The Rare Occasions’ Jeremy Cohen - GEAR MASTERS Ep. 642

I probably could go to Levin's one day, but that kind of scares me. I'm not quite Stevie Ray Vaughan. Like all important choices, I made mine surely on aesthetics. Hey, what's up? This is Jeremy from The Rare Occasions, and we're gonna check out some of my gear. Yeah, so this is a... I think this is... Japanese got to be specific about where it came from when you're talking Fender. This is a Japanese... This is a premium jazz bass in California blue. I fell in love with this. No pickguard. Might be controversial for some, but helps me get some extra fingerprints on it, so I guess that's cool. But yeah, I fell in love with the color and the the maple. It was awesome. I think the thing that really caught me was the white pickups. I'm used to just like classic staggered P bass black pickups, but this was just like the perfect touch. So, like all important choices, I made mine surely on aesthetics, and the pickups just also happen to rip. It does everything. I can do burpee, jocko, flip the neck, do like a really deep pino type of thing, or just dime everything and get a Rare Occasion sound, because that's what I'm doing on this tour for hum reasons, which helps a lot. So yeah, I love this thing, and I got it because it's tonewood. I believe the body was tonewood, which from what I was checking out is a light wood. But I kind of screwed up because it is tonewood mostly with the exception of the neck. The tuners are really hefty in comparison to the weight of the body, so the neck dive can be a little intense sometimes. But it's good because I get to work on my biceps while we play live, so I get to exercise while we play. I'm using Ernie Ball Super Slinkys. So I think that's 105 to 50. I really want the extra beef out of the top strings. I've gotten some comments online, which is not really conscious, but some people say that some of my bass lines will have people playing all over the neck, which when I read that I was like, I got to make sure that no matter where I'm playing, there's some beef coming out of this thing no matter what. So that's why I went with a thicker gauge. Staying standard pretty much the whole time with the exception of a couple songs. We'll go to drop B flat or drop D. But yeah, standard all the way. I'll use like an octave pedal, octave up and octave down and octave up in case I want some extra range. So this is a very fingerprinty Strat as well. Yeah, zoom and get those fingerprints. This is a Mexican Strat, but I mean it absolutely kills HSS. So I primarily use this as like a clean boost, the humbucker. I know some people might say, oh it just kind of makes it thin, but when I'm playing lead stuff most of the time, it actually is appropriate. So and it helps for like stage performance as well. Instead of having to tap dance, I can just go from fifth to first and then I automatically get a nice boost for like a lead line or a solo or something like that. So and I'll usually have volume dimes, volume dimes on the neck to get it nice and bright. Which is, it's still single coil and Brian's single coil Tele's. But I go for like super bright to kind of like overreach him. He's usually playing with like an overdrive. Even his clean tone is still pretty hairy. So it gives me some space up top to get sparkly, which I think a Strat is perfect for. Volume dimes, there isn't one song, an unreleased song that we've been playing live where I will rock the volume knob and use like a really cavernous reverb to get like a ambient thing and I'll roll tone off for that one song. But most of the time I'm just getting Strat, you know. That's nice and juicy up top. And yeah, I've started as the bass player. I think most people would probably associate me as the bassist of the rare occasions. But we had a member membership change some years ago and we were like, well, we recorded our songs with 50,000 guitars. It was multiple walls of guitars on some tracks. So we were like, I think I gotta learn how to play guitar. So I'm more or less self-taught minus the 20 years of experience I have on bass. Yeah, so filling out some stuff with lead, which has been fun. It keeps it fresh for me and it's weird because sometimes depending like if we'll play like an acoustic show I have to go back to playing bass on some of our tracks like like backwards. I played bass on originally, but for live I'll play guitar. When we go to acoustic for like a small show, I go back to bass and I have to remember how to play my own parts that I recorded almost 10 years ago. So that's always fun. Keeps it fresh. These are Ernie Ball Super Slinkys as well, 10s. Enough tension. I think I'm used to the tension of bass. So I probably could go to 11s one day, but that kind of scares me. I'm not quite Stevie Ray Vaughan. And yeah, just do standard mostly and yeah, just throw a lot of hair and reverb and chorus on stuff when I need to. Yeah, yeah, that's it. Workhorse. Once upon a time there was a boy from a land who was the citywide section leader of the middle school jazz bands and I may or may not have been that boy playing this very old Yamaha trombone which has seen better days, but it's traveled with me all over the country and I need to try something different or if we want to add some extra textures, we've like on some of the most punk and hard heavy stuff that we've recorded has actually included trombone in the recordings. It's pretty tucked, but it's in there so still keeping it all alive. Don't have the embouchure that I used to, but that's okay. I gotta get a screw for this, the weight. If anyone has seen a missing trombone screw, let me know. And yeah on this tour Brian can go into it a little bit more, but we decided hey let's do a cover of our own songs and I should call them covers because they don't sound anything like the original. So I am playing trombone on that and Brian is playing an undisclosed instrument that he can reveal later and luckily, we haven't had anyone request a refund when we do that, but it's it keeps it fresh for us, so. So we got a Helix LT good enough, same DSP as the full floor. I gotta check out the stadium one day, the new models, but this has been killing it for years now. I got some overdrives. This is like kind of just a top boost, some beef in the low end. This is a sub-octave and this is a little trick that I do, some different snapshots that I do just for some like octave spread. This is normal tuning and then this goes splits up an octave and a half, which goes into my guitar amp. And then this one pushes the bass signal down an octave, so at one given time I can play one note and it has a two and a half octave spread, which is pretty unnecessary and fun, so that's why I do it. And then when, so this is my bass split, which is spelled incorrectly. I use the SVT model and then I think this is a, I think it's like the Led Zeppelin model that I have on the amp for the guitar split. So this is a, this is the bass line and then this is the guitar line with some slapback and some reverb just for extra juice. And then when I play guitar, I go to the aptly named guitar patch. And I primarily use just like dirty, like hairy clean, dirty clean. And then this is my lead, which pushes the delay into like more stadium territory. And then for some extra sauce, I'll throw on some chorus and then I have a reverb on a momentary switch. And I do that because it kind of just, I could make all snapshots, but it just makes it funner to kind of choose when I want to add some extra like feedback or whatever. So it gets nice and cavernous really quick. Oh, let's see. Yeah. What am I doing for this? You know, I think I, I think I turned off modeling for this cause I'm just mostly getting a mic signal. So yeah, I think I use a Led Zeppelin or maybe Queens of the Stone Age model if I do go direct, but I have it disengaged most of the time. And then another trick with this one is because I'm playing guitar, but we have bass in some of our tracks. We have a whole system with Logic that sends audio through a cable, goes into a snake and then comes into my pedal board here and then out of the pedal board back into my bass amp, which is probably a grounding nightmare. But that allows bass signal from a track to still come out of my bass amp, which is pretty fun. Doesn't feel less beefy on stage and just bass track coming out of the mains. It helps me feel like it's still real life. So yeah, maybe one day we'll be Tame Impala or you know, some other band that can hire, or Arctic Monkeys that can hire, you know, 10 musicians and we'll keep it all live. But for now it works. And this is Orange Crush 60 C, I want to say. All solid state. It's great. Really nice sparkly clean tones, but I use it on like mid game settings on the Dirty channel. And just pretty much up the middle tone wise. I really don't feel the need to push it in any direction. And then this is the Fender Rumble 500 watts, which is stupid how light it is. This whole line is just absurdly light. I can't believe that it's 500 watts. And yeah, more or less, you know, pretty centered tone. I try to control as much up here and keep the amps basic so that I'm not like sending extra gain or fuzz down the line at all. So yeah, that's pretty much it for the house. We just go direct out for the bass amp. So in ears, we went to Ultimate Ears. I got the Spider-Man colors for right and left ear. And I'm using Dunlop, I think 88 millimeter picks. A little extra grip because I like to move. I get nice and sweaty. So a little extra grip goes a long way. If you want to know more about our setup, want to listen to our music, you want to join a rising fan base that is just storming the world at this very moment. You can get in now by joining therareoccasions.com, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, maybe Tumblr, everywhere on the internet. You can just check out The Rare Occasions and stay posted for some new tunes.