I've tried stuff like this before and never really thought it sounded any better than treating the whole tonal spectrum on it's own.
I'm anxious to hear Erkan's chain. It probably wouldn't work for the type of music I do, but the growl is still nice, and may give me tips to a better tone that fits my tonal goals.
Glad you think my chain is cool, here's roughly how it's setup:
Track 1: Where the DI comes in straight from my Profire 2626, no pedals or anything before. This track has a send to a second track, Pre-FX. On Track 1, there's AmpegSVX and an EQ after I think. Not very much EQing other than a little bit scooping in the cardboard freqs (150-300 or so) and a little presence boost around 3-4k but I'm not entirely sure about the numbers right now.
Track 2: A send from Track 1 is fed here and I've got an EQ that high passes at 500hz or so and a big scoop at around 1k (otherwise the distortion goes VERY metallic in this case when you high pass the signal and then distort it). After this EQ, WarpVST is active on the Warp channel with the gain at as much as I needed for some grit, bass is rolled off all the way I think, mids are around 7, treble at 3-4 and presence at 5-6 or something. I used keFIR with Sickan's Warp Cab Bypass impulse because I wanted a very bright and wet distortion which I then low passed a little bit with an EQ after WarpVST.
Both of these tracks then go into a bus where a multiband compressor evens out the whole spectrum and then feeds it into two compressors back to back for some staged compression. The first one lets a lot of attack through while the second one clamps down on them. Release is set pretty fast, 80ms or so (fast for bass guitars anyway I believe). The actual compression is about 5-6 dB per compressor, and the multiband is doing something similar too so we're looking at about 15 db gain reduction in total I think.
Sorry for the long text but I suck at explaining things like this through text. I'm at home now so I have no screenshots to take or anything. I will however make videos later when the mixing stage starts and I will "reveal" the basics of my chains and stuff.
Anyway, I found something I like and that I could reference to and that was Sybreed. On the album Antares, there is a track called Orbital which has the bass guitar solo for a second and then the drums kick in. You can still hear the bass guitar very nicely and I like the grit in that bass. I think I'm gonna play around a little bit more with my compressors to get a smoother sound like in Orbital, and also tame the lows a little bit more which should automatically bring up the mids. After that, I think my bass tone will be pretty much good enough. I like the growl I've got now without it being too much.
