Tone to keep chords and arpeggios clear?

[g-dude]

Perhaps you need true-temperament frets... Good luck.

“I sent my bass in for a refret, and THIS is what I get back?”

“I apologize. See, my buddy came over with a bottle of rye, and I had this bottle of bourbon. By the end of the evening, I had finished that bottle of rye over there, and he had finished this here bottle of bourbon…and I had somehow found the time to finish your bass guitar.”

 

[BassBrass]

With bass guitar, the amp is 1/2 of the instrument. I started on a hollow body bass I found abandoned somewhere, I pulled the frets out of and didn't have an amp for a couple years. But it was lound enough and expressive enough for bedroom play. Perfect kid bass in 1968. Once I had a decent pickup* put into that beast (the bass, Italian or Japanese no name) and bought a 40w amp, it was a disaster. It was a feedback machine due to being hollow and light weight. Within 4 years I had found a great bass and amp (for then, Peavey MkIII, blackwidow 15") and That was the Instrument, both together. * The original were tin foil microphonic very low output, useless past 1965. that bass was left somewhere after a move

There is SO Much Love for amps here on TB! Some people own as many amps as some people own basses! (Some people have basements.) It's because the amp makes the sound.

 

[mambo4]

mostly wondering what people do to get a functional tone for chords

You may be fighting acoustic physics

If you are not talking about arpeggios but chords
Realize that bass chords are going to be mud (mud you can't hear unamplified)
unless you play higher up the neck or use very sparse , open voicings

If you strum GBD starting on the E string , 3rd fret it will most definitely be mud
EQ ain't gonna fix it without getting too extreme
Human ears do not separate those lower tones well (it's not normal homo sapiens speech range)
the same pitches clustered on a piano will be similarly muddy
If you do so on the 15th fret the chord will sound more clearly
because the human ears is more sensitive to pitch subtleties in those ranges

The same phenomena may impact how your arpeggios sound

You can also drop some notes and open up the voicings
instead of GBE on the E/A/D string you can play G on the E string and B an octave up on the G string
- a 10th interval. 10ths sound great all over the neck

when you have an instrument that goes as low as a bass you have to choose voicings wisely.

A final thought:
On a bass, we don't learn chord and arpeggio shapes for the purpose of playign chords and arpeggios:
we learn them to build our mental map of where those chord tones are on the neck
so that we can sequentially navigate between them with style and rhythm

 

[MDH bass]

ah i know this pain, little bit of mild distortion at low gain can work really well at 'adding clarifying edge' to a clean muddy tone.

eq and technique will be the big things tho, and on top of that, instrument selection (modern/active will beat hofner violin - for example)

ive come to find 'overprocessed' eq'ing sounds better for a lot of technical stuff - dont be afriad to pull out big bit of your tone, just compensate with smoother wider boosts to other areas (narrow specific cuts to get read of mud, broad boost to make up for the 'lack of tone')

remember to volume boost when playing with eq - everyone is okay turning down cuz something sounds weird - if you've pulled out the low end (freq) to give more clarity, add it back with volume and balance with a LowPassFilter.

when u play unplugged and like it are you by any chance feeling the lowend in the basses/your body, and hearing the note attack from string noise and actual note in the actual basses midrange resonations? ok well cut 5-10db, narrow Q if possible @ 0hz-40hz(highpassfilter), 100hz-180hz(high-bass), 1k-1.5k(finger noise zone), and 3/5k-up(lowpassfilter) - then smooth boosts (2-7db) inbetween @ 60-80hz (broard sounding lows), 500-800 (gentle, mids clarity), and the infamous bright switch or a top end boost around 2khz maybe 5-10db.

hopefully you'll get a nice broad, detailed tone without much flub - might be setting that only work for me, my ears, fingers, and basses