Good bass overdrive...

[mth5044]

A friend of mine wants a good bass overdrive, and I've seen things like the SHO and the DOD250 (IIRC) being used on bass, but I know it depends greatly on what gear they are using.

They have:

Boss Fender Bassman
Active Double Humbuckers
450Watt Stack (I dont know what kind)

He is at college now, so we will only be able to try it out on a practice amp, but I guess that doesnt really matter.

Any recomendations? Trying to keep it as simple as possible.

Thanks

[Gus]

This is a hard question to answer.  Do a search here for "bass overdrive"  I just did and there are good posts.

Now it realy depends on player, bass and amp/speakers.

IMO the best thing to do is to collect up(buy or borrow or build ) a bunch of effects both guitar and bass and try

Dist +
BMP
FF type
TS 5,7,9,10
look for the grunt box threads here
SHO
EQs sometimes an EQ can overdrive just the right frequencys in an amp
any distortion, fuzz, overdrive you can find guitar or bass

When you find what is liked you can adjust it if you need to

I have built fuzz's or overdrives that sounded good with one setup and not another.  Sometime people post effects that worked for them but IMO bass seems to be trickier to select a good distortion/fuzz/overdrive effect

[DougH]

It depends on what kind of sound you want too. Are you talking Mel Schacher or Lemmy? For example...

[MarcoMike]

yes, +1 on the "what kind of sound you want"...
as an ex-bass player I can tell you my opinion.... as overdrive the BOSS one (don't remember the name) is pretty cool and with the blend knob you can mix some clean signal to keep a bit of "punchiness" and let people hear what you are playing... related to this, the Behringer clone BOD100 sounds damn similar and costs one fifth of the Boss. acyually I have one for sale, 10€ and it's yours

instead if you are looking for a fuzz for bass or heavy distortion my favourite is absolutely the Wooly Mammoth. it sounds very "rough" but the nice thing is that it retains very well the dynamic of your playing... you still hear every pick... is it understandable?

TS and Dist+ are absolutely not gear for bass, obviously in my opinion.

[fogwolf]

I've been very interested in  the Brassmaster clone at GGG but from what I've read here it sounds like it's a problematic circuit. Anyone have any luck with this?

[Gus]

MarcoMike  does not seem to like the D+ or TS with bass, I would agree most of the time.
  Now the thing is I heard a TS and a D+ work well in two cases.  The D+ in  a more driving a tube pre stage to a 1,200 watt solid state amp to a nice cab.  The TS worked with a funk sound.

It is taste issue.   With bass sometimes something works well with one setup and sounds not so good with other setups.

Sometimes I think the best overdrive for bass is just driving the amp and speakers as hard as you can without destroying them and having the speaker(s)  not "flopping" around uncontrolled.

Maybe a little tube or solid state amp and speaker cab in a boxed with a microphone as the overdrive effect or even an adjusted for you amp bass speaker(s) overdrive speaker sim

 

[bipedal]

A lot of folks seem to like the sound of a Big Muff with their basses...

For my bass rig, I'm currently using a Hot Cake with drive knob at about 12:00 for some gritty mid punch and level knob turned a bit higher to drive my bass amp's preamp tubes into giving a little extra growl.  Nicely "dirties up" the otherwise fairly mellow sound from my j-bass.

[Sir_Ian]

A lot of folks seem to like the sound of a Big Muff with their basses...

I built a Russian Big Muff. It sounds great....BUT....it does suck quite a bit of bass. I'm gonna build the bass paralooper to use with it. But If I could redo the big muff (which I might end up doing in the future) I think I'd either "bassify" it or build a wet/dry blend directly into the box.

I'm currently looking for a good bass overdrive. I have one I was gonna breadboard today. I'll report back on my findings.

[Thomas3D]

its tickey to get dialed in but i use the BMP on bass, sounds like a raunchy fuzz goodness.
I like to use the Big Muff Pi, on my setup i either use the volume for the percussion and jazz pickups as a suto-blend knob (ie more jazz volume, more bass; and more percussion
volume, more high end, and the bmp only seems to distort the highs and lets the lows just blend in)

[Sir_Ian]

Ok...so I breadboarded this bass drive today.

here is a link...

http://www.aronnelson.com/gallery/main.php/v/mnordbye/own_creations/mnordbye_schematics/bassdrive.png.html?g2_imageViewsIndex=1

http://www.aronnelson.com/gallery/main.php/v/mnordbye/own_creations/mnordbye_layouts/Bass+drive.gif.html

It sounded pretty cool. With the gain all the way down...I was able to get the sound I was looking for....Some distortion but not really fuzz. If you turn that gain up, however, watch out....this think can get as nasty fuzzy as a BMP. A versatile pedal.

I didn't seem to get alot of response from the Body control...not sure why.

I'm gonna play with this wonderful circuit tomorrow and see what else I can get it to do. I already played with moving C5 so it is in parallel with C6 instead of after it in series. This seemed to tame the beast a lil. But Its a very nice ciruit, and whats nice is that most the parts are pretty standard...you might already have em all.

One other thing I got to do is play around and figure out how it works. I'm new to stomp boxing, but I'm kinda a lil puzzled on how that gain control works. Somehow just by putting a fat cap (C2 on the schematic) in the path to ground increases the gain a ton. I'm not smart enough to know why.