How do I get this bass sound using a pedal currently being manufactured?
One source said they saw the bass player using a Boss SYB-5 in concert but it’s out of production.
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Gosh, I haven’t heard this in ages!! And that bass is DIRTY!! 
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Use a synthesizer 
You could maybe do something similar and fun with an Octaver based on the OC-2 circuit, or a bass synth pedal.
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My understanding is it was double tracked with a bass and a synthesizer an octave lower.
The Korg Toneworks G5 synth bass processor had a setting named after this song. But, no longer in production.
I looked into the EHX Bass Micro Synth and Mono Synth. From what I read, neither can do this.
@JoshFossgreen You’ve had a bunch of different synth pedals. Do you know of one that can do this?
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I just got the Unfiltered Audio TRIAD vst.
If you look at the BYOME distortion presets, some sound very much like the bass in “Down by the Water”.
By the way, it’s one of my favourite warmup songs!
Triad can be had for 10€ now:
https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/products/unfiltered_audio_triad.html
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Thanks, but I still don’t have DAW skills. That’s why I was asking about a pedal.
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Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? It’s about time to change that!
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I prefer pedals too. Only thing I care to really use the DAW for is setting a limiter on the master track and at the moment (until I can pick up a pedal to do it), I’m running a NAM profile for the SVT4Pro through the DAW. I figure the way I’m doing it will transfer over to a live setting better as I get to start playing in live settings.
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Having no desire whatsoever to ever play live again certainly simplifies things.
Being able to enjoy the much greater flexibility of a purely ITB workflow is pretty important to me.
It would get you close.
It’s so hard to reproduce studio stuff, particularly live.
There’s so much control and adjustment in the studio.
This pedal does pretty much that thing for me, but out of an amp, live, it is tremendously difficult to get it to behave in the right volume/intensity range.
If you add a compressor and maybe some other guiding/limiting/eq-ing things, I bet it would work.
I’m a broken record with this pedal, I know.
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A little Internet sleuthing came up with a Korg Toneworks G5, with specifically these settings:
Waveform:#5 ; Intensity: 10 o’clock; Decay: 9 o’clock; Resonance: 10 o’clock; Mix: 2 o’clock.
Apparently there is a preset on this pedal specifically for this song? Do not own, cannot confirm.
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I’m finding learning midi is a bit of a hiccup in this, but I’m sure I’ll get it figured out.
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Some DAWs are better than others for MIDI but in a bad way - all DAWs are better at some part of MIDI than all the others. Some are generally better but all are pretty good.
Except Audacity, which is laughably bad at it, but is also is not really a DAW anyway so it gets a pass.
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Also, apparently when seen playing live, the bassist used a Boss SYB-5 pedal.
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That’s okay! When you find something that gets the job done, it’s worth sharing.
I saw that also. Unfortunately, it’s in the “no longer made” category.
Yeah. Me too. I’ve spent too much of my life in front of a computer screen. I like things that take me away from that.
That would be nice. But, i don’t see it happening anytime that would be considered “reasonably soon”.
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The caveat I’d put on this one is that I’d love to set up a midi footswitch controller to control DAW plug ins like they were normal pedals but I know nothing about midi controllers or how to set them up. I think the amount of learning I’d have to do to make this work is a bit frustratingly beyond me right now.
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This is a tricky one! There are at LEAST two bass layers, I think I hear three? Like electric bass, a sine wavey subsynth, and then the super grindy synth sound.
That’d be tricky to really replicate - I would fake it with an octaver (with some dry signal keep in), then a super squelchy fuzz (I’d prob use my Red Witch Zeus, but I’d be looking for something that can get really stuttery and gross).
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On the SYB-5 I’d start with trying the pulse wave for the grindy part. The square wave could be doing the octave down. Marinelli does this a lot where he puts a square wave an octave under to round out the more bitey sound. Current production is a requirement? SYB are reasonably priced.
The grindy part sounds to me like what happens when you turn an oscillator down past audible. Could it be 2 octaves down?
I’ll give it a go on the Source Audio C-4 and see if I can get it close. That may be a violation though since it’s pretty much a plugin running in a pedal.
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This is extremely common in synthesis to the point that some synths just build in a dedicated suboscillator.
This will definitely sound more raw and “buzzy”.
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I’m thinking this is where I’ll end up. I’ve seen some for around $120.
I was thinking the SYB-5 was getting long in the tooth. It came out in 2004. It would be nice if Boss would put out a SYB-6 with more processing power. However, maybe that’s not necessary for what I’m looking for.
I can do this with the OC-5. I’ll have to test it out.
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