Crew: John Zocco

Next up, we meet with John Zocco, John Myung’s bass tech, who shows us JMX’s World.

John got a new bass vault a few months ago, which makes setting everything up a lot easier. The Ernie Ball six-string Bongo basses just ride in this vault from venue to venue and overseas from country to country.

Typically for a show, JM uses three to four basses. For example, a song like ‘A Rite of Passage’ has a low D string instead of a low B so there will be a bass just for that. It’s the same for ‘In the Name of God’, which has a low C. He swaps over basses for alternate tunings and sometimes he’ll just get the urge to play another bass between songs and will ask for another bass.

Zocco has his own little area with all of the tools he has, just in case anything crops up. But he says that it is usually simple stuff like action and truss rod adjustments that are needed during a show.

JM is playing Shure Wirelesses, where the bass is transmitted through the wireless and he has four different channels of wireless for four basses. These go through a switcher and depending on which bass he has, the appropriate one is switched in or out. This goes through a tuner and through Demeter DIs and a Demeter Compressor for his clean sound. There’s a router that sends one signal to his Mesa Boogie Rectifier for his underlying dirty sounds. What you hear out front is a combination of a nice clean, fat bass sound with a grinding overdrive underneath.

JM switches patches on his Eventide unit with a custom Audio-Electronix switcher and goes through a number of patches such as a flanger. He’s also got a distortion pedal for extra gain which, for example, he uses on the beginning of ‘A Rite of Passage’. This goes through to a cabinet, which is all mic-ed up. Zocco says the cabinet is usually hiding away “somewhere where it is not going to kill anybody!” All-in-all, it’s a fairly simple signal path.

There is an emergency DI so if everything else goes down there’s still a clean bass sound in front of house. There are basically, clean and dirty sounds with some effects thrown in here and there.

John occasionally has a clean bass amp in there as well, but he hasn’t used it lately, as everything has been much simpler on this tour.

Setting up the rig is pretty easy; everything is labelled and goes up and down pretty quickly. There haven’t really been any problems with anything apart from an occasional battery going out. The biggest issue is keeping the basses playable; everything else is fairly low maintenance.

John Zocco is John Myung’s bass tech and plays guitar himself, he says “John’s a great guy to work for and he’s very easy going.”

The Drawbacks Of Being JMX’s Tech:

Most of what I deal with during the day is around maintaining the basses depending on temperature and humidity etc. In a really cold venue, the basses will shift a little bit and the action will go up, so I will have to measure it each time. Even during the show I will measure the string and see where it is at. I know in my head where each string has to be on the measuring scale.

On Touring With Dream Theater:

It’s a great environment being with these guys. Everyone is just amazing. It’s a nice setting just to soak up music in. I have a guitar with me so I usually practise and try to write. If we’re in a cool place, like Berlin, sometimes a group of us get together and we’ll go out for about six or seven hours, walk around and see the sights. Other times, like yesterday, I just went out to Starbucks and stayed in my room and played guitar.

John’s Memorable Moment From This Tour:

When we got word that Steve Vai was going to come out and sit in with the band, they wanted to rehearse the jam section and obviously Steve wasn’t going to come to Vegas the day before just to rehearse, so I wound up stepping in and playing during the soundcheck and filling in for Steve – which was not easy. *laughs* It was great. I got to jam with JP and Dweezil Zappa and I’ve loved their playing since forever!