Bass distortion pedals can do a lot more than just give you that Kurt Cobain-type roar. They can also tighten up your EQ, offer saturation exploration, and more.
Unlike overdrive and fuzz pedals, most bass distortions can be dialed in very lightly without losing their bite. That makes them useful for any bass player, regardless of genre.
Wet/Dry Controls
As the name suggests, a bass distortion pedal is designed to deliver a distorted tone suitable for use with bass guitars. It’s an essential pedal for bass players who are interested in achieving a hard rock and metal tone, with many famous bands using such pedals including Black Sabbath, Motorhead and others.
Unlike effects like overdrive, which typically have a wide variety of tone settings, distortion pedals tend to sound fairly similar regardless of whether the user selects a light or heavy setting. This is because the distortion is simply pushing the volume higher into a cut off point, which is the same function as the preamp of an amplifier.
Bass pedals often feature a wet/dry control that allows you to choose between the distorted and clean signal, allowing you to adjust the balance of the two. This gives you control over the amount of distortion in your sound and is great for situations where you need to keep some definition in your tone.
The pedal will usually also feature a range of other controls to allow you to tweak the overall tone. These may include tone and gain knobs, as well as a range of other control options like trebble, mid and bass boosts. Many will allow you to download presets and upload them back to the pedal via USB, giving you even more flexibility.
Another very important feature for bass distortion pedals is a mix control, which is used to set the level of the dry (clean) signal in relation to the wet (distorted) signal. This is extremely useful as bass instruments tend to produce lower frequencies and can easily be swamped by high-frequency distortion sounds.
Other control features to look out for on a bass distortion pedal include a noise gate and a 3-band EQ, which are both useful for keeping your tone tight and focused. Many will also have a phantom power jack and parallel output for added versatility.
The next thing to think about is the order in which you plug your pedals in. Most bass guitarists will run their pedals in the order of bass-effects-amp, but it’s worth experimenting with different setups to find what works best for you. Some pedals, such as modulation pedals (chorus, phaser, flanger), will work better earlier in the chain, before any tone-producing pedals like distortion and fuzz.
Tone Knobs
A bass distortion pedal’s tone knobs can be a crucial part of its overall sound. The tone knobs usually control the EQ of the pedal, and they can give you a huge variety of sounds. This can range from basic treble and bass boosts to more advanced controls such as center frequency control, Q control (which allows you to control the width of the centre frequency), or a parametric control which moves the peak point of the signal up and down in order to alter its tone.
A good example of this is the Source Audio Aftershock, a compact pedal that’s designed to give you a variety of different drives and grit styles. With the push of a button you can choose between three drive engines: Tube for a subtle tube-style overdrive, Heavy for a scooped-mid distortion, and Fuzz for old-school Germanium fuzz. You can then sculpt the resulting tone using the DRIVE LEVEL, VOLUME, DOOM (the pre-distortion EQ which controls low-end) and TREBLE knobs.
This makes it an ideal pedal for anyone who’s looking for a versatile and high-quality distortion pedal that can cover a wide variety of genres. If you want a more specific effect, there are also some dedicated pedals that have just one type of distortion or overdrive that they’re designed for. For example, the late Lemmy Kilmister (Motorhead) famously used a simple MXR Bass Soul Food pedal to give his bass guitar a natural overdrive without altering its original tone.
In general, you should try to place distortion pedals early in your pedal chain – after tuners and dynamic effects such as compressors, but before things like modulation and time-based effects such as delay and reverb. This will ensure that the pedals are processing a relatively clean signal which is more effective at creating its desired tone.
Having multiple distortion pedals in your rig can be extremely useful as well, but it’s important to keep the EQ settings of each pedal in balance. If the two pedals are boosting the same frequencies, they can start to cancel each other out and leave you with a muddy sound.
Switchable Diodes
Generally speaking distortion pedals have maximum output levels that are lower than the levels that can be produced by very hot, modern pickups. As such they need to be a bit more careful about how much they boost the guitar signal so as not to clip it. This is why many pedals use “soft clipping diodes” to soften the clipping effect. This is usually done in a feedback loop and it can be very effective. However it does introduce a slight loss of headroom into the circuit.
The way in which these diodes are configured and the frequency that they cut off frequencies also makes a big difference to how the pedal sounds. For example the Blackbird uses Schottky diodes (these are a special type of silicon diode that closely matches germanium diodes – used in classic pedals like the MXR Distortion + and ProCo Rat) which create a less harsh, more symmetrical distortion with higher gain. This is good for more of a lively and energetic saturated drive sound that’s great for modern rock, metal and even some blues and country.
But if you wanted to build your own distortion pedal with something more akin to the tone of a vintage tube amp you might want to consider using regular silicon diodes (these have a forward voltage of around 0.7 volts). These will have more of an asymmetrical clipping behaviour which can produce a more harsh and unruly distortion.
Some pedals offer the ability to switch between these two clipping modes to give you a choice of how much compression or how harsh your distortion is. Using this feature in combination with the gain knobs can produce a huge range of tones from mildly distorted and compressed to hard and brutal.
It might seem a little confusing that some pedals can have so many different tonal characteristics but there’s actually quite a lot of consistency in the way that most professional guitarists expect a pedal to sound for clean, blues, metal and so on. There is no right or wrong answer and it’s really down to the individual player and their personal preferences.
Dual Drive Engines
A dual drive engine is an awesome feature for a bass distortion pedal because it gives you multiple styles of dirt and grit. The Magnetic Effects Aftershock is a great example of this – it features three different overdrive engines to give you lots of options for different types of bass distortion. The Tube engine offers a classic valve-amp style overdrive, the Heavy engine belts out some heavy distortion with a scooped mid-range, and the Fuzz engine delivers some old school Germanium fuzz without losing your low end.
The Laney Blackheath is another bass distortion pedal that has a few cool extras that set it apart from its competition. For one, it has two different distortion modes, allowing you to switch between overdrive and fuzz with the flip of a switch. This makes it a really versatile pedal that can cover a lot of different musical genres and styles.
It also features Laney’s CabRig digital processing, which allows you to save up to 250 different mic and cab combinations. This means you can dial in the exact sound you’re looking for and get that perfect distorted bass tone.
Another cool thing about this bass distortion pedal is that it’s built for the bassist in mind. It’s compact and lightweight, which makes it very easy to carry around. Plus, it has an external input so that you can use it with any pedal in your rig.
You can even run it in parallel with your amp for a more saturated tone, and it comes with an internal power supply so you don’t have to worry about finding a spare AC adapter.
Another really cool thing about this pedal is that it’s fully midi compatible when used with the Neuro App (free download iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows). This app lets you access a massive collection of additional overdrive, fuzz, and distortion tones, with extended parametric EQ capabilities, stereo routing options, and internal stacking functionality. The app also lets you fine-tune each of the pedal’s six available presets with ease and share them with other users.