Nine Inch Nails have unveiled their new bass guitar player, with Stu “Bassie” Brooks making his live debut at the industrial-rock icons’ show in New Orleans last night (February 5).
Brooks comes heavily credentialed. He is the co-founder of Dub Trio, has a string of high-profile pop collaborations that include Lady Gaga, Mary J. Blige, Lauryn Hill, and 50 Cent, and he even sat in with the Saturday Night Live house band. You might also recognize him from Danny Elfman’s 2021 solo album, Big Mess.
According to Bass Magazine, he has been in rehearsals with the NIN camp for some time now, which we would imagine is a considerable undertaking.
NIN frontman/leader Trent Reznor put together an epic 21-track set for the show, opening with Something I Can Never Have on the B-stage, playing Non-Entity for the first time since 2009, and then there was hit after hit after hit (Wish, March of the Pigs, Reptile, and so on).
What can NIN fans expect from Brooks? Well, he has a reputation for having a thick, plummy, treacle-thick bass tone, pure dub on four strings. He’s also a producer, too, so he knows how to put a track together, put something down on tape.
In a 2022 interview with EarthQuaker Devices, Brooks explained how he got his sound. The bad news for those who like their bass set up all slinky is that the strings are heavy.
“My approach to getting a good dub tone has definitely changed over the years,” said Brooks. “But first, I would say get some LaBella flatwound strings. I love the La Bella 0760M Deep Talkin’ Bass 1954 Stainless Flat Wound 52-110 set. Those are heavy gauged! That’s actually the very same string set that James Jamerson used.”
Brooks described his tone as “woofy, round, and sometimes wooly” and said that he would use a Gibson EB-2 or a Höfner bass for old-school reggae – a Fender Jazz Bass set up once more with flatwound bass strings and played through an Aguilar preamp gives him a more modern dub tone.
My approach to getting a good dub tone has definitely changed over the years. But first, I would say get some LaBella flatwound strings
Are the Nine Inch Nails too animalistic, too mechanistic, for recontextualizing the ür-Motown Records bass tone? Maybe. But then Brooks has the pedals to switch things up. He has form for applying them in radical ways.
With Dub Trio, he would sometimes put the front-of-house mix through an EQD Bit Commander, which strikes us as the kind of power-move that would have got Mr Reznor’s attention.
“That was one of the most brutal sounds I’ve ever achieved with a band,” he said. “It was on the song Noise off of the album IV.”
