Le matériel des bassistes pro

Geddy’s Direct Approach to Stage & Studio
“In the old days, the sound pressure levels from booming amplifiers made me feel disconnected from my bass. I started using in-ear monitors a long time ago, because they give me more control over my bass sound. Cabinets sound sluggish. I like that immediate feedback of the strings hitting the neck.
“My stage and studio setups are essentially the same: I take a flat signal from an Avalon U5 DI, one from a Palmer speaker simulator, and one from a SansAmp RBI. I change the blend depending on how nasty I want the distortion. I usually use the Palmer unit’s bright setting to give me some extra twang. That gives me some really interesting distorted subsonics. When I combine the Palmer with the SansAmp, which I set up to give me some extreme highs and lows, I get the twang plus a round bottom end. In the studio I sometimes make a mulch of the signals, compress the hell out of it with a Urei 1176 and put it back into its own channel, just in case I need a different sonic shape—if there’s a hole in the sound.”

Bass guitar amplification
Lee's amps in the early days were arena-ready Sunn and/or Ampeg models. By the late seventies, his backline had evolved into a unique configuration of Ashly preamps and BGW power amps, which were run in stereo with his 4001 bass. The neck pickup was sent to one amp and set for a clean, bass-heavy tone, while the bridge pickup was sent to the other amp which was set with an exaggerated treble boost, and extra gain in the preamp. This defined Lee's bass sound from 1977 to 1982. Though he would change basses, the amplifier setup remained constant through 1991. For the Roll the Bones tour (1991-1992), Lee switched to Gallien-Krueger amps, and later to Trace Elliots.

Beginning in 2002, Lee dispensed with using a single bass guitar amplifier in favor of a complex chain of amplifiers and DI units which allow the bass guitar to be connected directly to the stage and front-of-house mixers without involving microphones. Lee began using in-ear monitors at this point.

At the beginning of the 2002 Vapor trails tour, Lee revised his previous setup. His bass signal is sent via a Samson wireless unit to an Avalon U5 DI. From there it is split between a Trace Elliot Quadravalve all-tube power amplifier and a SansAmp RBI rackmountable preamp. The speaker-level signal from the Quadravalve is sent to a Palmer PD-05 speaker emulator, which provides adequate load for the tube amplifier and attenuates the signal down to line level. The signals from the U5, Quadraverb/PD-05, and RBI are all sent to the monitor and front-of-house mixers and blends of the signals are changed on a song-by-song basis. Typically the Quadravalve/PD-05 signal makes up the low end while a balance of the U5 and RBI make up the high end, with the RBI providing the "top end" distortion in Lee's sound.

For the 2007 Snakes and Arrows tour, Lee swapped the SansAmp RBI for a new unit by Sansamp, the RPM. During preparation for this tour a feature on bassplayer.tv with his live bass tech, Russ Ryan, was filmed which detailed Lee's live signal path.