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I sense a trend

#61
I'm going the other way. I've had a very clean tone for most of my life, and am finally getting to the point now where I can get some grind to it (amp/pedal style overdrive grind, not just the bass itself) without it just being a bunch of fuzz. Thanks to modelling.

But still I keep going back to my clean tone.

IMHO clean bass tone became a huge thing in the 80s actually. it was pretty dirty before that in many cases, and then got dirty again in the 90s.

using a very very general guideline...

so like maybe it's like fashion styles and other things like that... comes and goes every 10 years LoL
 
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#63
I think that IF there's a 'return to clean' (or with modern LOUD amps, own it for the first time . . . . ), this would seem to follow an arc I've seen and read about many times: The pedal board gets bigger and bigger, you go further down the rabbit hole, then one day, you can't really hear anything than this 'supreme pizza' sonic mosh where you almost can't make anything out. The light bulb appears over your head, and then you start climbing out of that hole wondering why you needed all that stuff.

I've always felt that for effects, the effects loop needed a 'blend' knob like mixers have whereby you could add as much as needed to the clean throughput, so effectively you kept a big piece of clean with it seasoned by the added-in effects mix, rather than the usual IN or OUT situation that's typical. I've known of guys feeding a small mixer with each effect in a separate channel to accomplish this. I've often thought a two-channel/dual power amp/paired speakers head would be perfect for this, but I've never seen it done, and you'd sure end up with a big footprint.

But I'm quite convinced effects mixed with clean is way better than effects only, far easier to anchor a band regardless of what's switched in.
 
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#66
JW56789 said:
I've always felt that for effects, the effects loop needed a 'blend' knob like mixers have whereby you could add as much as needed to the clean throughput, so effectively you kept a big piece of clean with it seasoned by the added-in effects mix, rather than the usual IN or OUT situation that's typical.
Click to expand...

Many modern bass amps have this feature. Ampeg PF series and Ashdown RM series come to mind, and that's just off the top of my head.
 
#67
I would never just base my view on what I see on TB re trends. All it tells you is which trends are current within Talkbass.

Listen to commercial recordings. I'm yet to hear something that resembles a completely unadulterated
clean bass tone. While you won't hear Darkglass distortion on everything, there is stuff there. Even running a bass direct into a desk can do quite a bit to the clean sound of the bass if the gain is run a bit hot though the channel and out to the DAW or tape.
A little bit of distortion softens (or slows down) the midrange a bit and can make much easier to sit in a busy track.
 
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#68
JW56789 said:
...I've always felt that for effects, the effects loop needed a 'blend' knob like mixers have whereby you could add as much as needed to the clean throughput, so effectively you kept a big piece of clean with it seasoned by the added-in effects mix, rather than the usual IN or OUT situation that's typical...
Click to expand...
My EBS amps have this. But here's the bad news - not all effects sound good in the effects loop. I *could* run three cables between my pedalboard and my amp - one with the distortion/volume effects going to the amp input, another from the FX out to the delay effects on the board, and yet another back to the effects return - but it's just too much trouble.
 
#71
I have a respectable pedal board that I stopped using. For me it's just a time thing. I spent too much time trying to figure out why my killer sound was vanishing in the mix. My thinking shifted from " what will deliver a decent sound" to "how do I most effectively prevent my sound from getting swallowed by everything else?" the answer was a journey away from more circuits and a knobs.

If I had the time and the will I could dail in the goods, I suppose, but Igot other things to do.
 
#75
mambo4 said:
I have a respectable pedal board that I stopped using. For me it's just a time thing. I spent too much time trying to figure out why my killer sound was vanishing in the mix. My thinking shifted from " what will deliver a decent sound" to "how do I most effectively prevent my sound from getting swallowed by everything else?" the answer was a journey away from more circuits and a knobs.

If I had the time and the will I could dail in the goods, I suppose, but Igot other things to do.
Click to expand...

I've done the same.

After chasing overdrive pedals for years, and ignoring one of my best friends who said "Just buy the amp that makes that sound", I finally did it. The only things I use now is a compressor, and a dirt pedal with a similar flavor to help kick the amp's frontend into drive, but it's not even blended in past 40%. More of an added "presence control" than an overdrive.
 
#76
Interesting thought. Personally right now, I'm getting tired of dirty/od/fuzzy bass sound. Sold all my dirt (darkglass etc...) pedals. I like heavy music though. But I'm going for the mix on Carcass - Heartwork/Surgical Steel bass sound. Fat, round and warm. The "dirtiest" sound I can also enjoy probably right now is that clicky bright Hartke Dave Ellefson Megadeth sound.
 
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#78
I think it’s akin to buying a car, then suddenly noticing how many others are driving the same car.
Frequency illusion, also known as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, is a cognitive bias in which, after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often, leading someone to believe that it has a high frequency (a form of selection bias).
 
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#79
I used an app called Moises.ai to pull the bass from this Psychedelic Furs song and try to record my bass to it. That app works much better on warm, non-clanky basslines, and this song has one.

A lot of people think of an abrasive, or pedalish sound when they think of bass overdrive. I had to crank both the pregains on my Peavey MarkIV plus use a Rainer Gasoline to get the drive to pull off the warm growl that the bass has in the original track.

Dropbox - Bassadelic Furs.mp3 - Simplify your life
 
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#80
Peaveylover said:
Is it my imagination or is there a recent trend of people preferring cleaner tones? From some posts I'm reading here and in the classifieds I'm seeing more of a resurgence of the "clean is better" approach. In my personal effect journey this is becoming truer and truer. I'm just finding over the top fuzz and distortion (and even overdrive) sounds gimmicky and dated. I love me my phaser, chorus and flanger still though.
Click to expand...

You're also seeing people coming up on hard times in the classifieds as well. I think @Thump_N_Bloom has a great point a few posts back. And maybe we are on a similar page of sorts. My dirt in my tone is part of my "clean" tone. LOL
 
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