Fender Bassman...anyone use it for bass?

[Tommy Tourbus]

opinions?

[DiabolicLow B]

Not sure which Bassman you are referring to but I had a 72' Fender Bassman 50 for years and just sold it. I actually only used it a few times about 20 years ago, they are coveted much more as guitar amps (my guitar player at the time loved it!). For bass it never had enough volume and farted out way to soon, it did sound good at low volumes though.
Overall I would not recommend them, at least the 50.

[KJung]

+1 My favorite memory of a Bassman back in the day was never having to play out of one of those farty messes again when the higher powered solid state stuff (and more powerful tube stuff) became available.

GREAT guitar amps though!

To the OP, if you are looking for that tone in a format that will allow you to actually gig with it, consider an Alembic pre (modeled after the Fender preamp) and a power amp. If you are on a strict budget, the Hartke LH500 does a pretty good job of doing a 'clean Bassman' tone at decent volume.

[haens]

I have met it (Fender '59 Bassman LTD) in studio twice. it can handle bass pretty well but I think it is usable as studio bass amp only because the sound gets distorted pretty fast so you cant play it very loud - it has only 1 volume knob for each channel, no usual combination of gain + master, and with my G&L SB2 trib (which on the other side has pretty hot output) it got distorted somewhere around no.4. the sound was really nice though, especially when using bright channel.