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Status Basses | Rob GreenArticle from Making Music, April 1987 |
You know, the British headless ones made of graphite. Their creator, Rob Green, spills the carbon
What makes a bass cost more than a grand? Why does graphite make a bass sound good? Tony Bacon put these questions, and more, to Rob Green, who makes Status basses.
"It's funny," says Rob Green, "a lot of people think graphite produces its own sound. I look at it the other way round: graphite tends not to influence the sound as much as different types of wood do."
ROB IS the 'Green' of Green Machine Technology (GMT). GMT build the 'Machine': the Status bass. The 'Technology' is this graphite stuff. You're saying it's a neutral kind of material, then, Rob?
"Yes — if you use a very hard rock maple and then a softer mahogany for a guitar neck, say, you may well be able to tell differences between the two. Graphite, however, is simply giving you the broadest possible frequency range and eliminating deadspots; I think you hear more of what the strings and the pickups are doing. Once you have a good sound there, you can always subtract from it. If it's not there — well, it's the old any-system-is-as-good-as-its-weakest-link theory.
Rob's decision to make his own basses first came when he worked as a guitar customiser and repairer for Soundwave in the early 1980s. The Romford-based shop had quickly gained a reputation for specialisation in bass things, and became a meeting point for players and makers with ideas. So much so, that two of the biggest names in British bass tools were born there: Status, and Trace Elliot.
Rob came to Soundwave from Shergold Guitars, where he'd learnt a lot from Norman Houlder about guitar-making, and with so many exotic and expensive basses clogging up the Romford showroom it was perhaps inevitable that Rob thought to himself, "I can make a better bass than those." And, arguably, that's exactly what he's done with the Status.
These days, Rob's GMT operation — currently four workers and an outside graphite moulding contractor — is based in Chelmsford. It's here that the revered Series 2 bass (wood and graphite) and Series 2000 bass (all-graphite) are put together, and it's naturally here that we are to chat to Rob. Dwelling on the history for a few more minutes, he points out that the main problem in the early days was the construction: graphite technology was in its infancy.
The problem was one of cost, too: many companies that deal in graphite mouldings have lucrative Ministry Of Defence contracts; consequently they are used to charging (and getting) "telephone numbers", says Rob. Gradually GMT sorted the stuff out, and now have an exclusive moulder.
"The big problem about carbon fibre is that when it works, it's great," says Rob, "but when it doesn't, it's just so much expensive scrap material. And unfortunately things do go wrong with it — as we know, as Modulus know, as Vigier know, and as even our Japanese friends know."
But what is graphite? Rob obliges: "It starts off as a man-made fibre, each individual fibre of which goes through a heat/chemical process which burns the shit out of it — you end up literally with a piece of carbon. Obviously the properties of the original fibre are changed, and you end up with something that is very stable: in itself it isn't particularly strong, but it's then used in conjunction with specially developed resins. You have to get the carbon fibre to resin ratio exactly right, and that then gives you the means to form a structure.
"But it isn't just a matter of chucking it all into a bucket and ending up with something that looks like a guitar. If it was that simple, it wouldn't be anywhere near as expensive. Mind you, there's a lot of development that we're doing on our own to try to get together a more mass-market product — like those Japanese."
The pros and cons of using graphite in guitars are fairly clear: the cons involve expense (tooling-up, development work, wastage); the pros involve consistency (of resulting shape, feel, weight and sound). Timber, you see, is inconsistent — but then that's one of the reasons Rob still likes working with it, on the wood-and-graphite Status Series 2 bass. "Most planks of wood are exciting when you first start machining them up — coo, look at that!" he enthuses. "It's good fun using exotic timbers and knowing that the guitars aren't all the same."
Other than their use of new materials, some modem bass guitars have another oft-baffling component — active electronics. Rob's done his fair share of poking around with pots and circuit boards and switches to get that fantastic Status sound, by relying on gut feeling rather than scientific measurement. So what are active electronics, then, Rob?
"All things to all people, really. Take EMG pickups for instance, which are 'active pickups'. But sound-wise, you have no control over them — it's simply low impedance circuitry, small coils, and a battery-powered buffer pre-amp. There's no active EQ that you can mess around with: if you don't like the sound, bad luck. So to some extent, if it needs a battery, you can call it active electronics. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to sound better. In my book, active circuitry means starting off with a good sound which you can then improve."
An active circuit — that is, separate from the pickups — comes in one of three main categories: a pre-amp booster, a simple bass/treble cut-and-boost system, or a more complicated parametric setup. Rob has experimented with the last two, and finally opted for the simpler bass/treble scheme ("any horrible sound you can imagine you can get from a parametric system"). The first type, the battery-powered booster, he dismisses as merely a method of making a bass louder.
"Most people plug the bass in, and the first thing they say is 'cor, innit loud!' Because the amp's shouting a bit louder than their ordinary guitar, it sounds better, more impressive. That's a selling point which a lot of companies work on: it's louder. So what you do is turn the amp down so it's the same level as it would have been passively. That's the only way to compare them. Rather than being deceived by pure volts from the pickup, listen to the sound and see if it's doing what you want it to do."
For Status, a move away from the treble-and-bass active circuit has come with the new Series 2000 Mk II bass, launched at Frankfurt in February. The original 2000 had a distinctly punchy sound, thanks to a suitable midrange tonal lift. The Mk II Rob describes as having "more of a hifi-ish sound — not trebley or twangy or harsh, but with a wide bandwidth, as opposed to squeezing down the top end".
But the Series 2000 Mk II is still an expensive bass — over a grand. As is the Series 2. So what about this search for ways of making a cheaper one that you mentioned earlier, Rob? "Hopefully one of these days it will be possible to make a good, cheap instrument that incorporates graphite," he replies. "Unfortunately, I think the Steinberger bolt-on neck 'cheaper' bass is — I don't want to be offensive — pretty naff. They've got non-active grotty pickups on a bit of chipboard, and it costs £800 or whatever. There's no way I'd want to go down that road.
"A bass around that price would be ideal — because it's unlikely that we could compete in the really cheap market at the moment. Our aim is to get into the value-for-money midprice range. There's no way I want to cash in on the Status name, bring out a piece of crap for the next couple of years, then go bust and retire to the Bahamas." He pauses. "Mind you, that's not a bad idea..." Relax. He's joking.
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