Need Speakers for Overdriven Bass Sound

[Jfish]

I play a 78 P Bass through an Ampeg V-4B and am currently looking to run it through an old 2x12 60's Fender Bassman Cabinet that I need to buy speakers for.
I'm looking for a fairly overdriven, dirty bass tone, but I don't know exactly what makes that happen. I know the Ampeg is a 100W tube (so more than 100W really).
Any ideas on speaker wattage/brands? Looking to spend 150-300$ on the pair. Is that unrealistic? Should I just stick to my fulltone distortion pedal?
Thanks for any help in advance.

[Rick Auricchio]

Stick with the pedal. Driving speakers into distortion will cause them to soon fail, because you can't be sure when they're at their limits.

[Mark Olson]

That's not true. I've distorted many a speaker and never blown one that way. If you know what you're doing you'll be fine. Rock and roll musicians have been doing that for decades with speakers that handle a lot less juice than current offerings.

You'll want a speaker with good breakup characteristics, which in my experience do not include professional audio application drivers.

Also you should be getting a good deal of distortion from your amp. How high are you cranking it? You probably need to crank it louder if you're not getting the desired distortion, or get a lower wattage amp that will distort quicker, such as a V2 (these sound great on bass).

While the pedal is always the suggested way to go for some bass players, if you've ever experienced the raw power of a pushed amp and cab, you'll know pedals make a lousy substitute.

Sorry I can't really help as to which drivers would work well with your specific cab!

[Jfish]

That's the thing, I've played through a few overdriven systems and like it a lot more than using my pedal. I know it's not technically great for the speaker but this is just for a side project and it's not my primary cabinet anyway. I got it with the original fender speakers already blown. I've never heard my V-4b through a 2x12 so I'm kinda' nervous about buying speakers for it.

Even without recommending a specific speaker brand is there a wattage I should look for? Is there any equation like 100W Tube Amp = 2 100W speakers or 4 50W speakers etc? Does more or less speaker wattage result in more or less overdrive?

Thanks for the answers so far.

[billfitzmaurice]

Originally Posted by Jfish

Even without recommending a specific speaker brand is there a wattage I should look for? Is there any equation like 100W Tube Amp = 2 100W speakers or 4 50W speakers etc? Does more or less speaker wattage result in more or less overdrive?

None of the above. If you want a good over-driven tone use a small guitar combo, a 1x10 or 1x12, placed above your regular bass rig. Use the respective master volumes as a 'balance' control between clean lows and crunched mids.

[JimmyM]

Originally Posted by Mark Olson

That's not true. I've distorted many a speaker and never blown one that way. If you know what you're doing you'll be fine. Rock and roll musicians have been doing that for decades with speakers that handle a lot less juice than current offerings.

and they've been blowing speakers for decades, too

[Mark Olson]

Yeah people blow speakers, but not just because they've distorted them. Usually you distort the speaker (exceed xmax) well before you hit Xlim and rip the cone or exceed the speaker's thermal power rating and melt the voice coil. Obviously, if you're blowing speakers you're doing something wrong, something way beyond just producing some musical speaker overdrive.

Good electric bass/guitar specific speakers with good overdrive characteristics are key to that ballsy rock and roll sound. I haven't tried them but the literature on the Celestion Green Labels looks appealing. Don't know how they'd work in your cab, and they can be hard to find, but if they do what Celestion says they do, they'd be right up your alley.

[JimmyM]

they still heat up pretty good when they go past xmax. sounds good, yes, won't blow them right away, but it'll stress them out and cause failure eventually. plus it's a real fine line between exceeding xmax and exceeding xlim. i don't find that the key to good amp distortion...i see it more as a way to keep having to buy new speakers.

[Hellbastard]

[billfitzmaurice]

Originally Posted by Mark Olson

Good electric bass/guitar specific speakers with good overdrive characteristics are key to that ballsy rock and roll sound.

What you're referring to is a driver with a short xmax. They will crunch at relatively low volumes, at power levels well below the driver thermal rating, and have at least a 3:1 xlim to xmax ratio, so that they are highly resistant to overshoot damage. The technical name for them is guitar drivers. To do what they do well they sacrifice the ability to go low and loud.
Electric bass drivers that have the ability to go low and loud don't work well where distortion is concerned; that's why guitar amps don't use them. There are some drivers that are in between the two, and as is the case with most compromises they don't do either duty particularly well. That's why using a bass amp with bass speakers for the lows and a guitar combo for the crunch literally offers the best of both worlds.

[TomB]

I'm not sure the OP was asking about distorting the speakers, per se. A V4 driven at anything over medium volume will develop an overdriven sound through any adequately capable speakers. For myself, and given the volume at which my V4 overdrives, I'd want to know they were bass speakers.

I do like Bill's approach of running a guitar amp for higher levels of distortion, but I've only tried it a few times as a curiosity so I don't know what wrinkles it would introduce on stage. I seem to recall that it was popular decades ago... think Jack Cassidy's Airplane sound. I also know that today (at least when I saw him a couple years ago) he was using a volume pedal in front of an overdrive pedal and he could "dial in" drive with his foot (into a DB750 rig). It was very effective.

[IvanMike]

BFM's dead on about guitar drivers (speakers). A very different animal.

However, your OP raises a big red flag - I think before you commit to anything, you need to figure out what kind of "distorted" tone you like, and then find examples of this and find out how it was done. The sound of a guitar speaker breaking up, a tube poweramp clipping, a "fuzz", an overdrive, and a ton of other things all sound different.

Bass is tough to distort while still sounding good. This is one of the reasons that BFM's approach of using a bass rig and a guitar rig together works well. Lots of other people use some kind of effect to distort the bass but "mix" or "blend" the original undistorted signal with the distorted one.

There's a reason for this - bass tends to not sound like bass any more once you distort it, and when playing with guitars that are also distorted in some manner, the bass can literally "disappear" in the mix. Using some kind of "blend" and/or using a radically different approach to overdrive than your guitar player helps with this.

[billfitzmaurice]

Originally Posted by IvanMike

Bass is tough to distort while still sounding good.

The technical reason for that is that the sound of clipping doesn't manifest in the low frequencies, which remain relatively unaffected. It's very much a midrange thing, and is best heard with drivers optimized for the midrange, ie., guitar drivers.

I do like Bill's approach of running a guitar amp for higher levels of distortion, but I've only tried it a few times as a curiosity so I don't know what wrinkles it would introduce on stage. I seem to recall that it was popular decades ago...

The first major example was Chris Squire, on the first 'Yes' alblum. We were floored by his tone, and as much as we tried couldn't duplicate his combination of fat bottom and full on dirty mids. Even Larry Graham didn't come close, when he went to distortion mode his low end disappeared, as in 'Dance to the Music'. I didn't find out that Squire had used a bass amp for the bottom and a Twin Reverb for the distortion until the 80s.

[IvanMike]

Originally Posted by Hellbastard

I kept meaning to comment on this - The story may be apocryphal, but the tone Geezer Butler has on the Eponymous Black Sabbath Record was the result of a blown driver in the only speaker cabinet available to him. He hated the tone, but they weren't able to get any kind of loan or advance to have it fixed. It turned out to be an Iconic tone. One band I was in had a home-made cab with an EV with a couple of holes in it and that got the nastiest tone ever. Unfortunately it eventually blew out completely, but what a sound...

[Mark Olson]

By good overdrive characteristics I mean doesn't sound like crap distorted. Yes, this is an advertised feature of guitar drivers, and yes they're easier to distort, but not all bass drivers sound like crap when you distort them either. The good ones sound good overdriven/with overdrive.

Stressing speakers or not, I distort my speakers and play loud every day, and the number of speakers I've had to replace because of doing this is 0.

[seamonkey]

Originally Posted by Hellbastard

+1
It's known that old blues players would slit their cones to add distortion and fuzz. These are captured on old tape recordings. Seems drastic but it's a part of history.

[billfitzmaurice]

Originally Posted by IvanMike

I kept meaning to comment on this - The story may be apocryphal, but the tone Geezer Butler has on the Eponymous Black Sabbath Record was the result of a blown driver in the only speaker cabinet available to him. He hated the tone, but they weren't able to get any kind of loan or advance to have it fixed. It turned out to be an Iconic tone. One band I was in had a home-made cab with an EV with a couple of holes in it and that got the nastiest tone ever. Unfortunately it eventually blew out completely, but what a sound...

Some early blues guitar players would poke holes in the driver cones with a pencil, to get a really nasty tone, because their 5 watt amps couldn't push the driver hard enough to do the job. It probably began with someone's kid poking the holes, and the player using it at a gig because he had only the one amp.

[Hellbastard]

The reason I posted this is because, slashing speakers was the way Dave Davies got the distorted tone for "You really got me"
YouTube - the kinks- you really got me

IME, forcing a speaker to distort by maxing it out, sounds like a fart.

[JimmyM]

Originally Posted by billfitzmaurice

Some early blues guitar players would poke holes in the driver cones with a pencil, to get a really nasty tone, because their 5 watt amps couldn't push the driver hard enough to do the job. It probably began with someone's kid poking the holes, and the player using it at a gig because he had only the one amp.

that would have been one roy buchanan, and his amp had a speaker with razor slices in it. he did it on purpose to see what would happen.

[12bass]

Originally Posted by billfitzmaurice

The first major example was Chris Squire, on the first 'Yes' alblum. We were floored by his tone, and as much as we tried couldn't duplicate his combination of fat bottom and full on dirty mids. Even Larry Graham didn't come close, when he went to distortion mode his low end disappeared, as in 'Dance to the Music'. I didn't find out that Squire had used a bass amp for the bottom and a Twin Reverb for the distortion until the 80s.

Others, like dUg Pinnick and Tom Petersson have continued in this tradition, using a variety of guitar and bass amps to create an overdriven guitar-like midrange with a relatively clean bottom end.

Pinnick has been known to use a rather complex rig with crossovers plus sophisticated EQ and signal processing to blend the lows and distorted mids/highs into a singularly massive bass tone.

For a decade or so, Petersson used three amp rigs - one for each pickup on his 12-string basses - one with tube guitar amps for distorted bridge, one for tube guitar amps for distorted middle, and one with a bass rig for clean bottom from the neck pickup. More recently, however, he's been using basses with only pickup (neck) and splitting the signal between guitar and bass amps, presumably with a high-pass filter going to the guitar rig and the highs rolled off on the bass rig. Again, it makes for a huge overall tone.