I'm spilling sauce today. I stumbled upon this method while trying to spice up one of my 808's. It can help give your bass patches more character, without sacrificing the clarity of your records. Essentially the trick is all about adding a small amount of reverb and distortion to your bass channel, but only on the high frequencies. Reverb on bass tracks isn't uncommon, but you should apply it in a way that doesn't make your tracks muddy. Too much build up in the low end can create some nasty phase issues.
This technique focuses on duplicating your bass channel or 808, and isolating the high frequencies of ONE of the channels.
1. Start by duplicating your bass channel and grouping them together.
the next few steps will focus on your duplicated bass channel, call it the evil twin...
2. pitch the duplicated bass channel up 1 octave (+12 semitones)
3. Add an Auto filter plugin, set it to HIGH PASS and roll the cutoff up to about 1k
4. Add Compression, I like to use the GLUE COMPRESSOR
5. Add your favorite flavor of reverb. (mine was about 50% wet, with a decay time of 3.5 seconds)
6. Add some distortion. (I'm a huge fan of the CLA Effects plug for this one)... and you know I had to add some Canyon Reverb
7. Mix the channels to your liking, and add some final compression and EQ on the GROUP to glue it all together.
After you're all set up just arm the bass tracks by holding COMMAND and clicking both of the arm buttons.
Once you're ready to record select two empty clips while holding SHIFT, and hit ENTER to begin recording simultaneously.
This method sounds especially good when you turn on the glide effect and toss in some slides to the higher register. The higher notes sustain in the reverb and then everything cleans back up when you get back into the fatter bass notes.
Tweak this basic setup to find what sounds best for you. I've used this technique on Basses and 808's, you can also use it on synths. Just a great way to put some more playful high end into your tracks.