Line 6 Spider Jam as a bass practice amp

Howzit · #1 09-21-2011, 07:38 AM

Has anyone used a 75 watt Spider Jam amp as a practice amp for a bass? Does anyone have strong reservations and if so why?

will33 · #2 09-21-2011, 07:47 AM

The amp portion will be fine but a bass will fart out the guitar speaker in short order and likely blow it at anything above bedroom levels especially if it's openback.

I guess this one has a 12 and tweet, built in drum and bass backing tracks, etc. Try it first. It might handle something but playing recorded tracks like that is a lot less stressful on a speaker than actually playing a bass through it. The recorded tracks have a lot of limiting, no dynamics. A plucked bass has a lot of dynamics and transients, make that speaker jump outta there.

Howzit · #3 09-21-2011, 09:09 AM

Thanks for the reply. I'll look for a used Fender B-DEC instead.

Can anyone provide feedback on these as practice amps.

will33 · #4 09-21-2011, 01:52 PM

Haven't played one. If you can find that line6 at a GC or something it wouldn't hurt to plug into it and see what happens, I wouldn't buy one sight unseen. Can't tell from the ad copy if it's playing the backing tracks through a guitar speaker or if it's more of a PA type speaker that might handle a little bass and uses the modeling only for guitar tones.

Obviously with built in bass and drumloop backing tracks to play along with it's geared towards guitar and is going to have a bunch of distortion presets and probably not much for warm bass sounds.

There are plenty of other bass practice amps that have modeling and inputs to plug in an mp3 to jam with or whatever.