This is a great reply. Thank you. I don`t have much experience with overdrive on bass, and I thought a Klon-circuit was what I might be looking for, but could be not, based on these replies. I might get to try one out on the weekend, actually, so we`ll see. Could be I actually want an Ampeg Scrambler … not too heavy on the overdrive-side, and preserves the bass sound.
It's gonna depend on the flavor and level of drive you want. From a basic point of view, any drive pedal on the market "works" for bass, as in, it produces sound and doesn't set your rig on fire. That of course doesn't mean the sound will be what you want. Without getting into a college course in electrical engineering or a masterclass in mixing, true drive pedals that work best for bass tend to do three things:
- Don't cut bass (or at least allow adding it back)
- Don't **** with the mids
- Don't clip too hard
The first point is obvious. You're the bass player. Your raison d'etre is to lay down the lows, giving your bandmates the harmonic foundation of the chords and melodies above. A pedal that won't let you do that is a pedal destined for the buy/sell/trade site of choice. The second point is related; being the bassist means you
aren't the guitarist. You have a particular slice of the frequency spectrum that you're expected to fill, usually below 500Hz. Your bass and your low mids are essential to filling that space. A pedal that boosts above 500kHz like the Tube Screamer and Klon are going to put you in some very heated competition in the full band mix, while one that scoops out your mids removes the body of your tone that forms the audible link to the guitarists' chords, leaving you with room-rattling undefined bass mud and fizzy-high noise.
The last point is debatable, but actually feeds into the first two and for the same reason. Purely from an audio engineering standpoint, the more you clip your waveform, the more bass you lose and the more high-mid "presence" you gain. The double-whammy for bassists is that your clean tone is mostly low fundamental. This gives bass players a much narrower window of distorted gain between what is generally thought of, in the guitar realm at least, as "overdrive" versus "fuzz". Simply put, when you start clipping your fundamental frequency, you're in fuzz territory sonically, and there simply isn't a whole lot of anything else in good clean bass tone to distort before you get there. So, true "overdrive" on bass is a relatively subtle effect, just barely kissing the threshold of clipping with the higher frequencies modulated on top of the bass fundamental, giving you a little "grit".
Speaking very generally, bass players looking for dirt tend to center around some basic circuit topologies:
- "Transparent soft clippers". Most of these are descendants of the Marshall Bluesbreaker pedal, which confusingly enough has more in common with a Tube Screamer than the JTM-45 that Clapton made famous with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers. These "BB-style" overdrives use the "soft-clipping" circuit design of the Tube Screamer, but without the specially-formed mid-hump of that circuit, and are commonly touted as providing "your amp's tone, just dirtier". Examples beyond the BluesBreaker itself are the JHS Morning Glory, Keeley 1962 and Snouse Black Box. Similar but tweaked circuits include the Nobels ODR-1 (adds a little mids back). Because of the transparent but dirtier nature of these circuits, they're commonly used as at least half of most "stack drives", including the famed Analogman King Of Tone, the Browne Protein, Kingtone Duellist, JHS Double Barrel and some others.
- "Marshall-In-A-Box" aka "Plexi" drive/distortion. The category's named for the iconic Marshall 50- and 100-watt heads, which give us the "Brown Sound" of hard rock and heavy metal from the '60s into the '80s, however one can also lump in "transistor overdrives" aka "circuit traces" that model other amp circuits, replacing tubes with solid-state FETs, like the Boss Blues Driver. The "brown sound" is stereotypically a bit rolled off up top, thick in the bass and mids, with moderate to heavy (at least for the era) gain levels. Variations abound, primarily in the amount of gain on tap (ranging from the JTM45 up through the JCM800) and the mids character (some pedals go for more of the American "5150" tone with a bit of scoop and more high end). Examples include the JHS Charlie Brown and Angry Charlie, Friedman BE-OD, Zvex Box of Rock, the MXR Badass line, and half of Brian Wampler's catalog.
- Two-band and three-band EQs. Hearkening back to the fundamental 3 points, if a gain pedal's going to reduce your low end or **** with your mids a bunch, it should at least let you make it back up in the EQ. Most drives simply give you a tone control affecting predominantly treble, that you can use to compensate for the relative brightness or warmth of the rest of your signal chain; the pedal's designed to produce a particular tone and you're not gonna shape it a bunch within that box. The antithesis of this mentality is the "have it your way" approach, where the pedal gives you enough EQ to shape the character of the distortion either before or after the clipping is applied. Certain Plexi pedals, especially ones designed for higher-gain distortion, have full EQ sections. The Timmy is essentially a Bluesbreaker circuit with a bass control (EHX's Crayon is a Timmy clone), and Wampler's Belle is an ODR-1 with a similar mod. More recently, Darkglass, Chase Bliss, J. Rockett and a couple others have taken this concept to the extreme, with drive and graphic EQ circuits rolled into one pedal, giving guitarists and bassists some very fine-grained control over the tonal character of their dirt.
- Clean Blends. The pedal can commit a lot of tonal sins in the eyes of bass players and still be very useful on their pedalboards, simply by letting some unadulterated tone through to fill the low end back in. Electro-Harmonix lives (and dies) by the clean blend on its bass-oriented pedals; the Bass Big Muffs, Bass Soul Food, Hot Wax, Battalion etc. are all equipped with a clean blend of some kind. Wampler's Low Blow bass drive is similarly equipped on top of its 3-band EQ, as is the love-to-hate-it Boss ODB-3 Bass "Overdrive", and JHS's Moonshine, to many guitarists' surprise, started life as the bass-oriented Low Drive, and the circuit didn't even gain a clean blend until the Moonshine V2.
This is probably way more than you wanted to know, but I hope I pointed you in the right direction.
