This is the best solution by far. It keeps your hands relaxed and will save you muscle strain and efforts and pains.
But… it’s hard to rock out this way. So if you’re into huge, energetic musics, stage antics and the physicality of playing, this will be hard to maintain (said the guy who is into huge, energetic musics and the physicality of playing… and volume).
This is too hard for most things… but Flea makes it sound awesome. If you want to be aggressive, this is a useful thing to bust out. But - yes - ideally the amp is working harder and you can relax your plucking hand to get nice even smooth sounds from your strings.
So gain and volume are related in that they both affect loudness but are very different in practice.
Gain affects how much the input signal is modified. This can be useful if you have a low-output instrument, pluck softly, or if you want to, say, overdrive the preamp to get some overdriven warmth or distortion.
Volume affects the overall output volume, controlling not only your instrument volume but also any additional tonal qualities added by the preamp/onboard effects/etc.
tl;dr, play with them both to get the tone you want! Get the tone you want with gain, and set the overall volume with volume.
I can’t speak for everyone. But I tend to pick rather hard sometimes. I was using a medium pick for tremolo picking on my bass to get myself used to it. I’m after clank & grit on my bass though.
But now I’m back to my heavy pick for that too. I especially pick hard if I have to do palm mutes. (In my case wrapped pinky mutes)
I want to add as much clank before I mute the string so in those cases I tend to strike harder.
Everybody plays differently though, you always can supplement with EQ’s afterwards as well.
Lot of good information in that video link of Mark’s you posted @skydvr
Thank you.
Knowing how to set the Bass and Amp controls has always given me the tone I prefer as opposed to trying to achieve the same thing with pedals, which do have their place at times.
I am not a pedal junkie and only own a couple for my bass but my most used pedal would be my tuner
It comes down to personal preference, and style of music.
For classical and jazz, not too hard.
For rock n roll, like Geeer Buttler among others, they have a rep to play very hard.
It comes down to personal preference.
What suits your stye, and allows you to play without too much interference,
And what type of loud music you may or may not be trying to play
