Sunday’s office was the Sitzprobe at UMW’s Wonder Bread Studios for their production of Fun Home.

Consider yourself warned…this post is FULL of bass nerd stuff. Continue on at your own risk.

This musical *requires* five basses to play the show. The different basses are called up to help move the story through different decades of the protagonist’s life. The basses can represent the tonal “colors” of certain characters or an event. When I jump on upright, I’m usually playing a piece where the protagonist’s father is involved. The fretless comes out for the climax of the show.

The basses are; the NS CR5M EUB with Thomastik Infeld Spirocores, a Spector Euro6LX with GHS Progressives for all the “modern” sounds, an Ibanez SR656 6 string (rolled over to just the P pickups running active) also with GHS Progressives, a LightWave Saber VL5 with GHS Precision Flats, and a Hohner HAB-40N acoustic bass with Precision Flats. A Carvin AG100D is my amp because these old amps are just pretty awesome…(yes, I still love Warwick…I just have a soft spot for these old Carvin amps). This amp gives me multiple channels in a small package.

I have a pedalboard with two separate but nearly identical signal chains. All the electric basses (Spector, LightWave and Ibanez) go into a DOD AC420 passive mixer, into a Boss TU2 pedal tuner, then to a LR Baggs Para Acoustic DI box. The XLR goes out to the board, the 1/4” out to the Carvin. The second chain on the same board runs both the Hohner and the NS through another DOD AC420 into a Korg Pitchblack, then to a second Baggs DI box that favors EQ settings for those two basses.

One week “off”, then we head into tech week.