The Fender Bass VI BBS

[Tim Bucknall]

i want to ditch my evil multi fx unit as it sucks all the tone out,

[Ankhanu]

What sort of tone are you looking for? Different pedals for different applications

[Tim Bucknall]

good point!
I like a warm & relatively mild overdrive that retains the bassiness as if i'd managed to overdrive the input stage of my amp, quite an old fashioned sound i guess

[Ankhanu]

A lot of guitar OD pedals will work quite nicely with basses.

I use a Fulltone DP-1 and a Marshall Jackhammer with my bass... but they probably would give more distortion than you want. If you're using a tube amp, the DP-1, with the distortion all the way down and the volume up can give a slightly dirty boost to push the amp into natural distortion, though. I recorded a couple examples on my Jaguar (guitar) on my myspace while asking for some clean boost advice over on shortscale.org. While not bass, it'll give you an idea of how much drive you can expect from that sort of application. I'll record some distorted bass some other day to give an idea.

Again, if you're using a tube amp, you can use a clean boost to just drive the amp into overdrive by smacking its front end.

A Sansamp will also give you some overdrive; very natural sounding.

Um... Fulltone OCD gives a nice overdrive, it's milder than the DP-1.

But, yeah, any guitar OD will work fine with basses, and with the VI's pickups and tonal character, it will probably maintain clarity better than standard basses, which can get a little muddy.

[Tim Bucknall]

thanks for that,
appreciate the clips
i should have ditched the boss multi fx ages ago its a left over from my pre-internet days when i had to take whatever my local store had

[johngaryb]