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Gallien-Krueger 1001rb-II

Reviews

Recommended By	Average Price	Average Rating
92% of reviewers	$590.36	8.6

supersize

Description:

1001RB-II SpecificationsPOWER 90dB, Clip LED, -14dB Pad, Volume, Mute Switch and Mute LED
VOICING FILTERS: 5/4 String Voicing, Adjustable Contour and Presence
EQUALIZER: Bass Specific Series Four Band Active
OUTPUT: Boost, Tweeter Level with Hi-Cut Switch and Woofer Level with Hi-Cut Switch
DIRECT OUT: XLR, Ground Lift, Pre/Post Switch and Level Control
PATCHING: Send, Return and Tuner Out
SPEAKER OUTPUT: Two 1/4" and Two Horn Bi-Amp compatible Speakon Connectors
WEIGHT: 22 lbs
DIMENSIONS: 19"W x 3.5"H x 8"D

Author

Lorenzini

Registered User

Registered: December 2004
Location: Los Angeles
Posts: 4324

Review Date: Sat June 16, 2007

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: $400.00 | Rating: 10

Pros:	Great tone, headroom, versatility, features
Cons:	None I can think of

I got this head for an incredible price. $400 means I can hardly say anything bad about it. Actually, even if I paid $500 I wouldn't.

The head has a great fingerstyle and slap tone. It can thump for country or tame down for jazz. It has all of the necessities such as tuner mute, woofer hi cut, etc... And it does so in a package that could easily plug-and-play.

It has more than ample power.

I wouldn't say it does a great Ampeg SVT impersonation, but that's exactly why I got this head. It's quick and represents my basses' true sound. You could say this head isn't a BSer

This is a head I'll be happy with for years to come.

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Quote:

Originally Posted by JimmyM

it's like saying that if fish live in water and you find an old boot in the water, an old boot is a fish.

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metallicafan18

Registered User

Registered: February 2007
Location: Georgetown, IN (Louisville KY)
Posts: 3403

Review Date: Sun April 27, 2008

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: $620.00 | Rating: 10

Pros:	Sound, portability, quality of materials
Cons:	none

This is the best head I have ever had. It is very easy to dial in a tone and stick with it. It is plenty loud, and doesn't clip. I can go from a really metal tone to a nice slap tone by just turning one knob. This head is very sturdy and I don't see it breaking at all. Buy this head today!

James Holley
Registered User

Registered: December 2006
Location: Holley By Golly
Posts: 6

Review Date: Sat July 12, 2008

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: $750.00 | Rating: 9

Pros:	Power Tone Price and LIGHT WEIGHT
Cons:	Wish it had a compressor

All things considered, power, tone, price and weight, you can't beat this GK head. I have one powering my Ampeg 4x10 HLF cabinet and it sounds great. GK customer service is top notch as well.

bassman_rob
Registered User

Registered: December 2006
Location: Bend, OR
Posts: 68

Review Date: Mon July 21, 2008

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: $500.00 | Rating: 8

Pros:	Relatively lightweight, Tons of power, awesome for bi-amping
Cons:	Nothing major

Just got this head. I just love it with my GK Neo 212 cabinet. I absolutely love bi-amping, and here's why. Passive crossovers introduce distortion and are really inefficient. So when you're giving a cabinet 600w of power, that crossover is sapping at least 60 watts! I'll take a little hit in output power if it's bi-amped anyday.

One little quibble about this head. It takes a little bit to get used to the tone controls starting with treble on the left. Why does GK think that they need to be different than all the other manufacturers? Their products are awesome, they don't need to reinvent the wheel just 'cuz.

Overall, I just love it.

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Ibanez SR 506; Ibanez BTB 575FM in grey; GK 1001RB-mk2; GK Neo 212, GK Neo 112, Boss RC-2, CEB-3 LMB-3. youtube com /robsidle

BassDan8
Registered User

Registered: July 2008
Posts: 5

Review Date: Thu July 24, 2008

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: $750.00 | Rating: 8

Pros:	Light, amazing tone, I love the boost, plenty of power, direct out is great for recording, voicing filters are top notch
Cons:	I would like more headroom, heats up really fast

This is an incredibally powerful and punchy amp. The tone is amazing, and I love the boost and voicing filters. This tends to het very hot if it is played for more than an hour with the volume turned up. The biggest problem for me is headroom. I play a corvette double buck which is a very loud bass, and I have to turn down the bass's volume to prevent clipping. The best SS amp out there. But as always, I like tube a little better.

shutupdonnie
Registered User

Registered: September 2008
Location: San Jose, CA
Posts: 21

Review Date: Mon September 15, 2008

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: $375.00 | Rating: 8

Pros:	amazing sound and power
Cons:	plastic input jacks prone to breakage (it happened to me)

I bought this 1001RB mark II head second hand a year ago for the ridiculously low price of $375 from a guy that said it didn't have enough power to keep up with 2 guitar players with full stacks. i honestly have no idea what he was talking about. this thing has more than enough power for any live application i can think of. besides that, the xlr direct out will feed a PA just fine if being able to be heard were ever an issue. I run mine through an avatar b410 neo cabinet and it sounds great. nice tight mids and highs with plenty of bass. my only issue with this head is that the jacks are all PLASTIC and soldered directly onto the PC board. during a gig, some drunk ass tripped over my cable and the input jack snapped off! i was able to super glue it back into place, and then after rethreading the PLASTIC nut onto the jack and supergluing it to the face of the head, it was no problem. but c'mon. PLASTIC? the jack works fine now, but it's still a little loose, and i have to periodically re-glue it in place. apparently there is an upgraded PC board available for the head for like $200 with jacks that are actually made out of metal. this is my only complaint about this amp, and that's why it gets an 8 instead of a 10 .

D-Man VanKrill
Registered User

Registered: December 2007
Location: Alaska
Posts: 62

Review Date: Sun May 10, 2009

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: $750.00 | Rating: 8

Pros:	Killer Sound, cool looking, relatively small and powerful
Cons:	Plastic inputs, no compression

This head is awesome!! I've had her for a while now and it sounds crisp, clean, powerful, punch and loud. However, a compression would be nice (even if it is kind of a rare thing on most heads) and the plstic inputs and nuts gotta go

Not that they are falliny off or anything but, the 1/4 in plug-in nut on the back just cracked somewhere along the line and I have no clue how? Simple remidy... METAL PARTS!! Other than that, great product and the compression is more of just a "It would be neat" sort of thing. I would highly recommend this.

derridiandrift

Registered User

Registered: April 2009
Location: Hamilton ON
Posts: 1063

Review Date: Thu July 2, 2009

Would you recommend the product? No | Price you paid?: $700.00 | Rating: 6

Pros:	power, weight
Cons:	noise

I'm rating this amp as "good" and giving it a 6 because in my (over 25 years) experience, an "excellent" bass amp has to give good value for the money and most importantly, be usable in a wide variety of situations.

I like the fact that this amp has plenty of power. You can get some serious volume out of this little box. That's the other bonus... it's small and reasonably light. The eq section gives you enough control to shape your tone, but I think the bass is voiced a little too low. The boost control is neat. It sounds to me like it thickens up your tone by way of harmonics and thereby achieves more a "rock" voicing. Read the manual for a description on how to use it properly. It's fairly effective.

Bi-amping: this is, in my opinion, a stupid design, which is NOT to say that people who use this feature are stupid, by any means. Firstly, the only way to take advantage of this feature is to use GK cabs. If you don't use GK cabs, this is a feature that will sit in your amp for life and never be used. Useless expense in my opinion. But hey, beauty is in the ears of the beholder, so even if you like the sound of GK cabs, the cost of adding a second power amp, crossover circuitry, controls, jacks, etc. would be better spent on making this amp QUIET; now on to the amp's Achilles' heal.

This thing is just too noisy to make it worth anything more than half the MSRP. The amp hisses. Loudly, and all the time. There is no combination of controls to make the amp stop hissing (trust me, I tried everything). Actually, that's not entirely true. The only way to make it stop hissing is to turn it off. When I took it back to the retailer they hooked it up and said, "oh, that hissing sound? GK amps do that. Most people just learn to ignore it."

In the end, the noise off this head was the deal breaker for me. I returned mine after a month of gigs and rehearsals. It's simply not pro-gear if it makes that much noise, and there are plenty of quieter amps on the market in this same price range.

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"The dude abides."

Fender Precision Club #442
Ampeg Portaflex Club #134

4OnTheFloor

Registered User

Registered: April 2010
Location: Youngstown, OH
Posts: 136

Review Date: Mon April 19, 2010

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: $650.00 | Rating: 9

Pros:	Loud, Clear, Lightweight,
Cons:	Cooling Fan On Top, Gets Hot, Plastic Jacks

I've owned this for two years. This amp is loud, clear, plenty of bass and mids, bi-amp is nice (NEO410 cab). I love how light this amp is. Does a great job with passive basses, sounds a bit sterile with my ebmm sr5, I prefer that clear low end. I also bought this instead of a tube because I also play upright. For the upright I switch off the 5-string setting and roll the lows off all the way to get a clear low end with no extra boomy bass. Has a bit too much color to use with an urb, but a good compromise. Maybe a 15" would cover up most of the amp's overtones. For what I paid for this and how much I've used it, this amp has paid itself off. I have had trouble only once when it fizzled out, then I turned it off, shook it and turned it back on. No trouble since then. I am guessing that dust got in through the fan vent. The fact that it is on top, makes this amp tougher to mount in a rack. This thing gets hot as it is, after a good 2 hours at loud volumes. That is the only gripe. I love the GK boost knob, the growl is fantastic.

Evanator
Registered User

Registered: January 2011
Location: Midwest

Review Date: Fri January 7, 2011

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: $499.00 | Rating: 9

Pros:	Silent, Powerfull, Light and Secure Handle
Cons:	Input and woofer must be at about 1% for boost to growl and decent volume

Silent. The only thing at practice that doesn't even humm. Derridiandrift,... There is no reason for the noise you had coming from this head. Your head doesn't represent the model at all.
Mine has had one issue besides the ones that others have posted here. At power-on,... it has had a humm that is rather quiet.
With daily use for over a year,... this has happened only three times, and always goes away after it has been powered-down for a day. Compression and metal hardware would be nice,... as would a push-button mid-scoop. But so long as you don't have the same issue as Derridiandrift, this amp gives nobody a reason to complain.

somegeezer
Registered User

Registered: October 2009
Location: Leeds, England
Posts: 1003

Review Date: Sat October 8, 2011

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 10

Pros:	Size, power, EQ, boost, adjustable DI output, solid construction.
Cons:	Fan on top, GK-only bi-amping.

I have had this amp for a couple of years now I believe. It has never had a single thing go wrong with it.

I understand that because of the relatively small size of this product, that the fan on top makes more sense than anywhere else, but this amp can get really hot after a practise and especially after a gig, under hot stage lighting. I'd hate to see how hot it would get being put into a rack too.

I'd also love to be able to use the bi-amp feature to control the top end tweeters, but just can't afford to splash out on what GK cabs cost. Using the tweeter in a regular set up can give an awful hiss and so I prefer to just turn the tweeters off on my Laney NX410s.

Other than those 2 cons, I think everything else about this amp is perfect. It won't be going anywhere until either it dies or I do.

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English | Metal | Long Hair | GK 1001RB-II/Laney Nexus NX410
[insert witty quote here]

j_romero

Registered User

Registered: November 2010
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posts: 134

Review Date: Sat December 10, 2011

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: $500.00 | Rating: 9

Pros:	power, light weight
Cons:	plastic jacks, top cooled, effects (send & return) are in front

This GK is awesome. Very reliable and lots of power. I play this thing through a MESA 2x15 and can handle pretty much everything I have thrown at it (literally, that's another story).

Few issues I have 1.) inputs jacks. Very easy to break if not careful when connecting or disconnecting your cables. 2.) the fan being on top of the unit. I have this head racked in a 6U road case and I only utilize 5U and leave 1 rack space open above the head to keep it cool. And 3.) the effects inputs being in front. Since I already have 1 rack space open for the fan, I route the cables from the rear of the compressor to the front of the head from the opening. It's probably only me, but I like to have a clean look in front of the head and not any other cables aside from my instrument cable.

shenager
Registered User

Registered: April 2011
Posts: 6

Review Date: Tue December 20, 2011

Would you recommend the product? Yes | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 8

Pros:	Lots of power. Fat tonal range. Best bang for buck
Cons:	Clips with active preamps - Gets too hot

Actually I traded a carvin pb500 head with a carvin 210 cab and a 115. The speakers from the carvin were fine, but I prefer not to scab my rig. GK stack for the gk sound. Im overall happy with the amp, and I have had it since its first revision it the original chassis. It had some warranty issues, that had it in for repair, but that crazy dude in hollywood did an awesome job making this thing right. It went up there for 2 repairs. Both were handled by GK. I will always be a GK customer because they back their sh*t up and thats cool. I cant wait to get one of these new MB heads. If they are anything half as cool as their MB115 8 ohmer, im already sold. I gig alot and we all know the chore. Thats what we're really paid for, hauling gear. Having the benefit of tiny and light intrigues me.

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