Nate Watts Takes Hartke HyDrive on the Road with Stevie Wonder
With all the anticipation surrounding Hartke’s new HyDrive line, there is high demand for the new gear on tour stages. Fortunately, the release of HyDrive perfectly coincided with bassist Nate Watts tour with Stevie Wonder. Hartke’s revolutionary bass gear is sharing stages with an iconic bassist and a legendary recording artist.
Nate Watts has spent over three decades as the foundation of Stevie Wonder’s rhythm section. In fact, for the last 12 years Nate has acted as Stevie’s music director, a role that puts him in charge of picking the band’s musicians and organizing the rehearsal schedule. As a Hartke artist for many years, Nate was involved in the development of HyDrive products and was excited to give them one of their first legitimate road tests.
“When the guys at Hartke asked me if I wanted to be one of the first players to take HyDrive on tour, I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? Of course!’ says Watts. “I heard a lot about these bad boys and when I finally got to play them I fell in love. Even Steve complimented me on how good they sounded the first rehearsal I played with them.”
“Nate has been an integral part of the artist program since he signed with Hartke,” says Artist Relations Coordinator, Mark Menghi. “He’s an incredible guy to work with and the ideal artist on the perfect tour to introduce HyDrive to the world.”
On Stevie Wonder’s “A Time 2 Love” tour, Nate uses a HyDrive HX410 and HX115 cabinet with a Hartke LH1000 bass amplifier. Because HyDrive fuses paper and aluminum cones to provide both the warm tone of traditional paper and the punchy attack of aluminum, Watt’s rig provides the best of both worlds: incredible power and exceptional tone.
“Nate Watts is one-of-a-kind in so many ways,” says Scott Goodman, President of Samson Technologies. “His unique style of playing has been a big part of Stevie Wonder’s sound for over 30 years. He’s a very important person to our artist program and to me personally. Our friendship is a blessing.”
Samson Technologies Corporation designs, manufactures and distributes high-performance wireless, audio and music accessory products in the United States and 106 countries abroad. Samson is also the exclusive worldwide distributor of Hartke products and the exclusive U.S. distributor of Zoom recording and signal processing electronics. Samson Technologies is based in Hauppauge, New York.
