The amazing evolution of the Tym ‘Electro Harmonix Freedom Amp’ project… this will blow you away.

A while ago I posted a guitarnerd article on the amazing 1960’s Electro Harmonix Freedom amp that I played at Tym’s guitars. (Check it out here.) This little monster had tone for days and enough grunt to keep up with the big boys. Tim then proceeded to build his own version of this fantastic amp, using my gutted Goldentone combo as the prototype. (Check it out.) This hand made beauty sounded amazing, and Tim was so impressed with the results that he got thinking on the next phase of the project.

Tim noticed that the actual amp section he built was tiny… so he combined this with another idea he had floating around. A range of guitar cabinets that were ultra light that would be perfect for people (like me) who wanted the power of real amps but hated lugging around 80kg’s of gear. So here it the result…

This, ladies and gents… is the Tym FAMP. This is a 50 watt amp (based on Tim’s Freedom amp) that is completely MADE OF HIGH DENSITY FOAM! That’s correct… this combo amp is made from foam. Here’s Tim’s words on his his amazing creation:

The cab had to be light and “damage proof” because we didn’t want to use tolex or hard cases to save on weight, so, after talking to my good friend Naut from Naut cases who works in foam and has a CNC machine, the cabinet was born. The foam is then coated in a thick, waterproof “skin” as used on PA and some speaker cabinets to protect it and stop it tearing. Metal corners aren’t needed because if you drop it, it just bounces. There are no exposed handles and the grill cloth has security mesh between it and the speaker so you can’t damage the speaker. You can stand on it and it’s fine. You could kick it down the street (Tym guitars does not endorse or recommend kicking an amp down the street), and it will still work.

The attention to detail Tim has put into this this thing is fantastic. I went to pick it up, bracing myself for the weight and nearly threw it over my head. My Les Paul is heavier than this amp. Actually, my pedal case weighs more than this amp. (maybe Tim should make some foam pedals…)

The side has some molded handles which give you something to grip on, and as they’re not metal bolt-on handles like most amps they save on weight.

The genius bit is the back. To make this amp totally tour (and idiot) proof, Tim hid the actual amp inside the back of the amp using a flip panel to access it.

The latches are very high quality and very easy to use. You just press the buttons and the latches pops out. Then you pull open the back to plug in and tweak your settings.

As I’ve said, this amp is hell light but the production version is going to be even lighter. Tim is fitting Celestion Neo speakers to save even more kilos. One thing Tim won’t do to save weight is use that crappy Class D power amp/car stereo technology that is all the rage at the moment. I totally agree with Tim, as I bought a Genz Benz 600 Shuttle bass amp and had nothing but grief with it from day one.

‘It could have been lighter but I refuse to use switch mode power supplies in my amps. They just don’t have the bottom end and sound any good so this has a “proper” toroidal transformer with plenty of headroom which adds to the weight, but delivers better tone.’

Those of you who are a bit skeptical if this amp is going to be truly tough enough to tour with due to it being made of foam… Tim as asked me to stand on this amp to show me how solid it is. I stepped onto it and this thing is rock solid. Anyone who knows Naut’s work will know that he doesn’t build anything that won’t last 1,000 years.

Final conclusion: Loud + awesome sounding + light + indestructible = frikken’ amazing.

Tim hasn’t stopped there. He’s just released a range of foam speaker cabs (FAB’s)… He’s currently building a bass FAB 4×10 that my back will cry in joy for. (Check them out here)

My weapon of bass destruction.

In a few of my previous posts I’ve mentioned my beloved ‘72 P-Bass, which has been my loyal rock ‘n roll companion forever. I thought it was time to properly introduce you to her and fill you in on her story…

I’ve been playing guitar for roughly 19 years now. I picked it up pretty quickly, and within 2 years I was playing guitar in a local thrash metal band called ‘Lobotomy’. When I moved to Brisbane, I played guitar in a band for a while before stopping playing live to study graphic design. After not playing in a band for a while, I got back into playing in a band slowly, first with an acoustic band. That didn’t really quell my thirst for ‘rockin’ out’, tho. A work colleague, Dan, happened to be the bass player in local swamp rock/cane punks Sixfthick and was thinking of starting up his own little side project where he sang & played guitar. At that stage he was jamming on some tunes with our boss, Sheldon who played drums. Keen to get back into playing, I said I’d be willing to play bass while they mucked around writing the tunes. I’d been playing guitar for 10 years or so… how hard could playing bass be? Well, it was a lot more difficult than I thought. Playing interesting bass lines IN TIME was a lot harder than it looked. After a while I sort of got the hang of it. Being a fantastic bass player, Dan was invaluable in me learning the tricks of the trade. I quickly grew addicted to bass and wanted to get better and better.

My first bass was a loaner from our next drummer, Jason ‘Cass’ Cassidy. It was a 60’s Japanese hollowbody with no sustain and strings a mile of the frets. I valiantly tried playing this bass, but I knew something wasn’t quite right. I felt clumsy playing my bass lines and knew that I needed a better bass if I was going to do this properly.

Next up was a Mosrite bass that I got imported from Japan. This was a massive improvement. I was able to play some interesting bass lines, but again, there was no sustain and the sound was a little muddy for my tastes.

Dan then lent me his Musicman bass that he played in Sixfthick. This had the sustain and sound I liked, but the width of the neck felt huge in my puny little monkey paws. I was back to struggling my way around the fretboard and feeling like I’d never get the hang of this bass playing caper.

Me playing my first ever Sixfthick show with Dan’s Musicman bass…

A brief dalliance with a silver PRS bass that I found in a hock shop didn’t really help. It sounded great but the neck width was still too wide. Being a bass newbie, I thought all bass necks would be like this and I was doomed to play simplistic bass lines and have a permanent address in Struggle Town. Then everything changed…

One Saturday morning I was looking through the bass section of my local guitar shop when I saw a beautiful 70’s Fender P-Bass. I’d played a few P-Basses and found the neck width still uncomfortable to me, so had crossed them off my list. But I grabbed the bass off the wall, sat down and started playing it. It was instant love. Finally I had found MY bass. The neck was so easy to play that it almost played itself. The nut width was very narrow and the neck was very worn in which made it ridiculously easy to play. I asked the shop owner about the bass and he said it was a rare one owner P-Bass that had been custom ordered in the 70’s with a Jazz Bass neck. I was such a newbie I didn’t even know then that there was any difference between Jazz Bass and Precision Bass necks. All I knew was this bass was the best bass I’d ever played.

It had led a hard life. The neck had been cracked and expertly repaired by Kinman Guitars, who were one of Australia’s premier Fender experts. It was covered in scratches and bumps. This was before the Fender Relic craze started driving beaten up Fender prices to stupid levels. With these bargaining points I got a fantastic deal on the bass, which as a bonus came with it’s original hard case. As soon as I played her live, my playing improved from the start. I could fly around the frets and play the things I could hear in my head easily. This bass actually made me a better bass player.

My new bass in it’s early days with me…

After playing it a few weeks, I started having trouble with the original Fender bridge. While playing the grub screws would slowly wind themselves down until the strings sat flat on the fretboard. At one show in Sydney, a bridge saddle actually went flying into the crowd during the last song. I dived offstage and scrambled around on my hands and knees until I found it to the amusement of a few punters. As soon as I got back to Brisbane I had Tym Guitars fit a Bad Ass II bridge to it. The change in playability and sound was amazing. Straight away the bass felt more rock solid, with added sustain and grunt. The last piece of the bass puzzle had clicked into place.

Over the next 4 years I played countless shows with my new baby. Along with playing bass in The Tremors, I had joined Sixfthick as the new bass player as Dan had switched to guitar. My P-Bass travelled up and down Australia, slowly getting the shit beat out of her night after night. As most of our shows came with a bottomless drinks rider, I wasn’t uncommon for me to get a little too ‘excited’ at our shows and smack my bass flat against the wall at the end of our shows, which sounded huge and looked ridiculous. Or hit Fred’s cymbals with my headstock. The battle scars on the neck show the consequences of said actions.

But my bass never complained, never went out of tune and night after night sounded frikken’ awesome. After a few years the sunburst colour began disappearing due to my vigorous strumming technique, and my belt buckle added to the damage tally. But I didn’t care. The more beaten she got, the better she looked.

By now, the prices of 70’s Fender’s had gone stupid. My cheap bass wasn’t so cheap anymore. I hadn’t really noticed, and as my P-Bass was my only bass and I didn’t think twice about bringing her on the road. It kind of hit home after a gig in Geelong. After another huge show I was packing up my gear and a punter came up and congratulated me on the gig. Then he looked at my bass. ‘Dude, is that a real vintage Fender Bass?’.  I proudly said ‘Yep. It’s a ‘72.’ To which he replied ‘That’s awesome, but what are you doing playing it in Geelong?!’ BAM! I had no real answer to that.

As I wanted to be able to play my P-Bass until my old age, and at this rate she would be a pile of splinters if I kept player her as hard and often as I had been, I decided to retire my baby from live use and only use her for recording and on special occasions.

Recording ‘On The Rocks’ in Melbourne.

I tried replacing her with a Japanese P-Bass that I had fitted with a Jazz neck, but it wasn’t the same. The weight was different, the neck was different… After a year I sold her to a friend of mine who needed a good bass.

Jo from Butcher Birds with my old Jap P-Bass. Note the ‘Geddy Lee’ Jazz Bass neck.

Tim from Tym Guitars was nice enough to build me a Tym Bass which had a neck that was nearly a perfect replica of my P-Bass. So as not to cause offense to my #1, I got Tim to build my new bass as a Maton Fyrbyrd replica.

This worked great until I cracked the neck on the T-Byrd in Spain, so while it’s getting repaired my main bass is a fantastic Ibanez Black Eagle, which plays nearly as good as my P-Bass and has massive bottom end and clarity. Unfortunately she’s getting beaten up as well (Fender should hire me as a relic-er), so I think I’ll need to get my Tym T-Byrd back into action soon.

After 2 years, my P-Bass has recently been taken out of retirement for my new band ‘Obliteratti’ as I really missed playing her. I mean it, I actually LOVE playing this bass. After 7 years, I still get excited slipping this beauty over my shoulder, plugging her in and hearing her do her thing. In between songs, I look down and a smile forms on my face… I know I’m lucky to own such a beautiful instrument and I appreciate her more the longer I own her. Both her & I have had a lot of great times together, and she can dish out punishment as good as taking it. My favourite memory is one show at Ric’s in Brisbane a few years ago. It’s a very small stage, so there’s not much room to ‘rock out’. Geoff, the singer, decided to flail about quite close to my bass’s headstock. A little too close… his nostril was over my bass tuning peg, so when I quickly moved, I sliced his nostril open! I saw a red line down Geoff’s left nostril, and a trickle of blood streaming down. Geoff grinned at me and said ”….ow.” and kept on singing. Next day his nose had become infected as my bass tuning pegs were GREEN from 37 years of sweaty pub gigs.

Oh well, this new band is a lot calmer than Sixfthick so she should be safe from exploding into a cloud of tooth picks.

Here is my P-Bass in action with Sixfthick, terrorising the poor kids in Perth.

Boys & girls… are you man enough to play this bass?

A few months ago, I was doing what I usually do Sunday mornings… poking around the local pawn shop to see what music gear they had. On the sales table I spotted an early 80’s series Peavey Bandit for $150.It was in great condition and still had it’s original foot switch tucked in the back.

My first ever amp was a 1992 Peavey Bandit with the SuperSat circuit which I loved as it made my dodgy metal riffs sound cool, so I had a soft spot for these amps. I’d been looking for a cheap combo for band practise and as a backup to my Mesa Boogie Mark 1, so I grabbed a Strat off the wall, cranked the reverb and was floored by the most gorgeous sound I’d ever heard come out of a $150 amp. 10 minutes later I was on my way home with this beauty in my back seat.

I emailed Tim from Tym Guitars that week and said… “Tim, I just bought an ‘82 Peavey Bandit for $150. Is it just me or are these amps AWESOME?”. I was expecting a scoff and a response saying I was nuts, but he totally agreed with me. Tim had just finished reading ‘The Peavey Revolution’ and was amazed how clever and ridiculously well designed and engineered the old Peavey gear was. The amps were designed to withstand the worst of touring and if by a miracle they did stop working, to be easily repaired on the road. I borrowed the book and it’s a great read. I really recommend it.

Very, very happy with my Bandit, Tim told me that a friend of mine Luke Henery from the band Violent Soho was also a recent vintage Peavey convert and had been buying up old Peavey gear on the road while touring in the USA. Apparently they’re ridiculously cheap and everytime he saw something, he’d grab it. When Violent Soho came back to Australia, this is the beast Luke brought back with him…

This is a 1978 sunburst T40 Bass that Luke picked up for around $150. I’d never seen one of these in the flesh, and the first thing that struck me was the weight. The bass is RIDICULOUSLY heavy. I literally could not play this bass live… I’m not big enough. Luke is 2 foot taller and a lot more built than me so this bass suits him fine. But I think my collar bone would snap like a dry twig about 3 songs into my set.

The reason for a lot of this weight is this bass is so over engineered. The worksmanship, materials and fittings are awe inspiring.If you read the Peavey book, you’ll understand way. Hartley Peavey wanted his stuff to work and to keep working forever. The is the bass equivalent of an army issue Hummer.

For example, the bridge is a totally unique Peavey design (no Fender bent metal bridge here) that is basically a massive lump of steel that’s been gloriously carved/cast/polished to fit in the most massive saddles I’ve seen. They may look like Fender saddles, but these things are over 2 inches long. And look at that cool cast bit at the bottom with the Peavey logo in there. It’s this attention to detail that really blows my mind.

The attention to detail follows on to the control knobs and neck plate. Peavey could of just used simple steel telecaster type knobs and a plain steel neck plate and that would of been fine. Nup.

The knobs are just beautiful to look at, solid steel with the Peavey ‘P’ cast in the middle and Stratocaster type ribbing around the edges. The feel great to grab. The neck plate is also cast with the Peavey logo and looks to have a 70’s Fender type tilt adjustment.

Even the string tree is unique Peavey… a cast triangle tree that really suits the shape of the Peavey logo. Simple and elegent.

The tuners are of course fantastic. Solid, precise and beautifully smooth. Simply… there is nothing cheap about this bass.

Also, there’s the body which has an ash body that a Fender P-Bass owner would kill to have on their bass. The sunburst is perfectly applied too.

So what does it sound like? Huge… as in too huge. Those pickups are just monsters. Big, ridiculous, shiny, double bladed monsters. It’s like mowing the front lawn with a combine harvester. I love you, Peavey.

They didn’t just make my amp sound louder, they made my amp shit itself. The volume difference between my Fender and this was probably double. I think through a full 70’s Ampeg (or Peavey!) bass stack they would sound like Godzilla. But through my GK800RB, 8×10 and Rat pedal, it was a bit too much for my tastes. My ‘72 P-Bass has the perfect amount of drive, bass and ‘clang’ for that Jesus Lizard bass sound I love. The Peavey is perfect for dirty scuzz rock.

As I said, you have to be a real man to play this bass… it looks like I’m not. Which is painful as I really love this thing. I love that they’re so cheap that they’re basically free, that they’re engineered to survive for a thousand years and that they look so cool. My neck just wouldn’t ever forgive me if I got one.

To see this bass in action, here’s Luke showing us how it’s done.

A beautiful, mint example of a classic Maton bass.

A little while ago I received an email from Peter regarding his beautiful Maton Wildcat Bass.

“I have a 70’s Maton Wildcat Bass. According to info on the Maton Museum website (they list it as a ‘Wilcat’) it would seem to be the first in a series that was numbered 020 to 036. My serial number is 020. I’d love to know more about it’s history. I do know from a stencilled sign on the case that it was once involved in the ‘Warehouse Rock Band’.”

For a 35+ year old bass, it’s in mind blowing condition!

It doesn’t look like it’s been played live… ever! I’m a bit more partial to the Wildcat’s than the JB4’s due to the sharper corners and awesome scratchplate. Actually, both the body and the scratchtplate is a little  reminiscent of the non-sharbite Maton Fyrbyrd. The headstock is the pre-runner to the JB4.

As mentioned in Peter’s message, it’s serial number 20 of 36, but number 1 of that batch. Peter’s bass is so immaculate, he still has it’s original tags!

Beautiful bass, Peter!

So if anyone has heard of the Warehouse Rock Band and can recall seeing this Wildcat in action, please let me know and I’ll forward the info to Peter.

Maton’s bringer of thunder.

Maton in the 70’s, along with making great electric & acoustic guitars also made a solid as a rock bass called the JB4. I’ve seen a few of these at gigs through the years, the last being in the hands of the scarey as hell looking bass player, Grant (lovely dude, tho) from Geelong band ‘Speed Demons’.

When I asked him about his bass, like the other JB4 owners I’ve met he swears it’s the best bass he’s ever played and he’d never get rid of it.

I honestly don’t know much about these basses. My bass tastes are more in the old school Fender category, and to me the JB4 was kind of Maton’s weird stunted version of a P-Bass. But through guitarnerd, a major JB4 fan named Greg sent me a bit of info to help inform me on this forgotten Aussie bass.

The genesis of the JB4 design started with a bass player called Barry Sullivan, from Australian blues legends ‘Chain’ who also had in it’s ranks guitarist Phil Manning who as we know had the brilliant Maton Phil Manning Custom Stereo signature guitar. Barry and Maton started working on a signature ‘Barry Sullivan’ bass of which 6 were made. Here’s Greg’s example.

Here’s the info Greg sent me: “In 1975 Barry was asked by Maton to help design a new bass for the working musician. At that time Maton were producing the Wildcat Bass.

Barry took that concept and started to adapt it and change it. What he ended up with was a bass that was refined into what was then called the JB4 (Jumbuck).

This is what Maton wrote in one of their catalogs from when the JB4 was released:
Captures the “old” sound without the old problems. MATON have developed a number of electric Basses over many years, in both solid and semi-acoustic  models. The J.B. series is the result of background development work of the latest electronics, and exclusive wood curing technology. The design is an original concept with simple sculptured body contours, and featuring a natural brown wood finish. It is now possible to offer one of the world’s most advanced bass instruments to suit the critical needs of first rate musicians.

And here’s the JB4 bass…

As you can see, they Fender-ised the pickup configuration, probably to appeal to a wider market. The headstock is still that of the original Wildcat design, and unusually for a Fender type bass, it’s a solid as a rock set neck.

I’ve only played one of these basses and I was impressed with it’s sustain and typical comfortable as hell Maton neck. maton also sold a number of these as a fretless version, which come up quite frequently for sale on eBay. Here’s Greg’s fretless which he sold recently.

As you can see from this closeup, the workmanship is fantastic. Maton electric’s from the 70’s were just fantastic. The use of Australian woods and the craftsmanship puts these above a lot of the USA basses of the time.

The JB4 then evolved again into the MGB bass, which was made into the 80’s. Here’s Paul’s custom fretless MGB bass that he sent me a photo of a while ago. The body shape was refined a little and the headstock look more like the classic maton acoustic shape. My friend Bryce has a beautful blue example which I’ve had a quick go on and I have to say they’re lovely instruments.

Now, I’ve heard from a reliable source that Maton is possibly thinking of releasing a modern version of the JB4. I have no idea if this is still happening or not… I got told the release date was late 2010. Might happen, might not. I’ll keep you posted when I find out more.