For 12 years, Jeff Ament and Pearl Jam have been fortunate to play the world’s best stages, and the same tech, George Webb, has been working with him the whole time.
So it’s no wonder Ament and Webb have live sound down to a science. “He and I have gone through a long process over the years together,” says George, who first worked with Jeff before Pearl Jam came together in 1990. “We’ve gotten into a routine—we know what to expect out of each other, so the pressure and anxiety of doing a show isn’t nearly as great as it once was.”
Still, being Ament’s tech and Pearl Jam’s overall equipment manager has plenty of challenges. “Pearl Jam doesn’t always stick to the set list; Ed [singer Eddie Vedder] calls a lot of ‘audibles,’ so we have to stay on our toes.” Jeff has 12 basses onstage: three vintage Fender Precisions (including a sunburst ’59 once owned by Canned Heat’s Larry Taylor), two ’90s Modulus custom J-style basses, a 2000 Modulus custom Silvertone replica, two ’90s fretless Wal Basses, Hamer 8- and 12-strings, a ’70s Ovation Magnum, and an Azola Acoustic Baby Bass electric upright, plus a 1966 Gibson ES-330 guitar, which Ament plays on “Smile”—but he doesn’t use every bass in every show. “Jeff likes to get into a groove; when he starts getting comfortable with an instrument, he hangs with it for a while. If there’s a series of songs with standard-tuned, fretted 4-string, he tends to stick with what he’s got. He doesn’t like to change just for changing’s sake.”
When a swap does need to be made, George first rolls off the volume on Jeff’s Sony WRR840 wireless receiver, switches on the new instrument’s transmitter pack, hands Jeff the new bass and takes the old one, turns off its transmitter pack, and then turns the receiver volume back up. “We keep all of the transmitters on the same frequency,” says Webb. “I know that isn’t the ‘cool’ way to do it, but it works best for us. With all of the audibles, it’s just easier to have everything on one frequency all the time.”
From the receiver, Ament’s signal enters a complicated chain he and Webb have fine-tuned over the years (
Fig. 1). Jeff’s pedalboard includes two MXR M-108 10-band EQs: One is dialed in for a bright sound, and the other has the high end rolled off and the lows boosted for a thicker tone. Each runs on its own effect loop out of an Aspect Designs switch box, so Jeff can run his signal through one EQ, both, or neither. When Ament steps on a second switch box, another MXR EQ, this one with six bands, feeds a Fulltone ’70 pedal. “It’s more of a guitar distortion,” says George of the pedal. “He gets an old, Acoustic 360-like fuzz tone from that loop.” The signal then passes through two Fulltone Bass-Drive pedals (“one is really overdriven, the other not so much”) followed by a Boss reverb/delay. “He uses that for a kind of synth-like, reverse-gated-reverb tone. He’ll hit a note and it’ll go from nothing into this sweeping sound.”
Returning to his rack, Jeff’s signal goes through a second channel on the Furman VU meter (not shown in diagram) and then gets divided into four paths by a Jester Enterprises Hydra tube splitter. The first path goes to Ament’s vintage Ampeg SVT head, which powers two SWR custom 6x10s without horns. The second path goes to a backup SVT. Path three goes to a SVT-2PRO head, which powers a 6x10 monitor sitting next to Matt Cameron’s drum riser. Path four goes to another SVT that sits atop Jeff’s rack; it powers George’s own 2x10 monitor (so he can make sure Jeff’s stage rig is working), as well as a floor-fill 4x10 wedge for the front of the stage.
When Ament plays his Azola electric upright, the chain is much simpler: A cord runs into an Ashdown ABM 500 EVO head, which powers its own 6x10. Jeff gives the house four signals: A main-bass direct signal from his Avalon, a main-bass mic signal from one of the 6x10s, an electric-upright direct from the Ashdown head, and a mic from the electric-upright’s 6x10.