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Victor has a sizable collection of basses. "I used almost all of them at some place on the record," he claims. "It was a goal because I wanted get different sounds. Eighty percent of the time, though, it was one of my Fodera 4-strings." Vic's Foderas include his standard maple 4, his yin-yang-patterned bass, a matching yin-yang fretless, another 4 he tunes ADGC, and a 4 with piezo pickups and stereo outputs that he used heavily on A Show of Hands. To get a Marcus Miller tone, he played his new NYC Empire bass, a J-style instrument designed by Fodera. Victor pulled out a Taylor fretless acoustic bass guitar for "My Life" and "The Loneliest Monk," a Conklin M.E.U. electric upright for "Naima," and a Juzek upright for "A Little Buzz." Other basses making appearances include a Kubicki Factor, a custom Keith Roscoe 5-string, Joe Compito 5- and 6-strings, and his late-'70s Alembic Series 1, which he describes as his "first good bass." Although his very first bass (a Univox copy of a Hofner violin bass) didn't make it onto the album, it's pictured on the CD cover. All of his 4-strings sport D'Addario XLs, gauges .045, .065, .075, .095. A brand new bass in the Wooten collection is the custom 8-string pictured here. The 3-D dragon on top was carved from exotic woods by luthier Bill Conklin, who used silver for the sword and old ivory for the dragon's teeth. Victor also has a unique-sounding Nechville "banjo bass" (see cover), which sports a headless Steinberger neck and a black-ash body mounted onto a patented Tom Nechville modular banjo frame.
During his sets with JD Blair, Victor plugs into a Walter Woods head and plays through a new prototype Ampeg cabinet with one 18" speaker, two 10s, two 6w's, and a horn. Wooten steps on a DigiTech Whammy pedal and a Visual Volume pedal; his rack holds an Ensoniq DP4 multi-effects unit, a Yamaha G50 Guitar MIDI interface for his new Yamaha B1D MIDI pickup, and a Mackie 1604 mixer funneling bass, drums, and voices through a Lexicon JamMan, which Victor controls with a custom MIDI pedal to create live loops.
