I take a different approach to bass than most. I use Sony MDR-7506 headphones for everything, and you should too. But you won't know why - I mean really have the lightbulb appear above your head - until you do it yourself.
No amount of my yammering can possibly convey what listening to your own rig through flat-response headphones can teach you in thirty seconds.
And that's just the first part. The second - and most important - part is to listen to your rig with drums, at full roar from across the room! Again, you won't really get it until you do it yourself. The reason is because drums do all sorts of weird *trump to your bass tone and unless you're hip to it you won't even know about it until you're halfway through the first song.
Drums soak up all kinds of lows and mids, and I'll make a flat-out prediction here that your drummer doesn't own a tuner (if they do, buy them gifts. Talk nicely to them. That's a unicorn drummer, and they're far and few between).
If the floor tom and bass drum(s) are out of tune with each other by even a few cents (much less, tuned to whatever tuning your drummer thought sounded spiffy in his basement) there goes your carefully-crafted 250-500 punch.
You can throw as much wattage as you want at it, but it'll still sound flabby, like someone beating a headboard against the wall in the next room at a cheap hotel (I've actually experienced this way too many times on tour). Buy your drummer a $15 tuner and have him pick a key (G is popular) and your life will improve immeasurably.
The reason you want to hear your rig from across the room (don't you love wireless?) with a drummer bashing away is simply because we don't have ears in our knees. Standing in front of a bass amp (or worse, beside it) is the absolute worst place in the room to hear your bass. Sound waves from low notes are fifty feet long.
Low frequencies are omnidirectional (which is why you can hide the woofer from your home entertainment setup behind the couch) and denote power, and higher frequencies are directional, and denote definition.
I used a minimoog for decades (mostly for Dreamweaver, ha ha) and discovered that calling up a saw toothed wave and lopping the top off gives you a colorless bassoon-like tone, but adding high frequencies back gives you everything from a piercing solo violin screech to a mellow oboe sound, and everything in between.
The more you fiddle with those upper harmonics and partials, the more it defines the characteristics of vastly different instruments. It's the same thing with digital modeling, because that's what they sampled in the first place! (All synthesis comes down to basically four waveforms.)
It's the same balancing act with electric bass with drums, whether you're aware of it or not. (They don't call you a rhythm section for nothin', stud.) Its all about the sound of the ensemble, and the nice thing is that when you get your power dialed in with the drums, your sound is defined by what you do with the upper harmonics.
*my new word for the same old ... well, you know.
