HUNTER BURGAN
Hunter Burgan of rockers AFI on his road towards bass nirvana
AFI’s bassist brings the heaviness to the table.
When I was in high school, I played saxophone in the marching band, and there was a big competition in Hawaii planned. The jazz band was also slated to compete, but at the last minute their bassist wasn’t able to go on the trip. My band instructor heard that I played instruments other than sax: he asked if I played bass and if so, would I be able to play in the jazz band. I said yes, even though I had never played bass before. I borrowed a headless Hohner bass from a friend’s sister and quickly learned to read bass clef. We made it to Hawaii and won first place.
Despite playing bass in the jazz band, I considered myself a guitarist and a drummer –and not really a bassist. When one of my punk bands couldn’t find a bassist after months of searching, I decided to switch from drums to bass. We easily found another drummer and I traded an old Marshall JCM 800 for a sunburst Fender American Jazz at a local guitar shop.
I played Fender Jazz basses exclusively until AFI recorded Sing The Sorrow in 2002. Our producer Jerry Finn had a 1962 Fender P-Bass that sounded amazing on some of the faster songs. Over the years I’ve used a Gibson EB-3, an Epiphone Jack Casady model, a few Rickenbackers and even an old Peavey on occasion, but Fenders are always my main basses. On the road I have three or four Precisions in E, E and D tunings, and most
bof the time I play them directly through a few Ampeg SVT CL heads and 8x10 cabinets. If a song or part of a song calls for a specific effect, I have a tiny pedalboard with mostly Electro-Harmonix pedals. I use their Bass Microsynth for a subby synth tone and the Bass Big Muff for a fuzzed-out sound.
In the studio I use a lot of different basses, amps and effects, experimenting with combinations until the sound is just right for the song. The jumping-off point for each tone odyssey is always Fender and Ampeg, though. Six years ago the Fender Custom Shop made me a beautiful roadworn ’64 P-Bass and it’s been on every record I’ve made since the day I got it. Some records I’ve played on include
The Con by Tegan and Sara, The Strawberry EP by Dear Boy, Babylon by Matt Skiba & The Sekrets,
Complete Discography
by The Force, The Colors Of Summer by Las Gatas Beach Club, and everything AFI has released since 1997, including our new album, Bodies.
I’ve always held Eric Avery’s playing in the highest regard. His bass-lines are the perfect blend of rhythm, melody and dynamics. They are the true hooks in many of Jane’s Addiction’s songs. There’s also a meditative discipline to the repetition within his parts. It’s as if he found pure enlightened truth in his bass-lines and eschewed any desire or need to deviate from that. The only bass advice I’ve ever received was when I was first starting out, and it was, “Hey, turn it down!”
“The only bass advice I’ve ever received was when I was starting out, and it was ‘Turn it down!’”