I listened to a lot of clips of people playing their bass through distortion pedals, but didn't find too many in context. So here are some I made recently. I had been using the MXR M-80 the last few years, but I started to feel it was too kraang-kraang for me. And I wanted more dzurrzzh. I narrowed it down to either the Catalinbread SFT or the Xotic BB. I was recently able to get the SFT here for a good enough price. Haven't seen a BB yet. My first impression of the SFT was that it is an amp simulator. It really made my nice hi-fi modern rig sound old and muffled! But I found a setting I liked and tried it at practice, where we always record. I kind of felt like maybe it was making me disappear a little bit in the mix. It is a saturation tone filling the sound from within with distortion, whereas the MXR is kind of a buzzing noise on top of the clean. Saturation is more pleasant on its own, but I wasn't sold while we were playing. Listening to the recordings, I think I am still present enough, and I like the sound much more than the MXR for this application. I am still kind of curious about the BB though, since I think it might be somewhat more modern take on the SFT, and allow higher gain / more cut without just browning everything out (as the SFT would if I turned it up more).
I never used soundcloud before, so hopefully
this works as a link. Let me know if not and I will find another way to post it.
