Amos Williams – the bassist for British progressive metal band Tesseract – recognizes that bass guitar is perhaps the hardest part of the mix for a listener to discern. That's why he takes an approach to playing that works in tandem with the way that our brains work. He finds the upper and lower regions in which the drums and the guitar are not, and he plays there.
This style, paired with his background as an orchestral percussionist, leads to very untraditional basslines that are often more rhythmic than they are melodic. He plays a lot of dead notes and harmonics and lets the listeners' brains fill in the rest. In this way, he's able to cut through the mix with more clarity than bassists are generally able to achieve.
In the above video, Amos walks us through his approach to bass tone and how he achieves this clarity specifically. He also shows us more about the bass he's playing on, which is a prototype that he has been working on with Jeff Kiesel.