then a master tone knob which is controlling how much bass or treble is coming through the signal. On a lot of other bases, it's the opposite there'll be one volume knob that's controlling everything and two tone knobs which are giving you a bit more of a blend. And then you have the actual instrument input which is here which connects the cable to the amplifier. In a very general sense, where money is saved when you're buying a cheaper instrument is on things like the machine heads, the metal will be cheaper and less and less durable on it on a on a lower end instrument and more secure on a higher end instrument as well as the pickups itself. There are two main types of bass amplifiers. There are two amps and solid state originally when basis first became electric tube amps were the only kind of amps there were.

So a lot of people will Tell you the only real pure great sound on a bass comes from a tube amp. However, it's I mean, it's up it's a little bit of personal choice and also there's some other factors. With tube amps, they're quite heavy and they're also very expensive and they don't have features like having a headphone be able to plug into it and sometimes some extra effects. So for beginner and intermediate, I definitely recommend going with a solid state amplifier first. One other factor you want to think about is the kind of speaker you have in your cabinet. These are 10 inch speakers, there's two of them.

Sometimes with bass amps, especially older cabinets, you'll get one large 15 inch speaker which will give you more low end but less high end is a very general rule. The bigger the speaker the more bacey and bottom it is and the smaller the speaker the more high end you'll get to get a basic practice amplifier that solid state is going to start at around $500 and go up from There, and in the $500 price point, you're going to be looking at somewhere between 40 and 100 watts. Then the next step up from there is in the sort of 600 to $1,000 range, you're going to get more speakers in the cabinets and more wattage, so you might get up to 400 to 350 watts in that range. And then above $1,000, you're getting into large amplifiers so that are 800 to 1000 watts. How we measure the volume of an amplifier is in wattage.

This can be a little confusing because the wattage and a guitar amp and a bass amp are not really the same thing. This amplifier here is 80 watts, which is for guitar and this amplifiers 150 watts, but the guitar amp is actually quite a bit louder. And this just has to do with how sound travels and low frequencies for just practicing at home. 40 watts for a small practice Yep, there's lots of volume when you get into playing and jamming with friends, and especially With drummers and guitar players, I recommend getting 150 to 200 watts. This will just give you enough volume that you feel like you could keep up sound wise with the other instruments in your group. Whether you're getting tube or solid state, there's also one other factor to consider which is whether you get a combo amp which is white with this is where the speaker cabinet and the amplifier is all in one unit with a handle, or you get a cabinet which is separate from the base head.

Now they both have pros and cons with a combo. Everything is always all hooked up and you just have to grab it and go. The upside of a head and cabinet is that if you for example, have a regular rehearsal time with your friends at someone else's house or garage, the cabinet is the heaviest part of the amp. And if you don't want to be lugging it back and forth, you can just leave the cabinet where you rehearse and just grab the head which only weighs about five pounds and stick it in your gig bag and we go and when you get home, you can Plug headphones into the bass head or even plug it out into a very small basic sound system. Now when it comes to a strap and strap locks, I highly recommend getting some kind of a strap locking system. And all that is I've actually used just a very simple rubber casing around it.

The reason is, is that especially on the electric bass, which is a very heavy instrument, when you first get a strap, it'll fit very snugly around the cleats. But over time, it'll get worn out and it'll pop off eventually. And because the instruments so heavy, if it popped off and it dropped and hit the floor or banged into something, it would crack the finish or damage the neck. So having some way of actually keeping the strap in place is really important. And you can buy strap locking systems are very inexpensive and have them installed at a guitar store. A really important piece of equipment that's often overlooked.

He's a good guitar stand. When you play in the bass, you'll unfortunately often see people with their guitars or bass is just resting it against an amplifier or a table like this, or like this. I do not recommend this at all a bass is a really heavy instrument. And if it slides over and knocks down onto the floor, it's going to get damaged really easily just because of how heavy it is. And a good guitar stand will only cost you somewhere between 20 and $50. And guitar stands and bass stands are interchangeable.

And you can fold them up and take them with you wherever you go. The other reason I recommend them is that it's going to make practicing and working on your music a lot easier. It's an old saying that something that's out of sight, out of mind. And if you're packing up your instrument and putting in a case and sticking in a closet every time you're done, it's another barrier to go and get it and get out of the case and get playing again. Whereas if it's just sitting on a stand, you might walk by and think waiting for somebody I got five minutes I'll just pick it up and play a little bit. On the electric bass guitar, there's two main types of strings, there are regular strings, and then there what are called flat mounds.

And flat wound strings will give you more of the classic rock kind of sound, they're a little bit darker and some beer and regular bass guitar strings will give you a little bit of more of a bright sound a little more of a poppy r&b kind of sound. I personally like just regular bass strings because I find that with most amplifiers, I can adjust the tone on the amplifier to give me more of the flat round sound. If I'm looking for that, and then I always can go back the other way and have more of a pop and r&b sound if I want it. Whereas if you have flat ones on your base, they're always going to sound like flat rounds. So the only if you're only committed to that sound or they're kind of a good option. connecting your bass to the bass amplifier is going to be done using an instrument cable.

And these are also commonly called quarter inch cables. So they have a quarter inch input, they most commonly will come with both ends straight like this. Now if you have a base that has an input that's on the front, or especially if it's on the bottom of the body, I really recommend getting what's called a right angle cable, which will have one side look like this. Now the reason is, is that if you plug in a straight cable into the body like this, it becomes a bit of a potential danger that things can bang into this and potentially snap the cable right off in the input. Whereas if you have a right angle cable into the actual instrument, it's a little bit more flush with the body. The other thing is if you run your cable up under your strap And around like this, it sort of tucks neatly behind.

And if the cable ever gets pulled really hard like you step on it, you get a little bit of support here from the end pin, so it's not going to rip the cable right out. Not connecting the other ends to the to the amplifier is very simple. It just goes right into the front end that says input on the amplifier. And now let's have a closer look at the front end controls on the bass head as well as the back. So here we have the front end of the head for the fender rumble 150. So this is 150 watt bass head that connects to a passive cabinet.

Now, all heads work basically the same way. I'll just show you some of the basic features on this. So we have our input, which is where the instrument cable goes in. Then there's a switch to low The overall volume of the AMP This is a really great feature if you want to keep your amp settings in a certain way and just be able to play quiet or practice quieter, you can just do with one click of the switch. Then we have a volume knob. And again, with all electric instruments, you want to make sure that this is down at zero or very low when you plug in any instrument to an amplifier so you don't get surprised by big loud sound.

Then moving over we have an overdrive section. This is a little unique for an AMP to size, but we have a overdrive which is we can push in it'll come on and we have a gain, which is how much distortion you get. And then a blend which gives how much is actually going into the main signal. Then moving on we get into the equalization section. This amp has a really great feature for a push button EQ so this is labeled punch. So this will give you more of a r&b or slap kind of sound on the bass with just one push of a button.

One Next one is a spring Which gives you more of a classic rock, big, low vitamin sound. And what's great about that is even within a song or between songs, if you want to just quickly get a different sound, you can just do it with one push of a button. Then the actual EQ on the AMP has bass, low, mid, mid, high and treble. And these are the settings that allow you to really get your specific sound on your base. Now every room is going to sound a little bit different and every base you plug into your amp is going to sound a little bit different. So I really encourage people to try it out, play around with it, kind of find the right sound for your setup.

Then finally all the way over on the other side is the power switch. Let's check out what happens on the back. Here we have the back of the bass head. There are many different inputs on it, but there are only a couple of things that you really need to know about first one is where the power cable goes in. And on most modern amplifiers like this, the power cables are all exactly the same as what you'd see on a desktop computer or monitor. The next thing you have to know about is how to connect the head to the cabinet.

And this is an important thing these little lightning bolts are telling you that these are powered outputs which means that there is actual electrical current being transmitted through the speaker cable and into the cabinet to give it power. The reason you got to be careful is that you want to make sure you're only using a speaker cable and that whatever this is plugging into is passive. And the way to know that it's passive is the cabinet has nothing else that's powering it, it doesn't have a power cable like this. It has two of these because we can power more than one cabinet at a time. Either one will do if you're plugging into one cabinet you only need to it doesn't matter which one of these you plugged into. Over here we have an effects send return loop.

This is a bit more of an advanced function that allows you to send your bass signal out to be processed and then back into the amplifier, which you might use for something like reverb or delay or some kind of compression Next to it is a nice feature for some of these smaller amps which is an auxiliary in. These are RCA cables, which make it easy to connect to something like a smartphone or a tablet or a TV. If you want to send a signal of audio that you're practicing along with this allows you to put it into the amplifier so you'll hear it out of the same speakers. The next that you get your headphone input, and the headphone input on this particular one does not sever the connection with the cabinet. So if you want to only have the headphones, you have to unplug the speaker cable, then there's a footswitch which controls the overdrive which we saw on the front of the amp.

And this simply will switch it on and off, you have to buy a footswitch for that. And then on the far right we have the lineout and this allows you to plug a microphone cable into a sound system and it has a ground lift which is something that's important to help take away some of the buzzer hum that you might find on the back of the bass cabinet. There's only a couple things you have to know about. The main thing is where to put the other end of that speaker cable. So there are two inputs for the speaker cable, it doesn't matter which one you have. This also allows you to plug one into here and then also come out of the speaker cabinet potentially into another one.

Again, it's a much more advanced feature. This also has these two inputs which are called speak on cables. And these are newer, more modern ways to connect a head to a cabinet. Some have some heads will have this option some won't just this cabinet gives you both. A common question I get asked about bass playing is should I be playing with my fingers or slapping or should I be using some kind of either guitar pick or bass pick. It's somewhat comes down to personal preference, but the common sounds you hear most often played it on the electric bass guitar or played with your fingers and the usual technique is alternating between your pointer finger and your middle finger, which allows you if you're just using a single finger, there's a limit to how fast you can, you can do a single stroke.

Whereas if you have alternating fingers on multiple strings that allows you to move back and forth a little more comfortably and cuddly really changes the sound of the strings and it makes it a little more clicky and clunky sounding. I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way, but just as a little bit more of a click sound. I tend to only use a pick playing the bass if I'm playing if I'm playing rock where I have to play a lot of really fast back and forth for a long time like Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba, ba, ba, ba ba ba ba. There can be it can be very hard to keep that going with just the fingers if you're playing a song that's five minutes long.