Friday Pilots Club’s Drew Polovick - GEAR MASTERS Ep. 575

What's up? I'm Drew from Friday Pilots Club. I play bass. We're at the wonderful House of Blues Chicago on tour with Circa Waves, playing a bunch of songs off of our new album, Nowhere. Check it out. And, yeah, I'm going to show you guys what I do. First off, I play this pretty dope Fender Player Plus Green P Bass, which is dope. It's got a lot of cool extra features, like 3-band EQ, active-passive switch, and like a pickup blend. Two batteries, but I honestly rock it super simple, impassive, 90% of the set is just the P pickup. A few songs that are a little more gnarly, I do a 50-50 blend between the two. But, yeah, this thing is honestly ******* incredible. I even bought, I have a second one that's like white and red that's back there in that inky case. But, for some reason, this one is just, like, so magical. And I don't know what it is, like, literally when we were doing Europe last year, I was like, oh, I should get the exact same bass for the most part, so I can just, like, have all my tones transfer if for any reason this thing goes down. So I bought another one, and for some reason it just doesn't sound like this one. Like, there's just special mojo in this specific green P bass. And on top of it, it's like the most beautiful, like, green sparkle. You can probably see my, like, seven shows of grime starting to really cake on here, but it's awesome, and I ******* love it. And I rock Ernie Ball Strings, it's like the hybrid Slinky set, so it's almost like the bass version of a Skinny Top Heavy Bottom, which I love. Ooh, I want to say it's like a 45 to 105, almost positive, but yeah, I love it. I ******* love it, and Ernie Ball and Fender have both been so ******* kind to us. Shout out Billy, shout out Tim, Tim at Ernie Ball, and yeah, it's just been incredible, and honestly kind of foolproof. Tuning, yeah, so it's probably confusing from a fan perspective for people who try to learn our songs, but I actually play the entire set in standard tuning and use the pitch transpose function on the quad to basically do the rest of the heavy lifting, which is really convenient and nice when we play in, like, E, D, B, B flat, and E flat, so it's nice to not have to rip new tuning for all of those, and it kind of just, the quad does what the quad does best, you know, so that's very cool. Most of the set, I play pick, but we have a few slower songs that are more like finger style, just tone-wise, so like, we have a song called Would You Mind, that one's finger style, and then a few others that we're not playing this run, like Coffin, maybe favorite part that I also play finger, but for the most part it's pick. 73's, Ernie Ball, honestly sick, it's like, I wish, I have some somewhere, but they're like the orange Ernie Ball ones, you would think they're the same as the Dunlop ones, but the Ernie Ball ones are 73's in orange, but the Dunlop ones are 6's in orange, but I love the Ernie Ball picks, they're so awesome, and yeah, I tend to go through a lot of them, because I pick really aggressively and really hard, so every show I might go through like two or three, just to like keep the sharp edge and whatnot, but yeah, so last year, we, James and I made the jump to Quad Cortexes, which also, yeah, shout out Max at Neural DSP, the absolute GOAT, who really helped us out here, and it has been an absolute game changer, because I've done pedals and a real amp, I've done pedals with an amp sim, and like a Sans amp, and I've done Kemper, and I've done Helix, and getting to the Quad was just like, oh, that's it, like that is, for ease of use, how simple it is to make tones and the flexibility you have inside, there's really nothing that beats it, and I feel like I can say that confidently, but yeah, like in terms of the actual tones, I've kind of got a crazy situation here, I pretty much rock a very similar setup across all the tones I use throughout the show, and I pretty much have it grouped by tuning, so for example, here's FPC bass, that's just my standard tuning, oh, big boy, that is not one I use, but it's a great tone, I'll tell you what, here's FPC bass in D, B, B flat, and E flat, for the most part, they're pretty much all the same, some of the lower tuning stuff, I crank the drive a little bit more, because all the lower tuning songs I tend to play just needs to be a little heavier and stuff, but let me go back to my main one, and you can kind of see what we're rocking, so I mainly, for my bass, like the core of the bass sound is just like classic Ampeg SVT into a Ampeg 8x10, and I'm pretty sure, yeah, I like slightly tweaked some of the mics than what they normally have, but that's like kind of the core of it, and honestly, for those that are familiar with the quad platform, I'm just rocking so many EQs for so many different types of shaping along the way, but then it starts to get a to a Vox AC30, which kind of gives me a little bit more of the grit and midrange I'm looking for, very inspired by like Royal Blood, and the way that they rock their bass tones, which I think are just so incredible, so you can see, I have all these different scenes, right, fuzz, octave, normal fuzz, something that is completely unknown, and I don't know what that is, and then, yeah, just like really four stages of just gain, and within that, I'm automating some of these parameters on some of these pedals, which some are from my collection at home, and some are things I've downloaded, so like one of these is like a Noble Overdrive, this is a, who is it, it's a, they're like the other sister company, oh, it's like a Darkglass, basically, Micro Tubes, this is one I downloaded also, another Darkglass Vintage, and then I use a Fat Rat, that is like my favorite bass distortion, so basically throughout the set, depending on what scene I'm on, you'll see, some of these things click on, click off, some things mute, what have you, but yeah, it's kind of just that, it looks a little more complicated, and then, you know, on, for example, this is my fuzz octave patch, that's when this octave blend kicks on for only my guitar amp chain, and, you know, what have I got here, yeah, Tube Screamer, just absolutely ******* dimed, and yeah, that's kind of the gist of it, there's not, nothing too crazy every now and then for like, you know, my songs that I play in D, like, there's a chorus, but I don't use it on the standard tuning, or the drop B stuff, so, it's kind of it, and it's all MIDI switched, which is awesome, and love to not tap dance, and not fiddle with anything, because sometimes the parts and singing simultaneously are hard enough, yes, this is, this is just an oak tone, basically, controller, so I do all the MDing, and playback control for Friday Pilots Club, and yeah, throughout the set, I use this to just navigate through the songs and everything, which is great, and this has been the biggest game changer for us, because we used to rock it where you just have a foot switch with no screen, so you're hoping you didn't double click a button and go to the next song, and then you announce it's one song, and hit play, and the tracks are playing something else, so, having this with an actual digital readout where you can see the song names is so huge, and like, absolute game changer for us. So yeah, this is the backup, literally same exact model, just a different color, different fingerboard, but yeah, also, ******* incredible bass, but somehow lacking the magic of the green one, the green monster, Lizzy, as I call her, short for lizard, you know, so, yeah, that's it. Thank you guys so much for watching, once again, I am Drew from Friday Pilots Club, go stream our record Nowhere, you can find all of our tour dates online at FridayPilots.com, you can follow us on all platforms at Friday Pilots Club, except Twitter, we are just Friday Pilots, but yeah, come check it out, come see a show, and look forward to meeting you.