Beginner question, I always hear talk about clean and dirty stuff what does it mean?

Clean means a clear, clean bass tone...

Dirty is a tone with a little bit of distortion, fuzz, hair, grit, grind, dirt...

Something pretty simple but hard to explain without referencing itself!

 

+1 clean is clean, dirty is distorted to any degree.

 

Clean is how you girlfriend to be.
Dirty is how you want your mistress to be.
Somewhere in the middle of that spectrum is where you want your wife to be...

 

I'll drink to that!

Unfortunately, the English language is almost incompetent when it comes to describing sound as anything beyond "loud" or "quiet". That said, the difference between clean and dirty would be like the difference between a kid in a choir singing a note and a 50-year-old guy that's been chain smoking and drinking nothing but whisky since age 7 singing the same note.

 

dirty - Om - Live at Jerusalem (Uganda) - YouTube

 

Just for the sake of clarification, aren't the terms "wet" and "dry" also used for this, especially in the context of having two rigs in use simultaneously, one having the dirty task and the other the clean one?

 

Not necesssarily, but it can mean that. I always understood "dry" to mean a flat uneffected tone from an instrument or mic, i.e. no EQ or effects of any kind, "wet' can mean ANY kind of artificial alteration (not just distortion) , from the simple addition of more bass or treble, all the way up to a full board of any combination of special effects.
Basically,
"dry" = unaltered tone. "wet" = altered tone.

 

Pretty much. Wet/Dry usually refers to:
Dry: Straight bass tone
Wet: Effected bass tone. As in wet with FX.

If the only effect happens to be some form of overdrive/distortion/fuzz/etc, it's usually called dirty instead of wet.

 

For the win. This is infinitely quotable, and wise advice... haha!