Must-Have Pedals for Bass Players

if you're a beginning bass player there's so many things to think about already what amps do you need to get what bass do you want to go with what's the sound that you're after but i think more important than anything if you're going to get into pedals you got to have to have a foundation to know what are the basics that you need to start with if you're going to get a couple of pedals to kind of start to build out your pedalboard i thought nobody is better at being able to not only know the range of pedals that are available but really have a lot of experience with pedals none other than yannick was dallas so thank you for coming today thank you i'm not sure if i am the guy but i certainly own a lot of these pedals if nothing else so it's a good starting point and we have a good sort of potpourri of base pedals here and i think what the goal is today is to narrow down for anybody who is getting into pedals to kind of figure out what are the four essentials that they need we have lots of options here that we can talk about so that we kind of have an idea if you're again new to this or you're just starting to build out your board you know about the pedals that you should be looking at and how they might sound let's go let's uh what's what's up what's up for your first slot when i think about bass pedals i think definitely having a preamp of some kind is essential i think because i'm a guitar player we love anything that kind of does coloration maybe distortion sure so i always like to think that that's something that you always are going to need so what do you have for us that are kind of in the preamp range pedals aside from the obvious in that bases are quite often active yep obviously not a p bass or something like that but it does happen that our base is active so you have to take into consideration the power coming out of the instrument and what color like you said that's giving you uh in terms of what i put on my board i have a couple of things from exotic effects they're made here in california the tri-logic and the tri-logic 2 really simple it's just a little eq little warmth little boost and i use them really like that very very simple and i use it as an always on pedal got it often hidden under the riser of the vertex pedal boards right you know that's uh massive part of those risers for me is that stuff like this always on and underneath i also have from exotic the base bb preamp which i don't use as a preamp is actually when i when i max out the gain and rolling the volume this is actually a great distortion pedal even though it sounds good as a base preamp i actually use that as a distortion right and then of course there's other stuff like the sansamp of course is another one that kind of falls into a similar range that of course was a classic that many bass players used for a long time but definitely i think for me an important slot if we're going to narrow this down to the four essentials i think preamp unquestionably exotic makes some great win one sansamp has some great ones so if you want to go full out though you can go with its own pelican case yes uh the noble this has become sort of a staple uh you're gonna see players like sean hurley tim lafave you know some real paladino too oh he's using that now i didn't even know so some real serious high-end bass players using the noble preamp you won't see it like this with the tubes and the power supply exposed you're not going to pick this up on camera but mason can see it right here number nine yeah serial number nine i got one of the almost first ones from jack up in santa cruz the the price tag is hefty right but the payoff is even mightier than the price tag as far as i'm concerned um yeah because he's incorporated all this stuff inside so now everything's inside this is a little less pedal board friendly it's a little more delicate hence the hence the pelican case hence that i don't take this outside of the studio but it's way more pedal board friendly now with with everything internalized and it sounds unbelievable yeah it's it's a great option if you want to go like full out you know kind of have the most boutique option right but we're talking like a 10x price from here right here so you know it's for all budgets we're going forward today sure yeah you go zamp you could go exotic you could go noble all of them are great so that was my pick what do you think is another one that we really need to mention here for kind of essential pedal board i think it's got to be compressor right compressor um i don't have uh actually i think i only have one with me oh you got the boss too oh i got the boss as well so i do have a little vintage accent obviously like anything good that ever gets made they almost immediately get discontinued this is an old compression sustainer cs2 little vintage from the i guess late 80s early 90s boss made in japan um this is the one i use this is from miura made right here in california the miura m2 compressor limiter i'm not smashing the sound i'm not the slap guy particularly although that is very useful for this getting harmonics to sing out getting a nice solid consistent sound for slap bass for r b pocket for gospel music this is just a little warming of the sound for me and a little kind of consistency in the top and low end of the range yeah that boss one is definitely like very much a color oh like really squash and that's when i use it is when i want something kind of weird and dynamic and kind of you know out of the box absolutely and i think also other stuff you know to mention that's popular amongst bass players like the kali 76 76 is a huge one that a lot of people are into and also uh dunlop has some really cool ones with the mxr compressors absolutely budget friendly and the mini one like the one that is the same size as their vintage base octave in this like look at this in terms of chassis pedalboard real estate that's a huge thing um uh ampeg has one i know uh a bunch of people are having some really nice compressors out there yeah absolutely yeah so you got a couple of different versions you can go high-end with kali 76 or something like that you said this miura miura and something right in the middle this is obviously the octave version but the same chassis same size same pedal quality build by aguilar they also have a compressor it's the flu pedal right um somewhere right in the middle of the range sub 200 yeah so many great choices for for baseball i mean we're in the golden age of pedals so you have just option overload it's like drinking water from a fire hose all right so we talked about the preamp we talked about compressors i think the next one is definitely fuzz and i almost feel like i shouldn't even be the one sharing fuzz because you are such a user of fuzz devices what do we got here there are some great examples for well here's the thing the first thing with with me and you with the signal chain order again we've talked about this before in videos neither one of us is right we just have different opinions about what goes where and what works for either of us as we hear music for me my uh next slot we can totally talk about first is actually octave because i like octave into fuzz instead of fuzz into octave okay but we'll get to that we'll go we'll go mason's route which is a million percent valid and i i'm like mason said a massive fan of fuzz and have some pretty badass ones here i got to say let's go with the old with the impossible yeah the unobtainium it's the softec big mouth tall font from uh early 90s made in russia electro harmonix yes you are going to break the bank trying to buy one of these this is uh it looks pretty crappy but it's actually a pretty mint version yeah this is like weaponized fuzz and it's been modded for uh you know for a regular power supply so you don't have to run it on batteries it's noisy it's loud it's big yeah uh juan alderete from the mars vaulter that's who i heard using that first it's been on a thousand different great records yeah absolutely amazing piece of kit uh well it's the next peg down i guess in the price range uh no less brutal is the zvex woolly manor super hard to tame but it's unbelievably cool gated as far as you have some gating options on there which is very musical um these two bad boys from jam petals the red muck and the rattler yeah pretty aggressive and abusive beautiful sounding pedals again you know pedals for all budgets a lot of bass players are going to know this dark glass electronics are taking over the base world the the gen the prague the metal world they are super efficient compact beautifully made great sounding modern kind of fuzz distortion pedals and maybe we'll save this for the for the filter yeah for the filter we also have the running cut oh sorry yeah random cuff right here also right here in california yeah i think random cuff it's kind of if you want this but you've got this kind of budget it's an amazing sounding pedal right and it really does you know so what we should preface is so many of these fuzz pedals are based on right the muff yeah everyone's trying to copy that it's like uh you know what's a guitar pedal that everyone copies tube screamer tube screamer there you go so that this is our tube screamer this is the base world's tube screamer everyone tries to copy it yeah yeah and i think even now electro harmonix has different sort of more budget versions that they even make absolutely that are you know so you can get them for maybe sub 150 dollars and if you want sort of like an excellent build quality you know yeah then you're going into a boutique builder um and i would rate uh the boutique builders versions over the newer electro harmonix ones personally my preference where i play the modern ones that you can go get in guitar center yeah it doesn't really stack up to that yeah and you know something like the ren and cuff is about as close as it get or the red mark from jam pedals yeah yeah lots of really great options here so we talked about fuzz but you kind of detoured us on octave so yes that's kind of our fourth position here so just to recap that we got preamp we had the compressor you would put octave i would octave next and then we already talked about fuzz let's go kind of in that third order let's do octaves sure what do you got and the reason i put octave um before the fuzz is because i play a lot of electronic music as opposed to rock music and if i was playing rock music absolutely the fuzz would go earlier i just want a little more of the point of the sine wave that electronic sound that an oc2 for instance can give me before it goes into the fuzz which i'm using as a square wave to modulate and give me a synth bass sound that's the reason i put it in that order and this is the rarest of them all silver screen oh oc2 okay okay so you would think this is just me like being being vain the these are some of the only pedals in this era that didn't come with a silver screw i just found some silver screws oh i just went around there and put one on there yeah because this actually had a wood screw in it when i bought it it just had like a flat flip phillips head wood screw in it i was like i can't keep it like that so i got some silver screws these actually came with a black screw but this is actually the first batch 1982 octaver with the r on it the later ones just had the were called octave without the r very specific coloring slightly higher mounted power supply i'm a little bit of a nerd when it comes to rc2s i own 21 of them uh so this is the bad boy the most expensive if it has the box and papers as us watch fans like to say uh you're gonna you're gonna spend almost as much as a big muff on it like that goes six seven hundred dollars insane beautiful sound though now what mxr did was took this exact pedal literally this pedal in my hand i sent it up to mxr and they built this pedal out of it the vintage bass octave they cloned this this is what's currently on my board even though i own 21 of these original bad boys this is actually what is currently on my certainly more practical it's practical it's look at the real estate it's unbelievable it's got the top jack it's i i love it it's even got a little mid boost so you can do other things with it it does have a crossover with the bass octave deluxe which is kind of a classic bass octave from uh from mxr it's a little more pointy a little more mid-range it's a little more of the recreation and octave down of the natural sound of your bass got it whereas i'm using this to make more of a sine wave but i'm taking the clean signal of the bass completely out so those are basically my octave options and of course we showed this a little bit earlier the aguilar optim uh optimizer great pedal super solid great road pedal um and then i have this kind of combination fuzz an octave in one so octave divider more like a mutron but with a fuzz circuit which is by a company called gajira up in scotland in the uk very fun pedals all right so to recap yeah for the four we talked about right talked about preamps we talked about compressors yes we talked about in in in the the guys method octave and then finishing with fuzz now i think that there's a few honorable mentions on here that could be added which i think we want to go with so well thousands i think uh some sort of uh anything in the modulation department we could talk about flanges and about phasers about classic sounds of bass from the 70s perhaps but before we started filming you use the word type cast right as soon as you switch on certain pedals you're immediately typecast too oh i've got a mutron i sound like boosie collins right you know i've got a fuzz pedal i sound like this john paul jones or something you know what i mean like so some of my favorites here's another vintage one they don't make any more i haven't made it for 20 years or more is the tremolo pan the boss pn2 does exactly what it says on the box it is a tremolo and it is a stereo pan sounds incredible i would say one of my favorite modulation time-based effects are delays and modulated delays something like the jam pedals the delay llama extreme has some pitch shifting which is always fun right some modulation and then the big boy in the box it's like getting an old bottle of fine wine out yeah also russian-made electro harmonix original baseballs which is kind of a filtered distortion yeah um even still has the original card in it i'll be able to sell that for a fortune one day with that so not that i will ever sell it the super fun pedal used to use this with jojo mayer with his electronic music band nerve probably haven't used it in 15 years or more right more of a collector's item but it does fall in the category of you know wild cards right so filter could be kind of a component of that wild card in addition to modulation so it's like if you're going for marcus miller sometimes you have to have those phase phasers or the vintage kind of mxr stuff or you may have uh you know again some sort of filter pedal like you said bootsy collins of course the risk of typecast whenever you're a neutron or that kind of stuff or the moog yeah the move to mf101 i used that for many years there's the wmd super fat man i happen to use the iron ether zero graph deluxe amazing filter um and even pedals like the maris autobit junior has one of the best sounding filters in it i've ever heard yeah you can put trs expression cable in an expression pedal and suddenly the mirrors is not just a bit crusher also a thing that you could have on your you know variable list of pedals but it's also an amazing filter if you just use it clean we would probably have to cap it off with some sort of multi effects right if if you don't want to get all this stuff and you just need to have it simple and in one box right and if you've watched vertex effects pedals and the channel and like all the pedal boards that get put together for all these musicians bass players guitar players alike it's a lot of work it's a lot of information it's a ton of pedals and like i said if you don't want to go through all of that something like like this this is a hx stomp this is the xl version it's the slightly bigger boy a little more access with more pedals you can do more programming you can have basically everything on this table right here in one box it's the one-stop shop plus amp modeling and irs and all that kind of stuff so what i will say is that you probably get this pedal and maybe this pedal for the same price of this it's pretty crazy like if you were to add up all this you probably buy a nice small car yeah versus something more affordable and maybe a little more utility yeah and if you're starting out this could also be a really good option to use a multi-effects like an hx stomp or hx effects yeah just to sort of attune your ear and your taste to what you like because if you go after the high-end big muff you know that's you know 800 or something like that you're you're definitely restricted your budget you don't even know if you really like this if you're starting to build your blackboard you can kind of like figure out what you like with the multi-effects and then kind of add in pedals du jour based on exactly and the way the block system works in here it's just like plugging in a ton of different stomp boxes right but that's what i love about this thing and you can experiment and then go okay you know what i love like five things in here but i want the one thing that's booting right right right usually supplement exactly and then it's got an effects loop and you plug that in and suddenly you're just two pedals but you have a really nice boutique fight for instance yes you know and you haven't wrecked your budget and you're learning about effects the whole time with the way this works yeah absolutely absolutely will yannick this was such a cool opportunity to go through with the real bass player i feel cool sort of like a fraud when i talk about bass gear because i don't really play bass and so i'm sort of using like a theoretical sort of conversational uh approach whereas this is rooted in an actual pro bass player so thank you for capping this off for us again we talked about compressors we talked about pre-amps we talked about fuzzes we talked about uh uh rock to pedals octave pedals and we talked about some wild cards maybe some filtering maybe some modulation orgo and multi-effects so lots of things to consider here we're going to put links in the description for kind of all the major food groups here we talked about some of the pedals that we recommended and that are available at different price points and we'll also put a link to yannick's channel which is absolutely an incredible youtube channel that you need to check out if you're a bass player you will be remiss if you haven't checked this thing out and if you want to learn more about the stuff that we're doing rig builds whether that's bass stuff whether that's guitar stuff all the different techniques approaches materials definitely head over to vertexfx.com or therigdr.com we have lots of different resources for how to build the boards the materials that you need and all that stuff and easy free ways to engage with us is just go over to our podcast we have a new episode that drops almost every single week in addition to that we offer some support for bass players and guitar players on our patreon channel which you can check out if you want to do some paid services or be able to connect directly with me in my team about your rig troubleshooting et cetera until next time i'm mason maringela from vertex effects aka the rig doctor i'm yana guzdala don't forget to subscribe to the channel i did that's why i'm here with all these pedals that's why you see the rig builds that i put up on youtube is because of mason because of vertexfx.com subscribe to the channel it's free free see ya [Music]

Channel: Vertex Effects

Views: 42,649

Keywords: Mason Marangella, Vertex Effects, Rig Doctor, Pedalboard, Pedalboards, Bass Guitar, Bass Pedals, Bass pedalboard, Pedals for bassists, Janek Gwizdala, Noble Bass Amp, Boss Octaver, Sovtek Big Muff, Cali 76 Compressor, Which bass pedals should i buy?, Essential Bass Pedals, Cool Pedals for Bassists, DIY Bass Pedalboard, Bass Rig Build, Rig Rundown Bass, Best pwedals for Bass Guitar, Best distortion pedals for bass, best fuzz pedals for bass, best preamp bass pedals

Id: oU4M0w-fHgE

Length: 18min 37sec (1117 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 02 2022