IMO for guitar players, it's mostly technique that makes us shitty bass players. I use those rubberized picks that are supposed to sound like fingerpicking. They absolutely do not, but they are better than using regular guitar picks as you don't get the high pitched scraping sound that comes along with picking a bass string at an angle with a tortex pick. The rubber ones sound almost the same and I don't have to waste an entire afternoon automating notch EQs to get rid of the scrape noise.
Bass is, begrudgingly admitted, much more difficult to play cleanly than guitar is. Any little fuckup in timing, fretting or picking consistency is instantly noticeable in a recording. I'm not exactly Stu Hamm but I play and write technical stuff, and my basslines need to be more than just riding a root note like I'm in Van Halen. Since my technique is nowhere near good enough or consistently clean enough to nail a full tune in one take, I end up with a shitload of takes glued together.
Where you pick (towards the bridge vs towards the neck) is, as you said, equally important. I think it's personal preference as to where you do it, but you need to stay in the same place all the time. If you start a measure picking on the saddles and 3 notes later you're picking in the middle of the pickups, it's going to sound completely different and stick out like a sore thumb in your recording. I'm guilty of this too, because I'm just a shitty bass player. I totally understand why people program this shit in midi, it's not as cool but a lot of the time it's WAY more time-effective than having us shred types actually learn to play bass. :lol:
