
by M. Berg
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Not enough good can be said about the Tech 21 SansAmp 3-channel Programmable Bass Driver and Direct Box. Perhaps its biggest knock is that for a bass player like me, it’s too good. Once I dial in the tone I like, I see no need to make changes, and the two other channels to program are rendered extraneous. Also, due to the responsiveness and versatility of the SansAmp Bass Driver, I seem to care less about what sort of amp I’m using, and just that it’s loud enough. This thing would make me sound good playing through just about anything.
As you may have surmised from how I use it, that I treat the SansAmp Bass Driver as a preamp. From info I got on the Tech 21 website, and from what the geeks on the bulletin boards say, the SansAmp Bass Driver is all analog, and it has some circuitry voodoo that emulates tube amplifiers. That’s almost sounds too
good to be true, but that the SansAmp is analog gives its tone a very warm sound, like when I’d flip on my father’s old Sansui tuner and get that characteristic tube “THUNK.”
I play a Fender Jazz Bass through a variety of amps; practice-sized combos, to multi-cab stacks of high-watt power. I use this thing with all of them. None of my amps are particularly awesome. If I had an Ampeg SVT or a Fender Bassman, I’d probably have no need for the SansAmp Bass Driver as a preamp, and I’d probably settle for some other stomp boxes to provide boosts or distortion.
Before I had the Bass Driver, I was unhappy with my tone. My guitar is nice, and it sounds good in general, but the bass tone I was getting from my mediocre amps was very flat, with a very loose bottom end. Once I put the SansAmp in my signal chain, everything changed. I set all my amp EQ levels to the center, and used the Bass and Treble knobs to dial in my tone. The sweep of the knobs is so clean, I could hear right when I had too much or too little Bass or Treble. Also, sometimes when I feel like I need more bass, I just roll back the treble, and the bass is actually there. It’s very sensitive equipment for getting the sound just right.
The Drive and Level knobs, predictably, control gain and volume. The balance of these two knobs determines how much louder they’ll make the signal, and how much overdrive dirt is on the signal. The Blend knob then determines how much SansAmp gets put into the signal, mixed with the dry signal. This can help turn blaring distortion into a nice fuzz around the edges. The Presence knob is probably the closest thing to a midrange control. Delicate use of this knob can really fine tune ...