'Justin chancellor bass rig'

Answer 1

"Like Tool's compositions, Justin Chancellor's bass sound is a carefully constructed and complex beast. It's telling that his studio rig and live rig are essentially identical: His effects remain in place, his rigs are miked, and his signal path is his signal path, period.

Justin's Wal 4-string, which has a mahogany body, bird's-eye-maple top, maple neck, and Indian rosewood fingerboard, remains his choice for just about everything. "I can't beat that bass," he says. In fact, he had Wal make another one just like it in the event of an emergency. (The backup bass "doesn't sound anything like it," he laughs.) But Justin ended up using the cleaner, less-midrangy sound of the second bass for the finger-plucked buildup of "Wings for Marie." He also used a greenburst Wal with a different body shape for the harmonics in the intro and outro of "Right in Two." For many years Justin has stuck with Ernie Ball Hybrid Slinky strings (.045, .065, .085, .110) and Clayton 1mm picks.

Still, Chancellor has made some changes to his setup since 2001's Lateralus. He's still using Mesa Engineering cabs, but he switched the dirty cab from an 8x10 to a RoadReady 4x12. Most significant is the switch to Gallien-Krueger 2001RB heads. "The Gallien-Krueger's got really good punch, and it holds the note together well when you hit it hard. But the Mesa speakers were the best as far as I was concerned."

Justin runs three channels all the time. The first comes straight off the xlr output of his Wal bass into a Demeter VTBP-201-DBL preamp (currently available as the Demeter VTBP-201-S), which serves as the clean direct signal and never touches anything else in the massive signal path. In addition to being a favorite of the soundman for filling out tone in the PA, Justin says it "saved me a couple of times" when a cable went bad or an amp went down.

His pedalboard is a thing to behold. New additions include two Guyatone pedals, a Flip VT-X Vintage Tremolo (used in "Right in Two") at the front, and an Ultron AutoWah toward the back. Other newcomers include vintage pedals like a Colorsound Tonebender Fuzz (used in the crunchy middle part of "Jambi") and the fOXX Fuzz-Wah Volume pedal (modified; the volume pot has been removed). That, plus everything else you see here, leads to the splitter and on to rig channels 2 and 3.

Channel 2 is the "clean" rig; Justin's signal goes out of the splitter and straight into one of the two G-K 2001RB heads and into the Mesa 8x10. The third channel is "dirty"; the signal passes through a ProCo TurboRAT distortion ("That's my textured sound that I have on the whole time") and one last EQ before going to the other G-K head and a Mesa 4x12 cab. The overall rig is a blend of these two miked cabs, adjusted for desired levels of clean and dirty, with the clean direct running in the background at all times.