Shoegaze Pedals

Can't you just turn the dry and wet knobs up more? If it's just volume you're after, turning both should do it. If it's low end bump you're missing, use more dry.

 

Play with the dry knob until you get the sound that you want.

 

What they said. Also reverb and delay is good for shoegaze.

 

Yeah the mxr would be a good pedal for shoegaze tones, but you do have to play with the wet and dry knobs a bit.

 

Ditto bassmusic17's spatial processor advice.

PEDAL: Fuzzrocious Dark Driving. I have an old one, in a small case. But if the current ones have the same circuit they should sound great.

PEDAL: Devi Ever Shoe Gazer. I had one and loved it. Cheaply made, overpriced, and noisy and teasingly bass frequency-sucking with some of the most interesting settings, but glorious sounding.

PEDAL: Fairfield Circuitry Four Eyes. I just got one and love it. Expertly made, teasingly bass frequency-sucking with some of the most interesting settings, but glorious sounding.

APPROACH: Stack overdrives and fuzzes. Thick, desperate, complex textures await.

The Shoe Gazer does this in itself (letting you stack the Soda Miser and Torn's Peaker circuits, albeit only in one order).

I used to drive the Dark Driving with an Oh See Demon; the complex texture veiled by the DD's darkness was flipping fantastic.

Currently I'm driving the Four Eyes with, variously, a Darkglass Electronics Microtubes Vintage (usually called Vintage Microtubes on TB), a Lovepedal Kalamazoo Gold (probably too guitaristic a timbre for you), and a RimRock Effects Mythical Overdrive (when used for low gain overdrive, my new favorite bass guitar pedal). So many textures and moods... "tone" is inadequate to describe them.​

Good luck!

 

I know zilch about shoegaze, but I have a BFD and I have a harder time keeping the volume down. As mentionned previously, takes a bit of knobbing to get the volume right. A lot of tones in that little box...

 

I like muffish pedals for shoegaze tones... I use a W&C TFR.

 

The Source Audio Dimension Reverb is really cool on if you want to get into the more ethereal side of shoegaze on bass. Super fun too if you get the expression pedal as you can use it to change certain features/parameters of the pedal in real time:

Soundblox 2 Dimension Reverb for Bass

-Mark

 

I would have a flanger/chorus/tremolo, at least one reverb and 2 delays, one before dirt, one after, a muff or rat style pedal, and something that oscillates

 

The term "shoegaze" encompasses a lot of different bands with pretty different sounds. The first band that comes to mind is MBV and Debbie's tone, to my ears, has always been pretty clean. The same goes for Slowdive, Ride and most of the other bands that one first thinks of. Will Heggie (Cocteau Twins) relied pretty heavily on chorus for his sound (but who didn't in the early 80's?).

With all the loud, fuzzy, swirling guitars, you're gonna want to sit nicely in the mix. You can do that running a bunch of pedals, but as you are noticing with your MXR, some pedals just erase you from the mix. For dirt, you might want to use an overdrive instead of a fuzz. I've had much better luck with overdrives than with fuzzes. You can blend in your clean tone with a fuzz, but you can also end up with that bass with bees buzzing around it sound. I love my VT Bass for overdrive (well, I love it for clean tones too, but that's a different story) - nice "tube-ish" sound without shelling out thousands of $$$ on a tube amp.

Anyway, I'd keep your pedal rig simple - overdrive, some kind of subtle modulation (chorus, phase, flange), and maybe a digital delay (tap tempo is nice for holding down the rhythm). I play this kind of music and I often have to remind myself that it's the guitarist's job to go pedal-crazy and my job to hold everything down.