Pedals For Bass Guitar

[KazooMan]

I am hoping to make a pedal or two as gifts for a friend who plays bass guitar.  Any suggestions for pedals optimized for Bass?   I have done some searching on the Forum, but I haven't found anything that fills the bill.  I usually work with home brewed PC boards, but would go with Vero if that is the only layout available.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[neddyboy]

I built a clone of the ZVex Wooly Mammoth a few months ago. It's designed as a bass fuzz, but it's also good for guitar. VERY tweakable with four knobs.

[Kipper4]

Woolly mammoth is good and there's a new bass fuzz by lpd over in the members only.

[Gus]

What are you looking for fuzz, distortion etc.?

Distortion and fuzz stock guitar circuits can work well.  The web stuff you read of increasing input and output cap values for bass can work against you in a band at stage volume or recording you might even want to reduce the lows(adjust the input highpass filter up in frequency) that enter the effect. 
Try some stock bought at the guitar store effects.

[Groovenut]

Might I humbly suggest this one 



I designed this a few years back using the Bazz Fuss as the fuzz engine (but you could use any overdrive/distortion/fuzz circuit you would like). The biggest issue with any bass overdrive affect is keeping the bass frequencies clean while distorting the mids and highs. The MegaDEN design achieves this by allowing the clean signal to be mixed with the fuzz signal.

I think the only adjustment I have made to this over the years was using a 500k for the Fuzz pot.

The one Kipper was referring to is an overdrive. If you're looking for a fuzz this is the one I'd recommend

[KazooMan]

Thanks for the quick replies.  I think the fuzz is a good idea.  Time to check my stock of parts and put in an order at SmallBear.

[Pedalhead]

I haven't built any of these yet (except the Ginger), but some good DIY effects for bass that I'm aware of:

Tronographic Rusty Box bass EQ
Zorg Effects Glorious Basstar overdrive
Mutron III envelope filter
EHX Bassballs envelope filter
(Green Russian) Big Muff
Maestro Brassmaster fuzz
ROG Ginger (Ampeg portaflex amp sim)

[lethargytartare]

Might I humbly suggest this one 

...

Do you have a project thread somewhere for it, or has anyone tried layouts, or have you just made the schemo available?  I'm poring over it now to see if I can figure out a layout for it (I'm on the novice end when it comes to the schem-to-layout jump).

Have you done any head-to-heads of your design against MXR's bass fuzz deluxe (which has a similar control approach of fuzz -- dry, wet, fuzz amount, tone)?

Cheers!

[PBE6]

It sounds simple-minded, but one of my favourite bass pedals is a passive parallel cap-to-ground selector. It exploits the fact that the response of an RLC circuit formed by the pickup, tone/vol pots and cable capacitance can be changed by adding additional parallel capacitance. The more capacitance you add, the lower the frequency peaks and then rolls off. You can also add a 1M pot-to-ground in parallel to simulate the loading effects of smaller tone/vol pots (lower resistance values will also lower the magnitude of the resonant peak of the RLC circuit).

[samhay]

>It sounds simple-minded, but one of my favourite bass pedals is a passive parallel cap-to-ground selector.

yes - and you can build it right into the bass.