Bass Guitar: The signal chain.

Here is a question I received by email.

Message: Hi Adam,
My name is Mohamad Fanouse, i\'m 20 years old , i\'ve been working in recording for almost two years...
I've watched all of your videos and they\'re so cool and usefull, thank ou so much Adam for this cool site.
I'm wondering if you have some videos about recoding the electric bass guitar for rock music especially and other music genres..
i saw the video about the upright bass and it\'s so cool but it would be nice if i know more about the electric bass...
thank you very much Adam
Mohamad Fanous (Miky)

Answer:
There is only one way I record the bass. It's not the only way, but it works. 
For the big projects we always record the bed tracks first. The only tracks that are "keepers" is the bass and drums. We hook up a bass to a DI box and run that channel straight into a pre amp. This pre has 2 outputs ( balanced and unbalanced) The balanced goes to the sound card to be recorded, the unbalanced goes to the monitor mix. We are lucky to have a Grace 101 preamp, that gives a very clean "larger then life" sound. We use that setup for almost ever bass track, so to be honest I do not have too much experience in other signal chains. Besides the Grace, there is allot of pre amps that will do a great job.