Home practice setup

What do you not like about the sound, and what plugins do you use?

There are plenty of good ones that'd cost a lot less than a pedalboard setup AND offer much greater flexibility. I still do most of my home practice with my ancient Guitar Rig 2 and it's SVT amp + compressor + EQs. It's a really convincing sound, but more importantly, as a beginner player I'd think that you may want to try playing many different things and do lots of genre hopping in one sitting. Having the luxury of switching presets with a single click for different sounds is invaluable. You'd use a software routing option to play along your youtube tracks -- ASIO Link works wonders on Win, and on a Mac you won't have issues to begin with (and on Linux you're screwed).

Another option is getting a Zoom B1 Four or B3N. It pretty much has the same benefits as above, slightly more difficult to tweak the presets maybe, but you can practice (or gig) without your computer on when you need to. Here you'd use the aux in for youtube & headphone out on the box. Many modeled (pre)amps here are nigh indistinguishable from the real deal, check out comparison videos on youtube.

A preamp would work. But I do not recommend one over one of the above options. I see no upsides to having one, really.

 

Any bass pre would work well, since it has instrument and mic inputs. So 1/4" or XLR (DI) connections are fine.

Generally bass preamps have EQ and maybe some character baked in, and maybe an overdrive circuit.

For a basic plugin that would do what a basic preamp would do, setting a four-point parametric EQ will get you in the ballpark. Set to low, mid, and high bass EQ frequencies and with a high-frequency rolloff, you'll be doing what lots of studio engineers do to make DI bass sound good.