Anyone tried a BassPOD with Markbass Amp?

[dean712]

I've had the BassPOD for a couple of years - I really love it for recording my bass guitar direct (used it on all 12 tracks of my band's last CD).

I've never used the BassPOD for live playing, though.

I bought a Markbass Little Mark II and 102P cabinet about a month ago (as a scaled-down alternative to my Ampeg stack) and was thinking that with the Markbass's clean, powerful, uncolored sound, it might be a good match for the BassPOD for playing live with the band, to get some interesting fuzz/grit and other effects happening. I'm just wondering if anybody else has experimented with this combination and had some useful results to share. With all of the variables in both pieces of equipment, there's a lot of possibilities.

I will also post any good results I get experimenting with the BassPOD in front of the Markbass.

[dean712]

I will also post any good results I get experimenting with the BassPOD in front of the Markbass.

Well... I spent a couple of hours this afternoon experimenting with the BassPOD and the Markbass, both using the effects loop and running the BassPOD in front of the amp. I was hoping to find a way to save a few channels in the BassPOD and use it to dial between tones while playing live.

First conclusion - the Little Mark II's effects loop is wired in parallel, so if you work it that way, you will be dealing with both the tone from the BassPOD and the Markbass together. With all of the gain stages and other complications in such a rig-up, it was too complex to be useful for me. Perhaps that would be to other folks' liking.

Second conclusion - running the BassPOD in front of the Little Mark II eliminated the parallel sounds complexity, so it was the method to pursue for me. I did a bunch of experimenting with effects and such from the BassPOD. The results were not encouraging, in the end. With some work, I was able to dial up some useful tones - a touch of overdrive, a chorus effect, etc. However, with the touchiness of the 4 gain stages - Gain and Master on the amp, and Output and Channel Volume on the POD, the balancing act was too tricky for me to trust taking to a live situation. Plus, when it came right down to it, I think I like the tone and flexibility out of the Markbass amp (using it's onboard EQ and VLE and VPF knobs) as well as anything I got with the POD (and it's so much easier that way).

YMMV - tone is very subjective. I used a '00 4003 in my testing. I'd be curious to see if anybody else on the Forum has tried anything similar.

Finally, the BassPOD is still a great tool for me to use for direct recording of bass. I'm still not finding a use for it live, though. I haven't tried running it direct into the PA, like Jeff Rath likes to do, mainly because for small gigs we don't get individual monitor mixes, so I'm skeptical that I'd be happy with my bass guitar's stage volume.