The Best Order For Your Bass Pedals

hi i'm mason maringella from vertex effects aka the rig doctor and today we're talking about base signal path in the order to place your effects in order to have the best possible tone let's do it [Music] if you're familiar with our channel you know that we've actually already done a signal path video that was specific to guitar a couple of months ago and if you're interested in that you can always check that up above or in the links below however a lot of bass players in that comment section of that video had requested that we do one that's a little bit more specified toward bass and although i'm not a bass player i still have a very good idea of where things should be but because i'm not an actual bass player i wanted to bring in a little enforcement here with my friend yannick wisdala who is a wonderful bass player plays with bob reynolds all the time as well as has an amazing youtube channel that you should check out and he's going to be kind of going through some of my picks and recommendations and not only showing how those actually sound in practice and how maybe some order differentiators might sound different with one placement over another and which one might work best for you but he's also going to do a little bit of critiquing on my different signal path recommendations and maybe say what he lands on as a bass player or where he might find that other bass players might prefer one signal path over the other again the big thing to remember here as always with signal path is it's always about personal preference there's no right answer there's no wrong answer ultimately you want to try this out for yourself and make sure that it works in your actual context and also remember that signal path generally won't matter if you're not combining effects this is in particular when we're talking about overdrive devices in a lot of cases it doesn't really matter which ones go into the next so long as they're not used together when they're used together is when you might run into some problems pending that there isn't any sort of impedance sensitivity but enough about that we're going to get into a much more detail let's get into talking about base signal path i'm going to first kind of give my rough overlay i'm going to go in sequence of what i think in terms of the order and then i'm going to bring in yannick periodically where there is any sort of maybe question marks or maybe more than one way to do it so that he can talk about why you may want to choose one particular signal path over the other and how that actually sounds in practice so let's go ahead and get into the signal path so let's start with our fictitious base signal path now before i get started on talking about the signal path i want to just mention one key differentiator between guitar players and bass players in case you're a guitar player watching this video bass players have been utilizing parallel signal paths i would say in greater numbers than any guitar player that i know they've been doing these tricks where they take a di right off the base right when they come into the signal so they have the bass come into a di the di splits the signal or one side goes to the mixing board and then the through would go to this pedal board and go through all the different signal processing the compression the distortion overdrive modulation delay reverb this way they can have parallel signal pass they have the clean base right off of the input and they have all the processing and then they can blend those two acoustically in parallel with each other now after the di is one of my favorite pieces of gear that i always talk about on the channel which is buffers now buffers for bass are a little bit different in that the impedance ranges are quite a bit different than guitar generally on guitar all we see is one meg input impedance pretty much across the board but for base it can range anywhere from 500k and i've seen up as high as 10 meg ohms so quite a different variety and basically the main thing that you want to try to do is to try to match that input impedance of your buffer as closely to what the input impedance of the amplifier is so you can load your base pickups the way that they're used to when you're plugging into your favorite amp now one of my favorite buffers for this that has a range of input impedance is made by laylee and it's the sunday driver and you can range from one make to five makes so you can conceivably cover quite a bit of ground or choose a number that's as close to the input impedance of your amp and pretty much get all the way there now if you want to nail it exactly you could always build one of our diy buffer kits where you can set your actual input impedance by whatever value you set for r1 on the actual pcb itself but let's talk about some contingencies where maybe you wouldn't want a buffer or you would want to put some effects before the buffer so in the case you have impedance sensitive devices like a vintage fuzz face or a tone bender or some sort of treble booster or some sort of more guitar oriented effect that has an impedance sensitive kind of transistor in there that would need to go before the buffer you'd want to keep that as close to the base as possible this is presuming that you have passive base pickups another condition where you wouldn't want to have an input buffer is if you already have an active base and that's all you use active bases are basically taking the buffer and putting it inside of the actual base instrument itself so the buffering and signal condition is just starting at the base before it even gets into the pedal board another condition where you wouldn't need an input buffer is if you have a wireless a wireless is already converting the signal to low impedance once it gets to the receiver so there's no need to add another input buffer in the event that you already have a wireless present now if you want to be able to switch between wireless and going cabled i have a cool diagram that i'll link below that i did for paul jackson jr on his studio rig and it shows exactly how you can take a wireless unit build a little interface box that has a defeat that adds in an input buffer whatever the wireless isn't being used so when you're cabled you have buffered and when you're wireless you don't have an input buffer at all and on the buffer spec you definitely want to again match that input impedance to whatever your amplifier is and then you want the output impedance to be as low as possible preferably a hundred ohms or lower as close to zero ohms the better but reasonably anywhere between maybe 80 and maybe 150 to 200 ohms is probably okay but as you get higher than that the worse it's going to be at being able to drive a lot of capacitance on the output all right so enough about buffers that was a long winded one let's go to the next effect next effect i'd put in the series is a tuner now some tuners actually do have built-in buffers and in the case that the buffer actually meets the requirement or the spec that i just recommended you might be able to forego using any sort of input buffer at all and double up your tuner as a pedal that has that high quality input buffer we actually have a great list of pedals that have high quality buffers in them that are already built in it's in another video i did a little while ago and we're going to link that up above and in the description if you're interested in checking out what some of those pedals are as well as a kind of a pdf list that i created of all the pedals and their actual specs that meet this requirement as a high quality input or output buffer [Music] after the tuner is where we start to get into some variability now i like to put filters in this place now what do i mean about filters typically i mean things like base was or envelope filters these are typically places that i like to keep those two effects because i want to keep them as close to the base as possible when we're talking about envelope filters i feel like the way that they react is more accurate and more intuitive with the way that you're playing the closer they are to the instruments the closer you put that to the bass the better that they're going to interact with the bass the more that they're going to interact the way that you're used to equally with wahs typically when we think about was in terms of guitars we think about those very close to the actual instrument itself this is just kind of a way that we've been accustomed to hearing things there are some people that do however like to put their filter effects after overdrive or a little bit further down in the chain but let's bring in yannick to kind of talk about how these effects interact and where he might use some of these filtering effects in his signal path and what the differences and sounds might be hi i'm yana guzdala i am a musician who just happens to play bass and i'm primarily a jazz musician when i make music it is of the improvised nature aside from that i've you know been working in the studio on and off for the past 20 plus years and been touring the world with some of uh my heroes some people you might know that nothing i can tell you that you can't find on wikipedia my main main goal uh when i'm playing no matter what actually on stage talking to you in this video is music first gear second i know that sounds a little bit silly as we're talking about gear but that's the way i go into it that's how i find i get the best out of all these devices so i'm not going to say i disagree with mason about any of this stuff actually because i think it can't be reiterated enough that all of the things both of us are talking about in this video are completely personal choice i i should also say that i completely agree with him for for where he's suggesting to put it for the kinds of sounds he suggested to make with it like that auto war that that quacking duck kind of thing maybe that bootsy collins kind of funk thing that mutron sound that auto filter i think it's actually great to have it further up front in the chain if that's the sound you're going for with the filter the way i'm using it i'm actually using the filter in the maris autobit junior that is hidden under my board here and it is turned on and off i have presets midi presets in the auto bit and it's turned on and off via the midi switches so it's not something i'm using as an auto wire um it's something i'm using as a kind of a sweeping filter so when i have a sound with an octave thing with a little bit of fuzz [Music] i'm really uh wanting to filter everything in the chain um so that's why i have it kind of later again this is how i use it it's not particularly conventional when you think about a bass player bass player who's working and playing lots of different styles of music it's a very personal thing i'm going to agree pretty much a hundred percent with what mason is saying but i'm also going to have my take on it and some of the time that is going to be completely different and upside down [Music] so you heard from yannick on that let's move on to our next category which is dynamic pedals in this for bass i typically think of dynamic pedals as a compressor now compressors are something that's kind of interesting a lot of people have been making compressors now that are emulating kind of what older studio compressors would do in a mixing board yet we're disaggregating them and we're putting them up in front before the amplifier which isn't generally where they would go however in a lot of the pedalboard rigs these seem to work really well up front especially the one that i've got shown here which is the kali 76 this is a really nice one to use with bass really helps kind of tighten everything up and gives you kind of a mastered quality to the bass sound that then feeds through the rest of the effects but again i'll bring in yannick to kind of break this down and analyze that and give us some sound examples of how that might be different in those two different positions so when it comes to compression i get to show you perhaps my favorite part of this vertex effects pedal board which is the underside the hidden area this is where i keep my compressor it's an always on pedal it's not something that's particularly aggressive for me and i was never like a compressor guy until somebody came up to me the the maker of the builder of miura um the m2 that's what i'm using the miura m2 compressor limiter he came up to me at a gig said hey you want to try this pedal out i think it might sound good with what you're doing and he was absolutely right it's a more of a feeling thing when it comes to compression with me then it is a huge sound difference i feel it in my fingers i feel there's a little bit of pressure to play against a little bit of resistance let me turn it off something i never do with this it's just always on and here we go we'll put it on and to me it just warms up the sound very very slightly take it off and i try and have the gain structure pretty balanced so there's no big boost with it that is second in my single chain that's where i like it um i have the the volume pedal is the very first thing then i'm coming into the ep booster and that goes into the miura m2 compressor before i get into kind of my octave stuff but it's very it's very much up front in the signal chain for me and you know when all of the other effects are are in bypass the only two pedals that are engaged are the exotic ep booster and the miura m2 compressor [Music] all right so after dynamic pedals i think the best thing to go into next is pitch and of course the classic boss oc2 octave is a great pedal for this this is something again that we're still keeping relatively close to the base instrument close to the input of the actual system again these also like a lot of the dynamic pedals and a lot of the filter pedals work better and trigger better the closer they are to the instrument so you're going to get better tracking of the octave the closer it is again some people do like to use this after overdrive and i have seen cases where it's been used after the distortion and overdrive section but again some of this is personal taste and some of this is just based on what the sound is and what you're going for so i'm going to bring back in yannick he's going to talk about these sorts of pedals using octaves or pitch pedals and where those might fit best in the signal path and how they might sound different either before overdrive or after overdrive so pitch is a pretty big one for me along with juan allerete and tim lafave the three of us and john davis of course the three of us are pretty well known for kind of cornering the market on the classic oc2 lately though um thanks to mxr creating this pedal which is based exactly on this pair not just on the oc2 but they actually took this very pedal of mine an original 1982 boss oc2 octaver with the r on the end this car you guys know you've seen my oc 2 video if you're an oc2 fan i'm sure and they cloned it they did a really amazing job in a chassis that is as you can see a fraction of the size so down here on my pedalboard you can see that the oc2 will just take up way more room than i have and it's the classic jojo mayor setting it is octave one maxed out it is the direct level at zero and the octave two at zero we're just concentrating on full volume with the octave one to give me that kind of to give me that kind of sine wave sound the real stuff with pitch for me that's the stuff i i have the most uh fun with is the is the harmonizer stuff that comes kind of in the middle of the chain for me and i'm i'm pushing a few things into it so if we take one of my typical harmonizer patches these are four note chords produced by having a parallel signal chain and two two note blocks in the hx stomp [Music] and there are just so many things i love to do with this to modulate it i'll push that uh the franta bit the iron ether friends a bit which is a sample rate reducer and a big crusher i tend to use it more as kind of a gated fuzz sound that's why it comes earlier in my signal chain give it a little bit of reverb with the dark world sweat swell stuff in with the volume pedal and i can change the chords [Music] so i think an important thing to know about how i have my signal change set set up for pitch shifting and where i have the pedal i'm calling a fuzz pedal even though it's not the iron ether friends a bit um for processing the octave stuff i have the octave first and then i like to have my distortions and uh overdrives or fuzzies after that to give me that kind of fuzzed out square wave sound but when i'm in the higher register of pitch shifting like you heard with those chords when i'm kind of way up in this register let's add a little verb i kind of like to have the fuzz before that so i'm pushing the front a bit into the pitch shifting again just a personal preference i know mason talked a little bit about that being completely the opposite from the way i'm describing it right now and that will also absolutely work but again like i said before it's about that feeling of how it feels under my fingers how it feels on the instrument and how it um allows me to explore and kind of just feeds my curiosity keep it keep track of the music and make sure the music is first before the pedals then you're going to come up with all these great musical combinations that work fantastic for what you're doing [Music] all right next is distortion fuzz overdrive all of the dirt style petals are going to be in here now typically when i think about the order of dirt pedals which is where a lot of us kind of get into conversations about order i really like to put the highest gain stuff closer to the instrument as possible and the lower gain stuff closer to the amplifier and the reason why i say this if you already have a gained up pedal that's already kind of at the limits of what it can do and then you're putting another overdrive going into it before it there's not really much more room for it to go and it kind of just sends it into kind of a displeasing kind of semi square wave and it doesn't necessarily add anything to what that pedal is already doing it can sometimes just be a mess just a blob of gain and not really that differentiated but if you take a high gain pedal and then you boost after it's not only going to raise the output volume but you're going to get more of the complementary eq of that following pedal it kind of helps fill it out a little bit better now there's some exceptions to this in terms of where people might run things but generally when i'm thinking about fuzzes distortions and overdrives i would generally put the fuzzes presuming that they're not impedance sensitive with which they would go first in the chain before the buffer if that were the case then i would go into the distortion type effects you know that are kind of maybe more asymmetrical clipping the higher gain stuff and then i would go into the overdrive devices so if i'm thinking about something let's say like a rat a big muff maybe something like a sparkle drive which has a clean blend we should also mention that as earlier we said that bass players love parallel controls i find that the sparkle drive and a lot of bass players love overdrives that parallel controls on them it allows them to blend in the clean sound or the sound of the unaffected bass or whatever has come before that pedal in with the distortion sound so you can blend those two things together a very excellent sleeper pedal by the way for all you bass players out there voodoo lab sparkle drive excellent excellent pedal and also the ebs multi-drive now if i had all these effects the way that i would order them is i put the big muff first that's kind of more of a fuzz probably the highest gain then i would put the rat then i would put probably the sparkle drive and then end with the ebs multi drive and i would go in that sequence again assuming that the base was first then muff then rat then sparkle drive then going to the ebs multi-drive because it gives me the most flexibility for stacking now again if you're not stacking or combining two different overdrives or distortions or fuzzes at once then the order's not so critical here but i want to bring in yannick to break this down a little bit further and kind of show us with different shades of gain and overdrive maybe not these exact same pedals but showing us how stacking higher and lower gain might be more complementary in certain sequences than others so you can really get a feel for what that sounds like okay so when it comes to distortion and fuzz first of all i'm a big fan i'm not your guy who's going out and playing like metallica covers or trying to get that kind of gently sound particularly in what i do for myself but as a side man when i when i have to go to the studio and play on other people's records that is absolutely something that's on my radar and combinations of these kind of pedals high gain low gain pedals i'm also super lucky over the years that i've collected a bunch of really nice pieces things that i can genuinely say i have used many many times and can recommend you try for kind of all budgets i'm holding the physicist and the aggro from aguilar super solid pedals um you might want to check out a video i did for the aguilar artist loft more recently i have a couple of super nice pedals from jam pedal the rattler and the red mark really really powerful stuff a lot of a lot of these pedals kind of hark back to the original big muff the softec big muff by electro harmonix from back in the early 90s i have a couple of these bad boys something that me and john davis are super fans of is the exotic effects bass bb preamp amazing pedal if you said it the right way this can be of such a great distortion pedal to smash the gain and then bring in the volume and this sounds amazing in combination with kind of one of these style octave pedals the oc2 boss oc2 style octave pedals to make a synth bass sound another one that both john davis and i are huge fans of is the xevex woolly mammoth the real the real deal not the vexta the actual real deal crazy high end in the budget department it's very difficult to tame actually um and you know i've had varying degrees of success with it but when i really want to go absolutely crazy it's either the woolly mammoth or it's the big muff and uh yeah a lot of fun in terms of fuzz but as you can see in my uh board currently i don't have a specific fuzz or distortion pedal more recently i've kind of got into some more modern pedals like the dark glass the alpha omega and the micro tubes ultra like i'm holding here crazy powerful pedals definitely more on the modern gen t sound and i don't try and get too complicated with it either it's i really want to run as clean a path as possible remember mason said the signal chain doesn't really matter if you're not combining effects well the less effects i combine the more pure my signal can be so that's kind of my concept when i'm going into these kind of distortions and fuzzies if i'm going for that sound that that's what's happening and when i just want that flavor like you heard me push that distorted sound through some effects then the iron ether franta bit is fantastic as is the marius auto bit junior that has the sample rate reduction and the bit crushing those kind of have all of my all of my needs taken care of on this board [Music] next in the signal path is eq now i've got here the equalizer from our friends over at source audio and i just think this is great because it's a programmable eq gives you lots of different options on how to cut and adjust the different equalization of your base rig now why i love this in this position is that allows you to just mellow out or intensify anything that you want coming out of the gain stage of the pedal board i think this is the most valuable place to put it that affects the things that you really need to have some control over extra eq control and you can also almost use this as a second channel to any one of your distortion or overdrive pedals in addition to using it as a boost if you set all the eqs flat and you jump up that level control you can basically use this as just a clean boost it just increases the level of everything just like if you had a boost channel on an amplifier which is pretty cool now this position is somewhat uncontroversial the only other place that i might see somebody use an eq is up front if they kind of want to eq their bass to sound a little bit different that affects everything that's coming after it if maybe they want to kind of give a p bass more of a jazz bass feel by mellowing it out a little bit or they want to try to give something maybe more of an aggressive sound that their bass doesn't produce on their own that might be a case to use a little bit earlier but generally this is where we see people use it i don't think we need to have yannick on this one i think that for most bass players i see if they're using an eq this is generally where we see it used of course you're always welcome to experiment and see where you might like it best [Music] next is definitely a place that has some amount of controversy is the volume pedal now i got the boss fv500l shown here because i'm presuming that you want the low impedance version if you've done the high quality buffering or you have an active base like i've already recommended a little earlier in the signal chain now the volume pedal is something that can go in a few different places some people like those volume pedals right up front but if you put a volume pedal up front it's basically going to do the same as what your volume pot does on your base itself as you roll it down it's going to clean up the signal path if you already have some distortion on but it's also going to attenuate i always recommend that you put the volume pedal after all the drive pedals the main reason being is that you already got that control on the base itself you don't want to have that redundancy by putting it up front putting the volume pedal after all the distortion overdrive pedals gives you the most flexibility you can clean it up on the base with that volume control and on the foot pedal volume control you can attenuate just like a master volume you could also use a volume pedal in your effects loop if you have an effects loop on your amplifier and this will equally act as a master volume but probably only necessary if you're generating a lot of distortion from the amplifier itself if you're using pedals for the distortion and the amplifier is relatively clean there's not going to be a whole lot of value in using the effects loop [Music] next is modulation now this is another place where there is some variability some people like to have certain modulation pedals before distortion other modulation pedals after distortion but let's just kind of generally talk through some of the modulation pedals we might see on bass i think phaser is definitely something that we would see flanger also something that we would see especially in the classical sense chorus also a pedal that we would see quite a bit in classical bass rigs now on a lot of the classical bass rigs we typically see phaser and flanger earlier in the chain before overdrive devices and we'll typically see chorus a little bit closer to the amplifier now in terms of the signal path this can be mixed up quite a bit some people like some of them before some like after i've even seen a case where chorus comes before some of the distortion effects but thinking about a lot of classical albums in ways that we've heard chorus modulation things like phaser and flanger used in a lot of historic albums usually we see them in terms of the flanger and phaser coming before the distortion if there is any sort of base distortion pedals and then seeing the course a little bit closer to the amp that's very similar also in a guitar type setup but you might also see situations where these effects are used in a parallel mixer something like the exotic x blender was a really popular device that was coming out in the last 10 years or so that a lot of bass players utilized and would put effects like these in those parallel mixers so they could blend them in with the distorted signal or with the clean based signal and be able to mix those in parallel and another place that we might see these used is in the effects loops some bass players have an amplifier that has an effects loop they're running the amplifier with some amount of dirt or maybe even some cases clean and they just want to isolate these from the preamp and have them in between the preamp and the power amp which is what an effects loop basically is it's splitting off between the preamp and the power amp of your base amp and they're putting their modulation effects there maybe in addition to their delay and reverb effects as well but let's bring in yannick to break this all down talk to us about where he likes these effects and where we might see these and how these might sound in some different applications in different orders so the modulation i have happening on this particular board really comes at the end and actually the most aggressive modulation effect i have on the board right now comes literally at the very very very end it's the it's the dark side of the dark world from chase bliss and i love this [Music] you get really vibey and cinematic with that so that's one of the reasons it's actually not a bad example of why i like to have some modulation at the very end i also have the chase bliss mood it's a little more of a complicated pedal but that's definitely a bunch of modulation stuff as well and it's basically a micro looper which has a bunch of modulating uh options with it so i can create a loop like that it also has its own reverb channel as well so when i push that through its own reverb you start to get these beautiful pads and then of course at the very very very very end of the signal chain is the the looper so i can capture what's going on there that's the concept with having that modulation towards the end of the chain i can grab everything that's before it filter it mess with it modulate it dump it into the looper create transitional things then i'm really moving compositionally with my looping again it's not very conventional as a bass player but that is how i use modulation and it's no more or less valid than the way mason explained how how he suggests using modulation either next let's go to time-based effects and in terms of time-based effects i mean reverb and delay now these are typically the last two things in the chain and as you can see from our last video i like inverting the order of the reverb and the delay i like putting the reverb first and then until delay because i like having the reverb on every delay trail however classically most people are typically putting delay before reverb now i'd say in most cases these effects are usually the last in the chain but there's also a case to be made to put these in the effects loop as i had mentioned also with the modulation some people like to put these effects after the preamp of their base amplifier they like to have these used and be completely isolated and separated from any sort of preamp distortion coming after them so they put them in the effects loop so they can avoid all that again this is something you could experiment with if your amp has an effects loop if it doesn't have an effects loop then you don't even need to worry about that i think pretty much you're going to have those two effects running last in the signal path and i would experiment both ways i'd see if you like it better with the reverb going into the delay like i do so you get that reverb on every delay trail or you can reverse it where you have the delay first and then the reverb and the reverb is going to tail off with those trails before the delay trails off just because those delay times are typically much longer than a reverb but let's see yannick's take on these how he feels like they interact his preferred order let's go to him and see what he thinks so with time-based effects i think i've given you some pretty uh pretty good examples of how i'm using reverb for instance i have a delay like a tape delay down here in the in the in the hx stomp and i actually have those set in parallel so there's the big debate you know the the recent video from mason from the rig doctor about hey delay first or reverb first what what goes into what i really like the concept i like mason's concept of being able to hear the reverb on each trail of the delay that's a great use case for putting the reverb first now with the hx stomp i kind of have the option to move them back and forth um or have them in parallel but if you're using you know traditional stomp boxes like this the the jam delay llama uh extreme badass pedal by the way unbelievably musical and has some pitch shifting as well highly recommend checking that out if you're using regular pedals like this hall of fame 2 by tc electronic great reverb you know no reason why you can't just switch them around and find out what works for you one thing i used to use a bunch before i switch to to just midi and and and not audio switching was the boss es5 um i know the i think the es3 and the es8 do the same thing where you can switch the order of the pedals not only am i a fan of both ways of doing it my stuff kind of generally comes towards the end of the signal chain my reverb is the last thing in the single chain now my my standalone reverb pedal um there like i said there's there's some delay in the chase bliss mood so i have some delay in a stompbox as well as what i have programmed in the hx stomp i'm also a big fan of putting a delay pedal into a fuzz and and you know messing with how that uh how the fuzz reacts to those delays and those you know less attacking trails coming into it i would highly recommend trying fuzz delay reverb as one combination and then fuzz reverb delay so much you can do with that you'd be super super creative [Music] so last in the chain we have our buffers again now we talked about buffers on the input having that nice input impedance that matches our base amp but on the output we actually don't need to be so concerned about the input impedance anymore we really need to be concerned about the output impedance and making sure it's as low as possible now if you have a high quality buffer that you already used on the input that matches your amp and has that low output impedance you could use that again on the output buffer and a lot of pedals today actually meet again that standard that i've already spoke about the kind of matching that input impedance with your amp you know anywhere between 500k and about you know five to ten megs depending on the amp again they're all over the place for base and then getting as close to zero on the output impedance as possible now i've listed a bunch of pedals in this video that you see linked above and again in the description below about pedals that have great built-in buffers your delay or reverb pedal depending on which one is last may already meet the specification might have 100 ohm output impedance or lower and if it does then you may not have a need for an additional output buffer to drive back to the amplifier just wanted to put that in there just in case you might have something that already meets that criteria but if it doesn't you can choose from any of the pedals that we've listed in our recommended buffers in the links also you could look at something like the sunday driver which we recommend as the input buffer which is a great buffer that has a variable input and output impedance and it also has a di out option which is really really handy as an output buffer if you want to use this go di into the actual mixer and you don't want to go into an amplifier it can be a great alternative pedal to use in this particular application now in a stereo system if you want to stereo out you need to make sure that you actually have a buffer for each side the left side and the right side so in that case you would need two output buffers to condition both sides of the line now also with the stereo system you may even need to use an isolation transformer on one side if you're running to multiple amps sometimes there can be an issue with the ground loop this is going to help eliminate that is also going to match the polarity or the phase of the two amplifiers as they're not always going to be the same especially if they're two different makes or models of amplifier that may be dissimilar from each other also if you're going for cable method using an effects loop you may also want to put a buffer on the return there is no standard for buffers inside of effects loops on amplifiers so some amps may have a great great quality buffered effects loop and others may not have a high quality buffered effects loop in that case you could always get something that would turn a passive loop into an active loop one that i've always recommended is the clienter i will link that in the description below if you're interested that basically is going to take your passive loop is going to give you active controls of it is going to allow you to be able to control the send and return level so you can attenuate down to instrument level going into some of your effects and then bring that back to line level on the output with a return volume this is designed to live right behind your amplifier not on the pedal board and it's basically sort of replacing the existing effects loop but even if you have a high quality loop you may still have a need for an output buffer coming back to it again you should check the specs of your pedals in the effects loop to make sure the last pedal that's on or buffered has a high quality low output impedance right around 100 ohms is ideal in conditions where you wouldn't need an output buffer if you have something let's say like a nobles preamp that has an xlr out that's already balanced that's already low output impedance so you don't need to worry about putting a buffer with something like that if you already have something that's converting to some sort of di or xlr on the output of the system and is being used as some sort of preamp those will not require an additional output buffer after them in order to make it back to your mixing board or whatever it is that you're connecting to whether it's your interface or your daw so let's do one last big recap of my recommended signal path and i'm going to put yannick's recommended signal path next to mine so you can kind of see how our two is compared and you can choose which one might be right for you you can experiment with them both or even try something that's not listed here again the rules with signal path is that there are no rules the things that you like best are what you like best and nobody's going to police that these are just kind of overarching recommendations of where you might want to put things so let's start back at the beginning you come into the system you could hit a di if you want if you wanted to have that just stock bass sound going to the mixing board and then have another side that was going to the pedal board optional thing not a requisite thing then you're going to go into your input buffer again you don't need the input buffer if you've got a wireless or if you have any sort of active base those aren't going to be needed then from the buffer you're going to go into your tuner now we mentioned that some tuners already have high quality input and output buffers peterson's a good example of one that has that has a good input buffer already low output impedance if you already had that that would negate the need for the input buffer before it after that then i recommend going into the filter effects these would be things like envelope filters and base was those would be going there then from there i like going into the dynamic pedals compressors this is a good place to put those from there i then like going into the pitch pedals like the octave the oc 2 from boss is a great one i like keeping it there keeping it closer to the base so it's very reactive from there i like going into the fuzz distortion and overdrive pedals i like putting the highest gain stuff closer to the base the lower gain stuff closer to the am so it's going in a cascading type of sequence from highest gain to middle gain to lowest gain in terms of the sequence this is also a place where you could put effects that have parallel controls like the sparkle drive or you could even use something like a parallel mixer like the exotic x blender if you wanted to blend your distortion pedals in parallel with the clean signal a very cool feature to use especially for bass players after that i go into the equalization this is going to kind of be almost like a mastering effect or kind of a finishing effect for any of our overdrive or distortion devices you could also use this earlier in the chain if you wanted to have more effect over the actual bass signal that was hitting all the other effects from there i then go into a volume pedal the boss fe 500l if you've got those high quality buffers you definitely want to get the l version that stands for low impedance almost every single volume pedal company makes a low impedance version in the event that you're using it in a scenario where it's buffered or receiving active pickups from there we're going to go into modulation now i'm going to move some modulation stuff to actually be before the overdrives i'm going to put the phaser and flanger before the overdrives and i'm going to keep the chorus after the overdrives that's how i hear it in my head and how i think of a lot of the classical albums that people have put out over time where you really hear those effects exemplified from there i'm then going to go into the time-based effects and i like going delay after reverb but you could do this in either way and still have plenty of merit and idea in either of the situations i really just like this particular order where i get those reverbs on every single delay trail really sounds best to me i really like that type of effect and how that's run now again overarching parallel mixers like the exotic x blender could really be put around any of these type of effects if you wanted to be able to have parallel control it's a very cool device for bass players so definitely check out the x-blender if you haven't there's a couple other parallel mixers that are out there that are also very cool old blood noise endeavors makes a really cool one and exotic also makes a stereo version if you have a stereo pedal that you want to kind of have the x blender effect working with that's very cool also the gig rig makes the wetter box which is also a similar type parallel mixer that'll allow you to do similar things to what we talked about here at the end of the signal path you're going to then go into your output buffers one output buffer for mono two output buffers for stereo and if you've got a four cable method you're going with an amplifier that has an effects loop you may even want to buffer on the return again check the specs of your pedals to see if they maybe already meet that requirement for a high quality low impedance buffered output you may have some devices that already meet that criteria pretty much everything from strymon falls into that category if you're using strymon effects last in the chain and remember if you have something that already converts to a dii output something like a nobles preamp or some of the stuff made by sansamp these things already convert to low impedance they have an xlr output you don't have another need for a buffer to go after that however if you're going unbalanced whether that's back to your amplifiers whether that's back to a mixing board you're definitely going to want those output buffers to make sure that you drive the line going all the way back to your daw to your mixing board whatever it is if the cables are again remaining unbalanced and they're not converted to a balanced or xlr output so that was our signal path our base rundown i hope you enjoyed it again this is a just a generalized overview this isn't the truth this isn't the absolute best way to do it and the best way to do it is really the way that you enjoy the sound that you like and so i welcome you to experiment with this and if you have any feedback of other alternative ways that you might want to run pedals or recommendations that you think that we should consider or maybe use on a future video please do put that in the comments we would love to hear from you big thank you to yannick for helping us out do check out his channel if you're a bass player it is absolute gold the content and the quality of stuff that he's putting out so do check him out i'll also link his channel in the description and if you want to support further what we doing we have a lot of different ways to do that you can go check us out over on patreon where we have several different options of different levels of membership including one that i couldn't make totally free because patreon won't allow a free account but it's one dollar twelve dollars a year for the account great way to stay in touch with us be a part of the conversation we do weekly live streams that are private for our supporting members as well as public live streams every week that you don't have to pay for so you have options to do either way we also have private tone consulting over on therigdr.com as well as all of the materials that we use for all our pedal boards including the pedalboard surfaces themselves tie down mounts zip ties all the velcro that we use all the accessories that are used to build our rigs in addition check out vertexfx.com where we sell all the pedals that we manufacture so if you're interested in supporting us you can always buy one of our pedals from us or from one of our authorized dealers and you can see our dealer list again on the website and another free way to help support what we're doing is check out our podcast the rig doctor podcast it's on apple spotify all the common podcatchers so please do check that out it's a great way to support us listen to us on your way to work or on your commute helps out the channel gives you another way to interact and maybe take some of these conversations into a more long form option so please do check that out if you haven't already again i'm mason maringella from vertex fx aka the rig doctor thank you for exploring base signal path with us today see you later [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Vertex Effects

Views: 57,836

Keywords: Mason Marangella, Vertex Effects, Rig Doctor, Pedalboard, Pedalboards, bass pedals, bass guitar, bass pedalboard, bass pedalboard build, how to build a pedalboard for bass, janek gwizdala, Bass signal path explained, ordering guitar pedals, effects pedal order, first bass pedalboard, best bass compressors, using reverb on bass, using delay on bass, using chorus on bass, which bass pedals are best, Janek bass, professional bass player pedalboard, pro bass pedalboard, bass

Id: LqnQZO0xBN4

Length: 42min 22sec (2542 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 08 2021