I've got two really good clean sounding basses. I want something filthy, grimy and nasty. Which bass or basses are the best for this? If you say a fender P bass....what year(s), with what pickups? Anyone ever done anything else to filth things up more?
I'd say go with a Lakland Darryl Jones with a maple fretboard. Mine is pretty good at the "dirty" thing, though I think an old tube amp might help enhance those qualities.
Rickebacker with a marshall amp. I actually just seen motorhead live a week or 2 ago. It was Amazing!... Amazingly LOUD! I loved it. Lemme's tone was awesome.
An Ibanez ATK bass - that bolt-on model with the great big hairy triple-coil pickup right in the sweet spot. A set of heavy-gauge stainless steel Ken Smith strings. Played through an overdriven SVT tube amp... MM
If you do want a Precision, the maple fretboard goes a long way towards a more aggressive, gritty tone.
Yes, I have. Is it nasty? Yes, however, two things: Firstly, Feildy doesn't use a K5, or at least not a stock one. Secondly, his sound is clicky; I would hardly gall it grimy or filthy, and while it is nasty, I'd put money on it's not the kind of nasty Wayner is talking about. And, on top of that, I've played several K5s, they sound pretty much like every single other Ibanez 5 string out there; I'm not sure how it's "raw" sounding at all. If you played it through an Ampeg or Mesa rig, I'd wager any "raw" was coming from the amp, not the bass. Meanwhile, fer instance, a Rick will sound raw though an Eden or through a Accugroove. Ace of Spades is nasty, grimy, filthy. Blind is just clicky.
My '79 Kramer DMZ-5000 is giving up some nasty tone these days. A friend calls it a 4-pack-a-day smoker. He loves it. Sounds right for certain stuff and still has that great sustain.
A Rick will deliver the nasty. Solo the bridge pickup, dig in hard, and watch your wallpaper peel away. Add some overdrive for some extra peel-ability.
P-Bass. No specific year, with a stock passive pickup will get very nasty. You may have to try a few out to find one that has an obnoxious, honkin' tone, but they're readily available.
I run a Stingray through a Peavey/Ampeg guitar stack and a Mesa/Ampeg bass stack, and it's pretty damn mean. I mean, it's not Lemmy mean (need a Ric to do that), but the Stingray gets about as mean as any bass I've heard, live or on record.
What you need is the cheapest, most beat-up p-bass copy you can find, then beat it up some more. Run it through 15 distortion and chorus/phaser pedals mounted on a big chunk of plywood and play through a Fender Bassman 60 watt amp with all the controls turned to 10. You will get nasty, filthy tone. And it's pretty cool stuff. My friend uses a similar setup to this, except he recently sold out and got a Harke half stack and a Gibson tbird.