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Products such as The Bass Butler from Orange offer an all-in-one bass shaping tool that means you can pretty much plug and play wherever you want, with EQ, drive and compression all at your fingertips. Some bass preamp pedals have the added benefit of additional features, such as built-in compressors, that can be extremely useful in managing your dynamics and are particularly useful for players of genres such as funk.
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Most manufacturers will have video demonstrations with high quality audio examples of their preamps in action, which can give you a much more thorough understanding of the kind of tones you can expect – both through the front end of an amplifier and through the preamp’s dedicated DI output – and how to use their specific feature set, which can vary from pedal to pedal.
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If you’re looking to achieve a particular sound – perhaps something reminiscent of an Ampeg, or Fender – consider that some preamps will be modeled to replicate those classic sounds, whereas others may have their own unique tone. And as any gigging bass player knows, this can vary wildly! There are many reasons you might want a bass preamp pedal – they’re perfect for studio use, giving you a punchy warm tone straight into your recording device, and they’re an excellent tool for gigging, offering consistency to your live sound, regardless of what the backline is. You can trust Guitar World Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing guitar products so you can choose the best for you.
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If you’re not bothered about having a headphone output, this could be the ideal pre-amp solution for you. The class A optical compressor on the always-on ‘bass’ channel is a great addition that would make this a pretty tidy offering if that was all there was to the Bass Butler… but there’s a whole other side to this little animal! The second, ‘guitar’ channel, is where you can make the floor cave in, through the high-gain distortion stage, which can either be on all the time, or blended into your clean signal through the use of an external expression pedal.Ĭabinet simulation for the clean channel is also a nice touch, giving DI recordings that real life feel, whilst separate ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ outputs makes this an excellent tool for multi-track recording. Rather than any digital modeling, the Bass Butler splits your signal at the input stage into two separate, parallel analog chains, giving you the flexibility of having two totally independent amplifiers all in one pedalboard-friendly package. A distinctly modern preamp pedal built around ‘bi-amp circuitry’, which replicates playing with a ‘standard’ bass amp and an additional guitar amplifier.
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