OWEN O'MALLEY: The next section here, this is the bass attack overdrive section. If you’ve used Hartke’s bass attack pedals, this borrows the same basic voicing for those pedals. It’s a simplified version of it. We’ve got our harmonics selection which is basically how intense the overdrive is, we’ve got our brightness which is our tone control, and then we’ve got our mix where you can mix between the dry signal and the distorted signal. The only strange thing about this is that even though it’s after the compressor on the front panel, the drive section is actually in front of the compressor in the signal chain, and if you’ve ever used distortion with bass, you know that it changes your perceived output quite a bit. This causes a problem when you’re switching between a clean signal like this...,

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...we’ve got our compressor engaged here, and between -- and then you switch over to this distorted signal...,

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...the compressor thinks that the signal is much hotter than it is even though that the human ear perceives the distortion at a much lower level. So really, in order to use the distortion and to switch in between, you got to keep your compressor all the way off, kind of a little bit of an annoying thing. But the distortion sounds pretty awesome.

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From there, we’ve got a seven-band EQ. There’s quite a bit of tone shaping options here.

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You get a lot of different sounds out of this. Let’s dial in sort of reggae-ish.

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And then you can really make some harsh highs coming out here.

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Add that to the bass and treble shelving...

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...and you get a little combo that can do a lot of different styles here. Let’s take a look at the back.

You can see I’m going direct with this guy. You can choose post or pre-EQ from the direct out. There is an effects loop. There is stereo RCA in for CD player or iPod. There’s a speaker out jack. It supports a minimum of 4 ohms. You can actually take this jack out and I’m sure there’s a way that you can get it an extension speaker and run it in series back to the internal speaker here and have a little extension cab. Otherwise, there’s no extension out. There is, however, a foot switch in. It’s a triple function footswitch. You can engage and disengage the shape control in the front, the overdrive, and there’s also a ground lift on the back here which you can engage from a foot switch. It’s just a tip/ring/sleeve input right there. The cabinet is ported at the top here, and it is one of those Hartke kick-back style cabinet designs. So, if you have it on stage, you can actually tilt it back like this, it’d be much easier to hear yourself on stage, and this thing really is loud enough to play at a medium sized venue. It can probably compete with a half-stack pretty easily even though it’s pretty small.

So there you go. That’s the Hartke Hydrive 112C 250-watt combo bass amplifier. You've been watching Gearwire.Com. I’m Owen O'Malley. Thanks for joining us.