Yesterday I accompanied a friend who went to buy a guitar. So I was tied up for the couple of hours we spent in a music shop in Dublin. At one stage someone took a bass from the rack and plugged it in to an amp. He then adjusted the amp until the sound of the bass was almost indistinguishable as a bass. The sound was so distorted that a listener listening blind would be hard pressed to say it was a bass, let alone the type of bass being played. I intended to ask him what type of music he played or what songs that sound worked for but when I had a free moment, he was gone.
So my question is: what type of music benefits from extremely distorted bass and/or why would a bassist set up that kind of sound in the first place? This is not a criticism of his playing but asked merely out of interest. Oh, my friend bought a Taylor acoustic guitar - a lovely instrument that sounds great fingerstyle (his preferred way of playing guitar).
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You don't even hear it as distortion in the context of a full band arrangement a lot of the time. It's just easier to hear it, and maybe a bit more exciting sounding. Most classic recordings have some amount of gain on the bass, either from an amp, overdriven mic preamp, or tape saturation, but in small doses it adds character rather than sounding dirty.
So, if you play heavy music (think Muse etc) and you actually want the bass to sound like it's distorted, even against guitars which are themselves distorted, then you really need to pile on the gain. Gnarly, nasty jagged sounds can be fantastic. If you want the bass to catch your ear as a central part of the mix it's just the way it is. It can sound top heavy and harsh in isolation. No good for Brown Eyed Girl, but if you want to sound like this;
It's just the ticket.
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To be honest, it doesn't actually sound very good on its own, so if you heard it in isolation in a shop I can understand why you might have been a bit shocked by it - but in a band context it sounds fantastic, actually not as 'fuzzy' and nasty, and more fat and almost organ-like sometimes.
Listen to a song like the Stooges 'Dirt' for a good example.
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Many of the sounds are slightly overdriven - even when within the mix they sound clean.
Small amounts of drive can massively increase the harmonic complexity of the tone making it sound fuller without actually sounding dirty in the mix.
It's a 50 year old approach and works very well.
Then there is modern drive, that sounds amazing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w5qFCT6EZY
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All sounds are about context and have a use somewhere, contrary to what I spent decades reading in Guitarist there are no such thing as good and bad guitar or bass tones only what works in context ( and sometimes what doesn't work of course).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=silOU_BvPWc
(PS. Check out Rick Beato's "What Makes This Song Great" series!
With Cream, Jack Bruce's bass was often overdriven and farty.
For me, the modern exemplar is Les Claypool. It works when he does it because his bass guitar is the main component in the Primus sound. The guitarist is usually making abstract/obtuse/angular walls of noise.
But actually listen to it. The acoustic guitar is basically the central feature of the arrangement, right? Listen to what happens when the drums come in. It's almost faded totally out - you just end up with a distant jangle, almost lost behind the panned egg-shaker tracks. And that bass tone was chosen because the bass needs to live alongside a string section, which is smooth and lush sounding. If you got the bass cleaner and louder like you might have expected in the mix, it'd swamp the cello.
So that's another use of distortion on bass - they were able to make the bass sound smaller, to fit into the small space it'd need to occupy in the arrangement.
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It's his version of shouting at clouds.
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