Adethefade

I agree that many players - especially guitarists - don’t grasp the distortion/compression relationship. I can’t count the number of times I’ve sat & watched a guy widdling like his life depended on it, yet all anyone can hear is wasps’ nest! It’s even more important for bass, where note attack & definition is important. Great advice to work backwards

I have the little Dug pedal too and I really like it, but keep returning to the GL. I should probably put some effort in since it fits in your pocket.

That's certainly not been my experience with the rack mount GED-2112. By far and away the best preamp I've ever used. It happily goes from clean to filthy and everything in between. Personally I favour just north of clean - a bit of drive as you've mentioned. I use Stingrays mainly but other instruments, including my Geddy Jazz, also work really well with it. I use it mainly with IEMs and no backline, but a decent bi-amped backline setup also works well. Maybe the pedals are of a different build.

My two-pennorth. I got one of these a few weeks back. Firstly I racked it up and tried it through a good 2-channel power amp and and two Aguilar 12” cabs. I don’t use backline unless a dep job comes in, it’s usually IEMs and direct to the console, but I was interested to hear it through an amp setup. I then set up my usual gigging configuration with IEMs and tried it like that. In both situations it absolutely blew me away. I’ve now gigged it a few times - It’s hands down the best preamp I’ve used. Our sound guy said it sounds huge. I use Stingrays and it seasons the sound without changing it; I just get more warmth, more dynamic, more sustain...just great. I plugged up my ‘70s Jazz, brought up the drive control and it was instant ‘Moving Pictures’, a sound I’ve been after all my life. I’d recommend the GED 2112 to anyone - it’s not just a ‘Geddy Lee’ sound machine, it’s a great versatile preamp. I use the two-channel setup because it’s no real hardship for me, but if that’s a problem there’s an internal jumper that you can move which sends both channels down both outputs. It’s not a hack, just an option. Not sure why it’s not in the user guide. i hope that’s of some use to you guys. Ade

Adding cabs is usually going to produce improved results. When amplifying low frequencies you need as much amplifier power as you can possibly achieve; once a bass sound is loud and clean, you're off to a flying start. As well as increasing amplifier power by reducing the impedance presented to the amp, adding another cab introduces another sound source which adds SPL, it'll be a different sound because it's probably a different cab, and when speaker enclosures are coupled (stacked or side-by-side) they tend to enhance each other's performance. In short, massive power and loads of cabs!

As mentioned above, daisy-chaining passive speaker cabs is actually connecting them in parallel, which is important to know. I'd say the quickest way to achieve way better performance for the same, or smaller, footprint would be to get a good set of active cabs for FOH use and run your monitors from the existing power amp.