Forget the cabs/ IR’s. You wanna manipulate the hell out of your DI ( assuming it’s a great sounding DI in the first place). The most in your face, present, and biggest bass tones are almost always ( in my opinion) done with just a DI. I would start here. I would YouTube how to mix bass guitars, and what techniques many use, such as splitting the bass into multiple tracks ( sub, mids, highs, distortion etc) and then summing them together for the final tone in one buss. There’s tons and tons of resources online about this.
Bass ( in rock and heavier music) is all about consistency, which means compressing the shit out of it, mostly in the low end. If you split your bass into multiple tracks, you REALLY want to compress the hell out of the sub lows. This will give you the solid foundation and solid low end you need, but don’t even realize is there in modern music or why it is like this. This is the key. Consistency. You don’t want your bass dropping out or popping out too much when certain notes are hit on the fretboard of a bass. This is again, where loads of compression comes in. I’ll compress 15-20db on the sub lows, whatever it takes to give a solid foundation and consistency in the low end of your track.
Start here. And forget the IR’s/cabs, you will have way more control and get way more unique tones utilizing just a DI. Start with a DI, a sansamp plugin ( thousands of amazing bass tones have been recorded with this), and an 1176 style compressor.
