Once I bought a little used Crate bass practice amp with a 10" speaker, $50. I could hardly believe how excellent it sounded. I can't remember the model.
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Best portable practice bass combo amp?
- Thread starter bassbourne
- Start date
Well your experience is not the same as mine. Surely it depends on how loud you play?
Hey bassbourne, grab a Vox amPlug2 or similar headphone amp--$40...it's about the size of a matchbox, plugs into your output jack; has an input jack for music source (drum machine, computer, metronome, etc)....probably not much point in getting another amp if your current amp is too big and too loud for home use...I've done almost all my practicing through one brand or another of these for years... very convenient--especially if you enjoy practicing outdoors!
I have a wonderful Blackstar Fly Bass amp, 5 watts. Does well for in home practice and small acoustic practices.
I have the Roland. It's great. Plenty loud and clear enough, decent drum machine built in and it'll work off batteries. I love mine!
I also have a Line 6 LD15. That's very good too. Great sound, some built in FX and amp voicings, but no battery power. Are you in the UK? It's for sale potentially. I don't need two!
FYI, the Hartke HD15, Rumble 15, and Rumble 25 are only an inch or two smaller than the Rumble 40 in each dimension. That doesn't help the OP much.
I don't understand the Rumble 40 being "too loud" since it goes down to zero.
- John
I don't understand the Rumble 40 being "too loud" since it goes down to zero.
- John
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OK, Now were talkin.
Sounds (TO ME) like the "perfect" amp for the OP does not exist. Anything that's as small as he wants, is too small for get togethers with other folks.
I agree with those that said use headphone at night as well.. assuming you get amp with headphone out.
T$
Thanks for the further comments and tips.
I should have specified that I wish to play out loud. I already own a vox amplug and use a headphone/laptop setup at night when my son is sleeping, but fancied an amp to use throughout the day without shutting myself out from my family by using headphones. But seeing as our apartment is very tiny and full of stuff, the rumble 40 gets in the way so I usually hide it away in a corner where it's not easily accessible. And by "too loud" I meant you can't really get the full effect of the rumble 40 when the volume is always so low. Sounds a bit muddy and muffled. Would rather have a smaller, less booming amp that I can turn right up without it really bothering anyone.
I won't be using it for jamming with any drummers. At most a singer or acoustic guitarist at home.
I guess my main question was whether there are any small 15 watt (or less) amps that are worth it and have a bit of low end or are they so bad that I may as well forget the amp idea altogether until I have space for a larger, more powerful one.
I recently bought a Blackstar Fly 3, but it didn't sount much better than playing through my built in laptop speakers, so I figured an actual amp would be better than one of these mini speaker/amps.
Some great suggestions though. Enough for me to go on. As I said, I'm leaning towards the Roland micro cube or the Hartke HD15. Both have good reviews and probably can't go wrong for a bit of living room jammage.
Ps I thought the Hartke HD15 was a fair bit smaller than the Rumble 40, but may have to look into that again.
I should have specified that I wish to play out loud. I already own a vox amplug and use a headphone/laptop setup at night when my son is sleeping, but fancied an amp to use throughout the day without shutting myself out from my family by using headphones. But seeing as our apartment is very tiny and full of stuff, the rumble 40 gets in the way so I usually hide it away in a corner where it's not easily accessible. And by "too loud" I meant you can't really get the full effect of the rumble 40 when the volume is always so low. Sounds a bit muddy and muffled. Would rather have a smaller, less booming amp that I can turn right up without it really bothering anyone.
I won't be using it for jamming with any drummers. At most a singer or acoustic guitarist at home.
I guess my main question was whether there are any small 15 watt (or less) amps that are worth it and have a bit of low end or are they so bad that I may as well forget the amp idea altogether until I have space for a larger, more powerful one.
I recently bought a Blackstar Fly 3, but it didn't sount much better than playing through my built in laptop speakers, so I figured an actual amp would be better than one of these mini speaker/amps.
Some great suggestions though. Enough for me to go on. As I said, I'm leaning towards the Roland micro cube or the Hartke HD15. Both have good reviews and probably can't go wrong for a bit of living room jammage.
Ps I thought the Hartke HD15 was a fair bit smaller than the Rumble 40, but may have to look into that again.
Afraid I'm not in the UK, but thanks for the reply. The Roland is high on my list.
I think a lot depends on how you see and use an amp. Some people see it as just something to make their instrument louder and prefer to do all their tone shaping on their instrument. If you’re an active bass player that can make sense. But for many players their amp is a much a musical instrument as their bass is. So the response and coloration their amplifier provides is a key component in their own personal sound. Especially if they’re using a passive instrument.
Hifi clean and punchy isn’t everybody’s notion of an ideal sound. So it’s hard to make too sweeping a conclusion about bass tone. Suffice to say it’s best to try everything you can, trust your ears first and foremost, and not get too hung up on the math or specs. They can provide valuable insights and give you some direction. But they don’t tell the whole story.
Or so I think anyway.
I can understand that point of view.
For me, because I also have a background in music production and have a foot in the audiophile world too, my stance is that audio gear that reproduce sound should be as transparent, neutral, and accurate as possible, and then you use tone shaping gear to shape the tone. Any baked in coloration in speakers is undesirable because it'll get applied to anything you play through them, whether you want that coloration or not, or whether the instrument/song needs that coloration. A neutral sounding speaker will give you the most accurate starting point, and from there you can add coloration any way you'd like. But if your starting point is already skewed, then even when/if you need transparent and accurate sound, you can't get it, unless you have enough audio production knowledge to surgically EQ the colored speaker closer to sounding neutral.
My ideal is to hear the true tone of the bass, without the inherent coloration of the speaker. And if I want to add coloration, I would have full control of exactly what frequencies to add with either the amp's EQ or the bass's preamp EQ.
To add to my point, I'll give an example. I started out with the Rumble 25, and I had a problem where when playing the G string--especially when snapping the strings during slap style--those notes are really loud and bright, and I would have to try to play those notes as softly as possible so they don't stick out so much, or use strings that aren't as bright, or try to EQ away the brightness. However, when I ran test tones through the Rumble 25, it became obvious the speaker/amp is tuned to sound very bright in the high-mids to compensate for not having a tweeter, and the frequency response is very uneven, with a sharp spike in the mids region for the sake of faking detail. This negatively impacted my playing because passages that should have been played normally with even force, had to have specific notes carefully attenuated, adding another layer of unnecessary difficulty/complexity to the playing. The other amps I've owned and tested has similar issues in different parts of the frequency range--they'd be too muddy in the low-mids, or too boomy in the upper-bass, or too sluggish in transient response, or too bright in the upper-mids. I'd waste time trying to EQ those problems away, but when the transient response is slow due to the large driver, there's nothing I could do about it.
With the Phil Jones Flightcase, I don't even have to think about those problems. The only thing I had to do was to apply graphic EQ to flatten the room mode at my usual practice position in my studio, and it's just set-and-forget room correction.
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Biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig +1 on that recommendation!
That is the *EXACT* combination I use (Ampeg SCR-DI and Sony MDR-7506 headphones).......
Hartke has no farting out on slap or finger technique in this video. Great sounding little practice amp.
Fair enough. Whatever works best for you and gets you the sound you want to hear is the right choice. I prefer a more organic and natural performance world sound over pristine audiophile studio sound. At least for playing live. And not being a control freak when it comes to music makes me welcome the occasional serendipitous “happy accident.” Even when it comes to recording.
But that’s me. We each like what we like.
Yeah, I saw that clip. Sounds good to me too. And looks quite a bit smaller than my Fender Rumble 40. May have found the one... Gonna sleep on it
Have you checked out the Vox vx50ba ? It's very small and light. I had a rumble 25 previously and the Vox doesn't make things shake like the Rumble did but it's a lot more portable.
