Distorted bass sounds awesome — greasy, gritty, garage-y, and punchy. But if you’re not careful, distorted bass can get lost in the mix. This is because using distortion can increase compression (reducing the natural dynamics of your bass), cut some of the low end, and juice the midrange frequencies, putting the bass right in the zone of any distorted and fuzzed out guitars you have. Especially if some of those guitars are baritone or seven-string distorted guitars.
One way of getting a great distorted bass tone is by running your bass direct and then mixing that with a miked-up distorted bass amp. However, if you don’t have the luxury of having an amp and mic and a recording space where you can shake the rafters, a number of pedals allow you to blend your clean, unaffected bass sound with some tasty distortion. Ampeg’s SCR-DI‘s allows you to blend the unit’s clean sound with with their Bass Scrambler Overdrive circuit, while the Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Bass Big Muff Pi Bass Fuzz will let you blend the classic Big Muff fuzz with your clean bass sound. Finally, Wampler’s Low Blow allows you to blend your clean sound with overdrive or distortion.
By blending in some of the clean, undistorted bass guitar along with the distorted version, you can get those dynamics and low frequencies back, without compromising the distorted tone. Dial in just enough clean lows that the overall bass sound still has the desired grind and grit in the mix, but you have back all the low end thump that the distortion took away. This way, you can achieve a gritty, greasy groove without compromising the bass guitar’s powerful low end.
