If you're gonna do that, Craig... maybe include a three staged version? As in one hones and dials the low, one dials in pick and one dials in growl... then each gets tossed on a clone as needed (and instructions on how to use all three)?
 
Of course single track solutions are ideal but I'm not sure if that set up would work on one track.
 
Just a thought.
 
Cheers.
 
Edit: Or of course there could be one track and three busses. Whatevers. Same thing.

Hi,
Studio Devil was a while ago in partnership with Sonar and they offer good tools for thickening a bass track.
The virtual bass amp costs around 70 bucks and gives instant results,there ´s also a more sophisticated tool which is called Virtual Bass Amp Pro but it costs more and I'm not aware if it can pull the sound to the next level.
Anyway with a proper DI Virtual Bass amp gives good results.
On another hand I recently got a small DI from Eden,they call it:"World Tour D I"so according to the name one should be able to play all over the World with it ,but it gives good results though according to me it is better if you can split the signal so you can have a dry track and the other one coming through this little box.
The other option ,like mentioned above,can be to record a well played clean track (through the proper DI) and take time with classical Eqs and comps to get the sound you're looking for.
Cheers.
Olivier

IKM Amplitube Ampeg and Waves Maxx bass are my favourite bass tools,
really like this sounds!

Well! That gives me a lot to check out. Thanks to all of you for taking the time on this one!

Maybe this will work for you, the CLA bass plugin:
 
http://www.waves.com/plugins/cla-bass
 
I do not have this one but I do have the CLA drum version and it is very useful.
 
 

CLA Bass is very good. Especially if you're a relative novice and like some good tweakable starting points. Not saying it's only for the novice but it's super useful especially if you don't already have a bunch of favorite comps and EQs lined up.

It really would be quite helpful if you described what kind of bass sounds/style of music you are after (and perhaps if you described your gear a bit too).
 
We're all kind of piling on the options (and really... some fine stuff is being recommended by smart/talented people) but it could save you some time if the answers were a little more... uh... tailored to your needs.
 
However you'll notice a lot of  "Ampeg" type sims being mentioned. Anything you get you may want to see if there are Ampeg models in there. Of course there are a lot of good bass amp manufacturers in the world but Ampeg stuff is pretty standard and sounds good on a wide range of styles... therefore good Ampeg models will likely serve you well in a virtual environment.
 
Don't forget though sampled bass is actually a really nice sounding and convenient option. Bass isn't like guitar or other instruments that really require the human touch (in most scenarios). I play bass and track all my bass tracks but now with the ARA MIDI conversion via Melodyne I'm really liking the method of tracking my bass part, converting to MIDI then blending in or replacing the audio with sampled bass. Those samples generally sound better than anything I could record/dial in with my modest gear and novice engineering skills.
 
Unless there are a lot of slides or crazy pop/slap stuff it works out great. There is a bit of clean up that needs to be done to the MIDI track because the ARA conversion is never perfect but it doesn't take long to fix things up. If you are dropping the audio track altogether (instead of blending) it's even easier because you can just use quantize or move notes without trying to match up witht he original.
 
Just trying to give you ideas... and this works quite nicely IMO. It also ain't really cheating because you actually played the parts anyway.... yanno just in case you insist on performing things like I try to.
 
Cheers.

Also, are we talking about a "real" bass recorded directly into the console, or a bass sample library?
 
I don't find that I need compression on sample libraries although a limiter can give the bass a subtly different (and cool) sound. (Bass with Limiter is one of the few bass presets I use in EX Mix.)  I do find EQ very important—especially a high pass filter and slight midrange boost—and do that by hand in the Pro Channel.  I usually rely on a plug-in preset when using parallel distortion because I don't normally get it right myself.
 
Not to keep pitching the Native Instrument Scarbee basses for Kontakt, but the Rick bass comes with some great presets that don't need much further tweaking.
 

UA LA-610 channel strip.  everything you need to make good bass.
 
Warm Audio WA-76 - nigh on perfect comp.

Geoff was here. Thanks for the thread.