Hey.
I am new to bass (i am a guitar player) and want to build small and affordable bass pedalboard. I have cheap bass and amp (Ltd b10 and fender rumble 40).
I want to buy an overdrive/distortion pedal and can you suggest any affordable pedals?
You still have to define affordable in terms of price range; just because you play an LTD through a Fender Rumble doesn't
necessarily mean a $200 pedal is too expensive (though we can probably guess). You also need to let us know how much drive you're looking to get; bass drives can go from very subtle almost-clean "is it on?" boosts up into wallpaper-peeling fuzz distortion.
Pretty much any overdrive pedal that isn't a Tube Screamer clone or a treble-boost drive circuit will work okay on bass. You basically want to avoid two things; pushing your high mids, and losing your low end. Many overdrive pedals are designed to do exactly that, which on guitar produces a thick, focused tone that sits well in mixes and can be brought out for solos. On bass, the same approach totally destroys the mix by shifting the frequencies of your instrument up into where the guitar's supposed to be; no low end, competing mids, it just ends up a mess.
(Spirit of Ox's recommendations in the Bad Monkey/Hardwire Tube OD vein work better, even though they are TS clones, by moving from the TS circuit's simple tone control to a two-band EQ, so you get as much low end as you want; I have the Hardwire one, great on guitar, still not a fan of it for bass)
To avoid that, overdrives marketed specifically for bass typically use circuit designs that avoid the Tubescreamer's mid-hump (so-called "transparent overdrives"; "hard-clipping" distortion pedals with op-amps feeding clipping diodes also tend not to discriminate in what they distort), and they also commonly include a dry blend, which allows pure unadulterated bass to get through the pedal layered underneath the effect.
On the lower end, there are a lot of direct-from-China brands like Caline, Joyo, NuX, Ammoon etc that make halfway-decent stuff. The Behringer brand is in a similar vein these days. People knock em because they're cheap Chinese brands, but when Made In The USA comes with a $100 price premium, most of these cork-sniffers end up having relatively few "boo-teek" pedals, and as many of the actual pedal makers will tell you, the components are all coming from China anyway, no matter where the pedal's assembled.
Out of this field, the Joyo/Harley Benton Ultimate Drive is a sleeper. It's designed as a guitar heavy drive/distortion pedal (a Fulltone OCD clone), but it retains plenty of low end and has the gain to push into pretty extreme RATM-style tones. If you care about cosmetic appearances, it also doesn't look like a cheap pedal, coming in a standard 1590T aluminum enclosure in a very metal matte black powdercoat with a Japanese kabuki demon mask graphic. They sell for $50 brand new and you can score them used for half that.
"Joyo Ultimate Drive" Gear
Behringer sells the BOD400, more or less a clone of the ODB3 which starts at heavy drive and goes way past Anaesthesia, for $25 all day:
https://www.amazon.com/Behringer-Ov...e&qid=1589895368&s=musical-instruments&sr=1-2
Electro-Harmonix also makes some really good stuff at an affordable pricepoint, and more durable than many lower-tier offerings. The Bass Soul Food is a light drive based on the iconic and ridiculously-expensive Klon Centaur circuit, which on bass ends up rather subtle but very good as an always-on effect to get that vintage and hard-rock "almost clean but pushed just over the edge" tone from an amp stack that's got too much headroom for its own good. These change hands for about $60-$70 on Reverb.
Slightly higher in price and much "gainier", the Hot Wax is a well-liked stack drive combining their Hot Tubes and Crayon circuits, one warm and dark for vintage drive, the other a bit brighter "color drive". Put em together and the available gain range and tone possibilities encompass just about every genre. These sell used for just under $100, so a bit pricier than others I've mentioned, but if you can front for it now it's a pedal you will not soon outgrow.
(Don't worry about the high-pitched tone on the Hot Tubes side in the demo; it's not the pedal, it's a bad power source)
The last EHX drive I really like is the Deluxe Bass Big Muff Pi. An upgrade of simpler (and cheaper) Bass Big Muffs, this one has blend, gating and crossover controls that make it extremely flexible, but like all true fuzzes it does its best work at higher gain settings. These are also changing hands right under $100, and again it could be the only fuzz you ever need.
Honorable mentions include the aforementioned Boss ODB-3 heavy drive/distortion (prices vary widely, but you can be fairly certain to find a decent used one for about $70), the Way Huge Swollen Pickle fuzz ($80-90), the MXR Sugar Drive (the little Klone that could; used prices are about $80) and the Caline CP-20 drive/boost ($35 brand new).
ESpecially if you're a guitarist too.
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