NPD - SansAmp YYZ

Mossman · Thu Jul 23, 2020 12:24 am

This actually arrived last Friday, but I didn't want to post about it until I'd messed around with it for a while.

All my life I've been chasing that elusive "Geddy tone", and it's not easy... Most people will say: "Just play a Jazz Bass/Rickenbacker and throw some dirt on it", but it's not that simple. Geddy bi-amps his bass (not something I want to do at home), and the low frequencies stay clean, while the highs get over-driven. Plus, there's some counter-intuitive EQ going on (I was amazed to find out how much he boosts his lows).

The manual has settings for his Rickenbacker tone, the YYZ Jazz Bass tone, and the settings he used to get the Chris Squire tone when he played "Roundabout" with Yes. It also has setting for Jack Bruce, Les Claypool and (for some reason), Tool, as well as a "tube/studio" setting and a "bi-amped overdrive" setting.

When I first tried it, it was a little underwhelming... I thought it would be a more exciting, visceral experience to hear those familiar tones coming out of my bass amp, but I was like: "That's it? Really?" But Geddy's bass sounds very different in the mix than it does by itself, and I thought maybe I needed something for reference, so with the "YYZ" setting dialed in, I loaded up "Vital Signs" from "Moving Pictures" and started playing along with the track. It was then that I realized how close my bass sounded to Geddy's. Then I fired up the isolated bass track from that song and it sounded frickin' identical!

That got me pretty giddy... For the Geddy pedal... The Gedal.

All the other tones on this thing are legit, and just as a general pre-amp/overdrive pedal, it's probably the best one I've ever owned. I don't use distortion on bass too much, because I've never really found one that I liked. I've got a Zoom B3 that I really dig, but I think the distortions on that device are its biggest weakness, so even if I wasn't a big Rush nerd, it would still be worth it to have this pedal.

andrewsrea · Tue Aug 25, 2020 4:17 pm

Just caught this post. HNPD!

Must be pretty Marshall sounding to get those Chris Squire or Jack Bruce tones!

Gear_Junky · Tue Aug 25, 2020 5:15 pm

Back in the 90's I think I even had a Tech21 t-shirt - I owned Trademark 60 amp, 3 SansAmps and was pretty much a fan boy of the company. It's interesting to see that they're still coming up with stuff.

Mossman · Sun Oct 10, 2021 4:15 pm

andrewsrea wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 4:17 pm Just caught this post. HNPD!

Must be pretty Marshall sounding to get those Chris Squire or Jack Bruce tones!

I didn't see these responses until now... What's weird is; I got a notification that @MadJack had replied to this thread, but obviously there's no post by him, and that notification has disappeared... spooky.

To reply to your comment; I wouldn't say that the pedal is particularly "Marshall-sounding", but you can get a broad variety of sounds out of it. It does do the "Roundabout" sound quite well. I never thought of Jack Bruce as having a particular sound, other than "distorted", but I'm only a casual fan... I've never really keyed in on his sound too much, or tried to replicate it.

Mossman · Sun Oct 10, 2021 4:21 pm

Gear_Junky wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 5:15 pm Back in the 90's I think I even had a Tech21 t-shirt - I owned Trademark 60 amp, 3 SansAmps and was pretty much a fan boy of the company. It's interesting to see that they're still coming up with stuff.

Man, they're constantly coming out with stuff. The YYZ/GED-2112 aren't the only signature pre-amp products they make, either. There's a Steve Harris range, as well couple of others, I think.

andrewsrea · Mon Oct 11, 2021 11:55 am

Mossman wrote: ↑Sun Oct 10, 2021 4:15 pm
andrewsrea wrote: ↑Tue Aug 25, 2020 4:17 pm Just caught this post. HNPD!

Must be pretty Marshall sounding to get those Chris Squire or Jack Bruce tones!
I didn't see these responses until now... What's weird is; I got a notification that @MadJack had replied to this thread, but obviously there's no post by him, and that notification has disappeared... spooky.

To reply to your comment; I wouldn't say that the pedal is particularly "Marshall-sounding", but you can get a broad variety of sounds out of it. It does do the "Roundabout" sound quite well. I never thought of Jack Bruce as having a particular sound, other than "distorted", but I'm only a casual fan... I've never really keyed in on his sound too much, or tried to replicate it.

Chris Squier, Fragile album, he would have been playing a Marshall 100w model 1959 Super Bass w/ 2 4x12 cabs. Jack Bruce played a JTM45-100 100w Plexi with a full stack during his Cream years and then moved to a Marshall Major 200w w/ two full stacks.

RockYoWorld · Mon Oct 11, 2021 12:04 pm

So if I understand this correctly, this pedal does parallel processing for bass in one pedal? That's cool!

I use Parallaxe as a plugin to do that that as well as finally dialing in a good tone for bass on my Axe FX. With both, the idea is to have a clean, compressed sound in the lower frequencies and tight distorted upper frequencies. Is that basically what this pedal does?

Mossman · Mon Oct 11, 2021 10:18 pm

andrewsrea wrote: ↑Mon Oct 11, 2021 11:55 am
Chris Squier, Fragile album, he would have been playing a Marshall 100w model 1959 Super Bass w/ 2 4x12 cabs. Jack Bruce played a JTM45-100 100w Plexi with a full stack during his Cream years and then moved to a Marshall Major 200w w/ two full stacks.

Yes, but the pedal is not meant to emulate a Marshall amp, or any amp, really. It's meant to emulate Geddy Lee's signal processing, and he doesn't use amps. He uses Tech 21 Sans Amps, and before that, he was using Palmer and Avalon Preamps (I think he went ampless back in the '90s). The "settings" are not pre-sets or amp models or anything. They're just diagrams of the knob positions printed in the back of the manual. The "Roundabout" setting is the setting that Geddy used when he played with Yes for their HOF induction. The rest are Rush-specific, and I guess they threw in Jack Bruce and Tool settings for good measure. I can understand the Jack Bruce setting, as Geddy has cited him as a main influence on many occasions, but I don't know what all Tool has to do with Rush, or Geddy Lee.

RockYoWorld wrote: ↑Mon Oct 11, 2021 12:04 pm So if I understand this correctly, this pedal does parallel processing for bass in one pedal? That's cool!

I use Parallaxe as a plugin to do that that as well as finally dialing in a good tone for bass on my Axe FX. With both, the idea is to have a clean, compressed sound in the lower frequencies and tight distorted upper frequencies. Is that basically what this pedal does?

Yeah, exactly... That's precisely the reason why I bought it. It's like bi-amping without having to use two amps, and I knew that was the only way you could really cop Geddy's tones, because he's been bi-amping since before he went ampless. It's not simply a matter of "just throw some dirt on it", because you lose all your definition in the low end, and that only gets you in the ball-park..

Apart from geeking out to Rush stuff, it's a pretty awesome, all-around pre-amp/distortion pedal. I never met a distortion pedal that I liked for bass before I got this, and all the additional EQ and tone-shaping features it has make it useful for pretty much everything. It's a permanent part of my signal chain now.

MadJack · Wed Oct 13, 2021 6:02 am

Mossman wrote: ↑Sun Oct 10, 2021 4:15 pm
I didn't see these responses until now... What's weird is; I got a notification that @MadJack had replied to this thread, but obviously there's no post by him, and that notification has disappeared... spooky.

Nope. I didn't reply to this thread, but I did read it this last weekend.

I am interested in a preamp, but right now I'm looking at something more basic. I'm just starting out with bass and I'm not looking for such a specific sound as the Sans-Amp YYZ. As of right now, I'm leaning towards the Ampeg Classic Analog Bass Preamp, as I do like the Ampeg bass tones and drive.

Mossman · Wed Oct 13, 2021 9:26 pm

MadJack wrote: ↑Wed Oct 13, 2021 6:02 am
Nope. I didn't reply to this thread, but I did read it this last weekend.

Yeah, it's weird. I definitely saw it in my notifications (your avatar is pretty distinctive), but I didn't go to that thread right away, and when I looked again, it was gone.

MadJack wrote: ↑Wed Oct 13, 2021 6:02 amI am interested in a preamp, but right now I'm looking at something more basic. I'm just starting out with bass and I'm not looking for such a specific sound as the Sans-Amp YYZ. As of right now, I'm leaning towards the Ampeg Classic Analog Bass Preamp, as I do like the Ampeg bass tones and drive.

I hear that... In fact, I've been exchanging emails with NuX (they're pretty responsive, BTW), and one of the things I mentioned was my disappointment in the lack of an SVT model (among other classic bass amps). He said he'd pass that along to their development team, whatever that's worth.

For the record, though, the YYZ is a great general-purpose pre-amp/tone-shaper. I use it for more than just Rush stuff. I probably wouldn't have been able to justify spending the money on it (it's kind of a spendy pedal), if that's all it could do. I'm not trying to sell you on it, or anything, I'd get the Ampeg prel if I were you, but I'm just knocked out by this thing! I've been using it with my Zoom B3 (another reason why I bought the YYZ is that I don't like any of the distortions on the B3), and I don't even use the bass amp modeling anymore. At this point, I'm just using the B3 for compression, into the YYZ and then into my Fender Rumble, and it sounds fantastic. I don't really feel like I need anything else to get whatever sound I want.