Reddit mentions of Clayton Picks Clayton Acetal Standard Guitar Picks (S100)

Justin uses a Wal bass which has multi coil pickups and a filter based preamp.

Each pickup has 2 coils per string which outputs to their own wires that feed into the preamp board.

Wal bass pickup

The preamp uses 2 low pass filters, one for each pickup. They each have a resonance bump at the cutoff which makes your EQ look like this:

Resonant low pass filter

So as you're shaving off the highs with the filter, you're also boosting a target frequency.

It also has a narrow frequency that it boosts in parallel with the filters that accentuates pick attack.

The bass tone itself with the tone controls open is very mid heavy, almost like the low end is attenuated at some point in the circuit. I've heard people complain that it lacks low end, but that's desirable if you're going for punch that cuts.

A huge part of Justin's tone that goes overlooked is the type of pick you use and technique.
I've tried many types of picks made of different materials and thicknesses and I've found these to give the best tone. I think I've even read that Justin uses them.

Clayton Acetal Pick 1mm

A big part of getting that tone is where you pick on the string. Try experimenting picking starting right at the bridge and slowly moving up to picking at the bottom of the neck. You'll notice a huge change in tone. Another element is the angle at which you're picking. Justin has a lot of scraping along the edge of the pick going on when he's playing certain parts.
This will definitely get you closer no matter what bass/pedals/amp you're using.


Ignore Justin's amp settings, try developing your ears more. He boosts the bass/low end more than you would other basses because of the lack of it in a Wal. Most basses you're probably going to want to turn your lows down if you want that punch. I'd get your drummer to play the kick drum and turn the lows down, bring your low mids up to the point where you're liking the punch, adjust volume, then bring the lows up just to the point that you're not conflicting with the kick, and you're hearing it as one big punch element. This will depend on volume and the room you're playing in too. Oh and make sure the speaker is head level, raise it with milk crates or a chair if you need to and stand in front and away from it when you adjust your EQ. If you have a long speaker cord that allows you to put your head in a good spot where you can actually hear everything, it helps immensely. You definitely don't want to adjust the EQ with the speakers under you blowing passed your legs.

You're going to want some low-mids, this is what cuts and punches with the kick drum when you're playing with a band and what makes Tool that punching rhythmic wall of heaviness that it is. 'Presence' controls are going to get you closer to the scrapey/clicky tone he gets naturally from a Wal. A lot of amps have this built in these days. A sansamp bass DI can get you pretty close to that presence sound:

Sansamp Bass Driver DI

I used to use one but I started to realize I wasn't a huge fan of the way it colored the sound.
Oh and putting new strings on all the time is a huge part of the tone. That's something that really sucks since bass strings are so damn expensive. Something that you're just gonna have to live with until you can afford new strings every night.

Justin splits his signal to 2 amps. The signal goes through a TurboRat and Boss GEB-7 bass EQ before going into the 'dirty' amp.
I made this diagram a long time ago that still floats around:

Justin Rig

You can try to emulate that with a blend pedal through one amp but it's not gonna be the same thing. Get a blender with a phase/polarity flip switch. There are pedals that flip the phase internally, which wouldn't normally matter, but if you split and recombine your signal, and one of those pedals flipped your phase, you're now going to have a really thin tone that lost a lot of low end.

Xotic Xblender

Radial mix blender

Lastly the signal is split and goes into a Demeter bass preamp which goes to a PA. This basically just reinforces the higher end clarity. It's a pretty clean preamp so if your bass sounds great, the preamp will sound great. This also gets routed to the mixing board where there is probably some light processing happening. It's also a useful DI for recording but if that is your sole purpose and you're not going to be playing through a PA system, I'd probably buy a different piece of hardware.

The bass Whammy that Justin uses was discontinued but they're now producing a newer model that is just as good, if not better than the old one.

Digitech Bass Whammy

I own both and they do sound slightly different but once you're playing with a band, it's not that much of a difference that you would probably be able to pick it out or provide enough of an impact to completely transform a song.

Schism, he uses the Octave up shift setting with delay.

The Pot he uses Octave up shift with an envelope filter set very precisely after the whammy in the signal chain.

Good luck, strive to develop your ears!