Walking the Bass Line #10
This is part four of my series for new bass players to help them through the maze.
The news…
It’s been a while, but it’s good to be back. Last year was a bit of a steep climb, and I had to step back for a while to focus on the essentials. Thankfully, things have calmed down, the coffee’s hot, the beer is cold, and we are officially back in the saddle.
2026 is looking like a cracker—I’m releasing my first solo album, and there’s a lot more in the works from Starlite & Campbell, the VIBRATIONISTS, and my session work for the lovely Trent Chapa.
I’ll be getting stuck into the bass side of things shortly, but first, in case you missed it, here’s a New Year’s greeting to celebrate a brand new chapter with you all.
All about the bass…
If you happen to stumble across this article, and to understand where it all started, it may be worth reading Walking the Bass Line #7, which is the first in my series for new bass players, or, if you want to deep dive, check out all the articles about my bass journey by hitting the red button below.
You can also find the article and other great bass-related stuff at Bass Musician Magazine where I am a regular contributor.
Let’s start a little theory
Before we continue the chronological journey through my bass career to date, we need to confront a little theory, whilst not trying to fry your head.
Track breakdown | Blow Them All To Pieces
As I mentioned in my previous article, I was hoping to do a full breakdown of two tracks for you this time, but things have been a bit of a squeeze with our current workload. Instead, I’ve dug out a video from a couple of years back where I’m playing Blow Them All To Pieces from Starlite.One. I’ll be sure to do the full ‘behind-the-scenes’ talk soon—stay tuned for that!
Working with the chords
The most important thing about the bass part in Blow Them All To Pieces is the melody and how it works with the chords, which I will be covering in the next edition. For now, let’s look at the basis—I was going to say bassis, but that would be far too cheesy—of my thinking.
I’m all about the melody—as soon as I hear a few chords, a tune pops into my head straight away. It’s how I write everything, from the songs themselves down to the bass lines.
To be honest, it can be a bit of a nightmare technically, especially when I’m doing session work. You haven’t got the luxury of sitting around for hours treading water and ‘finding the vibe’. You’ve got to be sharp, get stuck in, and nail the part right then and there. No hanging about.
When I first started playing bass, I had a bit of an epiphany: you’ve got to master the ‘safe’ notes within a chord and wrap your head around scale harmonisation. It sounds like academic heavy lifting, but once it clicks, it’s a total game-changer for your playing.
Take a piece in G Major. The major scale is G, A, B, C, D, E, F♯, and these are the likely root notes of chords you will find in the song.
When you stack these into triads (three-note chords), the landscape reveals itself: G, Am, Bm, C, D, Em, F♯m♭5 (that lovely, bruised half-diminished sound we’ll dive into next time), and back home to the G major octave.
If a song is in G major, these are the chords most likely to show up. Your ‘safe harbour’ notes for each chord are the root, the third (major or minor), and the fifth. Now, you could just stick to the root and fifth—it’s the ‘reliable’ choice, but frankly, it’s a bit pedestrian. We’ve all heard a million country tracks that don’t dare to stray further.
Make your bass lines cool
The real trick I picked up early on? You aren’t tethered to the root. It’s far more evocative to lean into the third, the fifth, or even a cheeky seventh—which I will discuss next time. It adds a bit of grit and character to the line.
For example, take God Only Knows by The Beach Boys.
The bass line is famous for avoiding the root notes. Brian Wilson (who composed the part exactly as played) used two bassists, Ray Pohlman (electric bass) & Lyle Ritz (upright), to highlight inversions (putting the third or fifth in the bass). This creates that famous sense of ‘suspended’ emotion, where the song never quite feels like it’s landing on solid ground until the very end.
Fun fact. While many associate bass on the Pet Sounds sessions exclusively with the legendary Carol Kaye, on this track she played 12 string guitar!
If you want to try something more straightforward, try While My Guitar Gently Weeps, by The Beatles.
Remember, when playing the line, look at the underlying chords and understand which note from the chord they are using in the bass!
Caveat - many interesting and great songs—including the ones mentioned above—change key within the song structure and therefore unexpected chords appear! Play what sounds right to you, don’t be shackled by theory.
But that’s quite enough theory for one session.
Before we leave though, take a look at what Kid Anderson has to say about George Porter’s much-discussed note in The Meters’ track, Cissy Strut. Very, very funny and always makes me laugh…
Endorsements #2
As mentioned in my previous article, I endorse several products, but in the real world, what does that mean?
Firstly, I only endorse products I love and use. In exchange for the endorsement, I receive discounts on the products, ranging from modest to mind-bogglingly great!
Currently, I am lucky enough to be working with Curt Mangan Strings, Matamp, Scott Dixon Cases (which have saved my basses more time than you can believe), HiWatt, Fylde Guitars, Bergantino Audio Systems, TWS Pedals, Radial Engineering, ACS, Sequential, Hipshot, Mike Lull Guitars & Basses, Hudson Electronics, Headway Music Audio, Supertone, Lehle and our wonderful friend Jez Levy of Eyes on St Albans.
So, how do you do it?
You always have to remember that a commercial organisation will want something in exchange for preferential discounts, and therefore, you must have something to offer them.
If you are a famous session musician like Guy Pratt, Pino Palladino, Gail Ann Dorsey or Rhonda Smith, it’s easy. Even easier if you are a world-famous artist: I am sure companies are falling over themselves to encourage the likes of Justin Chancellor (Tool), Joe Dart (Vulfpeck), Paz Lenchantin (Pixies) and the wonderful Laura Lee (Khruangbin) to use their products!
For me, it’s just about loving the product, then contacting them. If they think you can help their brand, they will come back with an offer of some type, which usually includes promotion of the products at live gigs, social media and…
Interviews
Over the years, I have been interviewed many times, first by Joel McIver for the now-defunct Bass Guitar Magazine (Bass Guitar) in November 2018 and July 2022, I was featured on the Wonderwoman section of the ‘No Treble’ website with a feature-length article and 60-minute video interview with the wonderful Britanny Frompovitch.
2025 saw me becoming a writer for Bass Musician Magazine and the editor, Raul Amado, interviewed me. Take a look!
It’s this type of thing that encourages suppliers to work with you.
Take a deep dive by visiting the equipment section of my website by clicking the red button below.
Alternatively, you can…
A big surprise
I haven’t given birth to children, but on marrying my musical and life partner Simon Campbell, I inherited two fully grown and well-trained sons, James (Jim) and Joseph (Joe). In the 13 years since we have been together, they have both married, and we now have three grandchildren: who’d have thought it, eh…
We have always lived in Europe together, but visit them as much as we can.
Several years ago, the band were staying in Brixton, London, hanging out with Jim for a couple of days after playing a gig at The Half Moon in Putney.
We had just opened our first adventurous beer of the day when in walks Jim carrying his 1974 Fender Precision and proceeds to place it in my hands, saying that he would like me to have his bass as he doesn’t play anymore, and I will make more use of it! What an amazing gift!
Here is a detailed piece on my website…
My amps & cabs (part three)
As mentioned in my last article, I like to play loud on stage using valve (tube) amps and big cabinets. The funny thing is—which I haven’t gotten my head around yet—is that a 200W valve amp sounds louder and more present than a more powerful, solid state (transistor) based amp.
If you have any ideas, please comment below. I am keen to find out!
Over the past few years I have seen the resurgence of lower powered valve amps, such as vintage 100W Fender Bassman stacks on stage replacing the ubiquitous—but still wonderful—Ampeg SVT. Perhaps it’s because stages are getting quieter, I don’t know.
Sunn have rereleased the legendary 60W 200S and no Nashville studio is complete without a vintage 25W Ampeg B15N Portaflex.
Bass players still love the sound of the mighty valve!!
A little history about British valve (tube) amps
In the early days, British amps were trying to be ‘clean.’ You had brands like Selmer and Watkins (WEM) popping up, but the real game-changer was Vox. Dick Denney at Jennings Musical Instruments (JMI) created the AC15 in 1958. When bands needed more volume to be heard over screaming fans, they doubled it to create the AC30 championed by The Shadows and The Beatles.
As the decade progressed, players needed more grunt. Remember, this was in the days before great PA systems, with bands relying on guitar and bass amps on stage to be heard.
Jim Marshall, a drum shop owner, started building amps because American imports like the Fender Bassman were too pricey. He took the Bassman circuit, tweaked it for British components (like the KT66 and later EL34 valves), and created the JTM45 and later SuperLead/SuperBass 100W and Major 200W models as demand for more power became prevalent.
While Marshall was all about saturation, other builders focused on clarity and military-grade construction. Enter Sound City—known as the proto HiWatt and HiWatt.
Dave Reeves’ Hiwatt amps were the ‘Rolls-Royce’ of the amp world. Used heavily by guitar and bass players of the time, they offered massive headroom—they stayed clean and punchy even at ear-splitting volumes. Yes, that’s why I own a HiWatt DR201 (200W) from the 70s and wrote about it in edition #8 of this series.
Matamp & Orange
Matamp has one of those classic British origin stories that starts in a garden shed and ends up on the world stage.
The foundation was laid by Mat Mathias, a German-born engineer who moved to the UK during WWII. Around 1945 or 1946, he started a business called RadioCraft in Huddersfield. At first, he was basically the “Radio Doctor,” fixing anything electronic, but by the late 50s, he’d opened a recording studio and was experimenting with his own amplifier circuits because he wanted a different sound from the ubiquitous Vox amps of the era.
The name we know today appeared in 1964. Mat partnered with a hi-fi engineer named Tony Emerson. This is when things got serious. They released the Series 2000, which caught the ear of a young Peter Green. Green used his Matamp to record much of the early Fleetwood Mac catalogue, giving the brand instant ‘holy grail’ status among blues-rockers.
In 1968, Mat teamed up with Cliff Cooper, who owned the Orange music shop in London. For a few years, Matamp actually manufactured the amplifiers for Orange (the legendary Orange-Matamp units) used by Wishbone Ash, Free and Led Zeppelin, amongst others.
By 1971, the partnership split because Orange wanted to move to mass production, while Mat wanted to keep things small, hand-built, and high-quality.
The Supertone Matamp 200
I love my HiWatt but it’s 42 years old, and although ultra-reliable, touring with just one amp is a dangerous business. I also needed a new sound, something bigger at the bottom end and a more prominent mid-range.
Simon has known the current owner of Matamp, Jeff Lewis, for many years. He is a troublesome Yorkshireman, in a very cool kind of way and always swayed by a pack of chocolate biscuits! Simon was having a customised 120W amp made for him, and when we met, I asked him if he could build me an old-school Matamp 200. Their current model is the Green / Matamp GT200 mkII, which features a mid-cut control, but I really wanted the original preamp circuit with a few personal tweaks.
Jeff and his amp tech Hayden Minett, built this for me under our Supertone brand, and it is available to buy :)
It’s built like a tank, totally beautiful and can be played at any level—but beware, it can tear your head off...
Another couple of pedals
If you delve into the previous articles, you will see that at this point in my career, I was using a Sonic Research ST-300 TurboTuner, Supertone Custom Bass FUZZ, Ernie Ball Volume Pedal Jr., and ElectroHarmonix POG2 polyphonic octave generator running through a Lehle RMI BassSwitch IQ DI.
Grit…
Listening to Lemmy (Motörhead), Geezer Butler (Black Sabbath), and Chris Wolstenholme (Muse), motivated me to explore ‘edge’.
Loud is one thing, but getting the amp to the point of breakup is quite another. As discussed in edition #8, I have a Supertone Fuzz, which is fantastic for solos and specific parts, but I did need something for grit that would not have my band members and the audience being sonically disembowelled.
Enter the…
Hudson Broadcast
I have never played through a classic British broadcast console of the 60s, but we do have a similar type of preamp in the studio: the H2 Audio 2120. This is a faithful recreation of the preamps found in the first Helios consoles, probably best known for the installation in Olympic Studios, London and the recording of Led Zeppelin 1 along with many others including the Rolling Stones, The Who and David Bowie.
When you plug in and raise the gain, the transformer saturates, and components start to overload, giving a fabulous, gritty tone.
The Broadcast is similar but uses a discrete Class-A germanium pre-amplifier (I am not a tech head and know nothing of this; it’s straight from the Hudson Broadcast website).
They go on to say:
“In the low-gain setting, the Broadcast can cover everything from sparkling clean boost through to transparent overdrive, all with a healthy dose of volume available to push your amp. The Broadcast features a specially selected Triad steel-core transformer and a Germanium transistor. Advancing the gain on the Broadcast starts to saturate the transformer and the pedal’s discrete circuitry, giving rise to a gentle and dynamic compression coupled with subtle thickening of the mid-range. With the gain switch in the high setting and the trim control wound up, the Broadcast starts to deliver heavier distorted sounds with a warm and fuzzy edge to them.”
It’s all Japanese to me. All I know is you plug it in, turn it up, mess with the controls and hear the beauty. It’s featured right from the start of Saving Me from our latest studio album Starlite.One.
Compression
99% of every recorded track you hear featuring bass guitar or upright bass will feature compression, to a greater or lesser extent.
But what the hell is compression, and why do we need it??
To explain it in the simplest way possible: imagine you have a tiny, super-fast sound engineer living inside your amp with their hand on the volume knob. Think of a compressor as an automatic volume smoother.
When you play the bass hard and cross a certain line (the Threshold), the ‘engineer’ quickly turns the volume down. When the music gets quiet again, they turn it back up.
So basically, it squashes the difference between your loudest notes and your quietest notes. It makes your playing sound more consistent, allowing it to ‘sit in the mix’. It also adds sustain to a bass or guitar because, as the note naturally fades out, the compressor is effectively ‘turning up’ the tail of the note.
Warning: compression also make any ringing notes, pops, squeaks, or thumps louder, so your technique has to be spot on.
Origin Effects Cali76 Bass Compressor
In the studio, we tend to use rack-mounted studio compressors. Simon favours our vintage DBX 165 and Urei 1176, but there are plethora of pedals available for use in a live scenario. After testing many of them, the Origin Effects Cali76 Bass came out on top.
As you would expect from the name, the Cali76 is inspired by the world-famous Urei 1176.
They are a bit tricky to set up, and not wishing to go over old ground, there are plenty of YouTube videos out there that can help, but as far as I’m concerned its a very usable effect that really tightens up the sound.
There are two very useful controls in addition to those found on many more basic compressors.
The ‘dry’ knob varies the amount of uncompressed signal through the pedal (known as parallel compression). So, you can compress the bass heavily then add some of the original signal which allows the dynamics to shine through! It’s very useful and often used in studio as compression is like a drug; you always want more, but overuse can take the dynamics out of your tone.
The other is the ‘High Pass Filter’ (HPF), which allows you to vary the amount of bass frequencies (0-400Hz) that is allowed through the pedal without compression.
If you think about it, it’s usually the transients—god help me like those created by slap bass techniques—pick attack, and increase in volume and thinness of tone/increase in volume as you move up the neck (especially on the D and G strings) that need controlling. You want the lows to breathe!
Again, I plug it in and mess with the controls until is sounds the way I want it, but you do need to know some technical stuff to get the best out of it! Watch the video.
I always have this on and adjust the amount of signal going into it using my GigRig ATOM switching unit to accommodate my different basses, which have a huge variety of outputs. But more of that next time.
Headroom
The unit allows a power supply to deliver from 9-18V DC. The higher the voltage you give it the more headroom (the amount of level you can put in before distortion) you have. This got me thinking about power supplies: time to speak to Simon, who has been using pedalboards for most of his career. I run this at 12V, as that’s what I have.
And finally
Next month, I will feature my approach to session playing, a new big speaker cabinet, my own signature bass and of course, more pedals.
Please comment below. I look forward to hearing from you!
Much love
Suzy
Really great, in depth article!!