A good guitar or bass preamp? Suggestions?

[thomasthebuzzard]

Okay so here is the scoop, I play in an electronic and industrial band. I play bass in this band and we send the bass right into the mixer and then out the pa with all of the beats and rackmount midi junk. During our set alot of things happen with the tone of my bass. During some songs It will need to be cranked up because of lack of headroom but as I turn it up more it begins to distort. Then on the next song the bass will be way to frickin' loud and drown out the vocals and high end of the final mix. my bass also tends to sound muddy through the mixer too but that may be because its a gibson sg with humbuckers. Forget about using a distortion pedal in this band
What want to achieve is a good clean clean clean boost that will bring my bass up to the level of the other instruments without having to crank the gain all the way up on the mixer and also make it so that i can reasonably run a distortion with it not creating volume leveling problems. Running the bass into the mixer seems kind of vital because it blends in with the beats and gives it a good "nine inch nails" quality. Three of the four members in my band also build diy pedals and other gear so any info would be a bigbig help. Here are a few possible solutions i was thinking about. maybe some light can be shed
1) A DI box. Would this level things correctly for my bass? would it clean up the tone a little? passive or active?
2) A good old home made clean boost! Can i use this as a preamp for a mixer? What is the loudest clean boost with the lowest harmonic distortion?
3) A different bass? mine has two humbuckers and is short scale with a really thick heavy body. Is this too much bass for the mixer to properly handle? I there a standard bass used for this kind of setup?
4)all of the above?
5)pack up an go home...
Also to give a better idea here is a video of my band questions and criticism welcome...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub3rifwrNDI

[Taylor]

Kind of a complex issue. I would personally start with the bass. IMO the SG bass is a mud machine. My guess is that volume really isn't the issue - you can always turn volume up or down.

How does a distortion pedal mess with your levels? Are you using a distortion pedal with no volume knob? It should be no issue to match clean and effect levels. Instead your problem may just be that the bass is so muddy that you have to make it unbearably loud to be heard at all. A different bass, like a trusty P bass or clone, would be a better start I think. More midrange, less flubby muddy low end. Will distort without fart.

A DI box is mainly good for impedance matching. They'll have some slight tonal changes, but you can't "clean up" an already fuzzy sound. Just not possible. Ask Angelo777. But impedance matching may indeed be an issue here, and plugging a bass into a mic preamp is exactly what DI's are generally used for.

An opamp-based clean boost is simple and quite clean. Just google non-inverting opamp boost.