Recording - December 2012 - 61

Next up is the gain stage and preamp, which is where the majority of your broad tone shaping will come from. Want a grizzly bear or a lion, or any suitable large menacing beast to speak from your bass? Crank up the Gain knob and slap on the Boost switch, but be warned, we will not be responsible for any bite marks or damage to villages or villagers. The preamp sports a familiar 3-band eq with fixed bass and treble shelving filters as well as a 40Hz to 4 kHz sweepable mid. On to the power amp section, which offers up more sonic control by providing a second stage of gain and limiter clipping. The power amp clipping and drive settings are less forgiving than the preamp and compressor, so be careful not to dredge up any nasty noise artifacts. Finally, there’s the A/B Mix slider. The lower section of the interface gives us more tone tweaks once the amp sound has been established. There’s a 12-band graphic eq, Bright and Deep tone controls, a 5way cabinet selection, the final Volume slider, and two effects, a chorus and a reverb. The eq has a good frequency range (30Hz to 15 kHz), and can make a huge difference in tone manipulation without upsetting the balance of the Input channels. Similarly, the Bright and Deep controls allow you to add that quick and easy contouring without utterly destroying your tone or balances. Thanks to the impulse specialists over at Red Wire, three speaker cab models come our way in VBA Pro: an Ampeg SVT 8x10, a Hartke 4x10, and an Ampeg B15, all miked with Neumann U47s. The 8x10 is big and beefy and really booms, but with some quick eq the latter two can match it for raw punch while adding more tonal flexibility. The DI setting features a useful HF rolloff, making for a softer tone than the full frequency passthrough provided by the Off cabinet setting. The chorus and reverb effects are simple affairs, with the latter capable of adding air and room around the bass to place it in a mix. The chorus effect has an interesting option—a sweepable cutoff control, so you can choose to only add chorus to the higher frequencies without upsetting the bass. All this tweakability adds up to a bass tonelover’s delight, with a relatively small CPU hit. I loved what VBA Pro did for my Yamaha bass, and I am pretty sure you will love it too. Both AMP and VBA Pro offer a sleek, slim, and solid set of guitar and bass sounds for a really reasonable price, with none of the extra fluff or GUI glamour that the some of the larger guitar effects packages throw at you. You can even use them standalone with the free application Studio Devil LIVE if you want to take them on stage without your DAW running in the background. The end result is some really nice high performance tones with little CPU load. Guitarists and bassists, take note! Allen Goodman (goodman@recordingmag .com) is a recording musician and engineer in Denver.
RECORDING December 2012

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Recording - December 2012

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