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This was transcribed by "Magic" Mike Mc Keaney
from Bass Player Magazine August 2000
Tony Kanal retired the Yamaha BB1 600 he played from 1987—96, but Yamahas are still his main axes—now a pair BB3000s. For Return of Saturn Tony played Ernie Ball Music Man StingRay 5-strings on “Ex-Girlfriend,” “Simple Kind of Life,” and “Too Late.” He also has a Fender American Stan- dard Jazz as a backup. “I change strings every day,” says Tony. “I use standard-gauge GHS Bass Boomers on my Yamahas, Ernie Balls on my Ernie Balls, and Fenders on my Fender.” On his Yamahas he never dials the tone knob all the way up to the treble position, and for a more reggae tone he rolls it off some.
Onstage Tony has three Gallien-Krueger 800RB heads— one is the amp he bought in the ‘8Os, and one is a spare. His road case also holds a two-channel Samson UHF wireless unit, a Korg DTR-1 tuner, and a Furman power conditioner. For easy live instrument switching, Tony has a Yamaha 4 and an Ernie Ball 5 each plugged into the Samson’s two channels. An A/B switch sends the signal to the tuner, and from there it’s split from a Dl to the house, and then to two 800RBs, one for each bass. For the 4-string, the amp’s mids are set to the center and bass and treble dimed; for the 5-string, the mids are also at noon, and bass and treble are at 3:00. The heads’ output goes to a custom Gallien-Krueger speaker cable A/B box, which determines which head will feed Tony’s Ampeg SVT 8x1 0 speaker cabinet.
In the studio, Tony used the same G-K and SVT setup for playing along with Adrian; then he would head into the con- trol room and sit at the board with producer Ballard and engi- neer Alan Johannes. They tried various amps—even guitar heads to get different bass sounds, and they even made some after- the-fact amp adjustments in Pro Tools using Line 6’s Amp Farm. The only stompbox effect Tony used on the album was a ProCo Rat on the “Comforting Lie” chorus.