Drive: off
Bright: off
Treble: 50% (set at noon / 12 o’clock)
Bass: 50% (set at noon / 12 o’clock)
Volume: Whatever sounds comfortable/good
Step Two
P Pickup Volume: 50%
J Pickup Volume: 0%
Tone: 50%
Step Three
Step Four
Leave them off till you find the basic sound you like on the bass.
Then use them as needed, as you like. Don’t think you have to ignore them because you’re a beginner. Especially that drive knob. Overdrive is a lot of fun.
Part of doing all this is you finding a reference point to work from. Usually the 50% mark on any given knob. This way you can return knobs to that position and start over if you start to feel like you’ve lost track of what knobs are having what effect.
The concept you’re chasing here is called “unity gain”, and basically it means that all of your pedals are set such that the volume is the same whether the pedal is bypassed or not.
Unfortunately I don’t know a better way to do it than adjusting all pedals to do this. And this is tricky when it comes to pedals with no separate output level knob, or when you want to change settings.
One thing you can do is put a preamp last in your chain and control the overall master level of your board with its volume knob, before going to the amp or audio interface. At least then it’s mostly one knob. But that doesn’t solve the whole problem (as different gains in the chain itself will change how subsequent pedals sound.) But that’s what I did before selling it all and moving entirely into the DAW.
Thanks to Eric for his suggestions for making what may seem complex much easier. If it’s OK I’ll add a couple more thoughts one of which is that an EQ set at noon is not necessarily the “flat” setting for that particular amp. You may need to spend some time working with each tone control to find it or search for something someone else has posted online whose done this for you. Many amps have voicings that are far from neutral or “flat” when the EQ controls are set to noon.
The other is what’s covered in what I quoted above. What your rig will sound like at home in a small room isn’t what it will sound like in a larger more open room. What the crowd hears is also not what you hear standing a few feet in front of it. Many times the rig must be EQ’d for the room in a way you may not enjoy on stage but in that room it works perfectly. There were nights when I hated how I sounded on stage but if I walked out into the room to hear it I was shocked by how much better it sounded.
Good piece of advice in that last paragraph as well. Smaller tweaks on your amp should yield the right results if everything else has been done correctly first. Basses and Guitars have their own voices and ways to adjust them. Their controls should be effective enough to allow you to adjust those on the fly without any major changes in the amps settings. Effects are a whole other ball game so I won’t deal with that here.
