Best Pedals For Bass Guitar


The best way to Improve your sound instantly... with a pedal or 2.

The bass guitar sound and function of the instrument in general doesn't call for many of the sounds that are usually sought after by guitar players, especially lead guitarists. Hey, but maybe that's not you! For the few bass players that like to step out a bit there are quite a few pedals in the market these days that can make playing a lot more fun for the creative bass man.

If you spend the time to look around you'll find lots of fun bass pedals to play with. A good idea is to start with one or 2 that will improve your sound like compression and overdrive or distortion. Choose pedals that offer only those specific effects because they'll usually be better quality. If you're on a budget and just have to have a bunch of effects right away there are a few multi-effect pedals.

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Rocktron Utopia B100 Multi-Effects Bass Pedal
The Utopia model made by Rocktron is pretty good and besides having all the effects you'd expect like several distortion pre-sets, wah, phaser, chorus, flanger etc it also allows you to program a bunch of their factory pre-sets to tailor your own sounds.

Bootsy for wah and fuzz

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Snarling Dogs Bootzilla Bootsy Collins Signature Bass Wah with Fuzz Pedal This funky little Bootsy Collins pedal will give you his trademark wah and fuzz sounds. We've tried several in the recording studio and the fuzz was decent but for the wah effect this bass pedal scored the highest points.


Beyond the basics

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Moog Bass MuRF MF-105B Moogerfooger Of coarse it's hard sometimes to avoid the really fun stuff like pitch modulation, synths, filters etc. Good pedal for this is the Moogerfooger, a personal favorite of mine. This effect is also available as a plug-in for recording software and that's how I originally got turned onto it. Although I haven't experienced the actual pedal yet, I can tell you some of these sounds you'll get are in a class all of their own, lots of knobs to play and experiment with.

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Ibanez SB7 Synthesizer Bass Pedal Also, another fun one is this synthesizer pedal. Ibanez makes it and it goes for well under 100 bucks. It goes pretty deep and even lets you play chords.



But for both live and studio this one beats 'em all:
Line 6 Bass POD XT Live