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Biamping

xander8280

xander8280

Dec 29, 2011
463
4
#1
I hear of a lot of rock bassists using two tracks of bass on recordings, does anybody take that onto the road and do it live? I plan on using two heads when i play my bigger venues this summer. Bass head and cab/guitar head and cab. Will collect into a fullstack, but I was just wondering does anybody do biamping live to get some sweet tones? I know I'll be the only bassist doing it in my scene.
 
#6
"bi-amping" and "tri-amping" specifically mean using an active crossover to put lows in one amp and speaker system and highs in another (and mids in a third).

running clean and dirty rigs at the same time is something different.
 
#7
jaywa said:
... and still winds up sounding however the FOH engineer decides he wants it to sound.
Click to expand...

Not completely. Pretty difficult to remove distortion from a sound, or add what's not there. You probably aren't gonna find heaps of sound engineers able to get an amazing bassy dub style tone from a Jazz Bass's bridge pickup through a guitar amp.

Hopefully, the sound engineer, if he's good, will try to present the sound you want to the audience, rather than try to fit it in to his idea of what's "right", anyway. Perhaps talking to them about the kind of sound your band wants might help that.
 
#8
Sam577 said:
Not completely. Pretty difficult to remove distortion from a sound, or add what's not there. You probably aren't gonna find heaps of sound engineers able to get an amazing bassy dub style tone from a Jazz Bass's bridge pickup through a guitar amp.

Hopefully, the sound engineer, if he's good, will try to present the sound you want to the audience, rather than try to fit it in to his idea of what's "right", anyway. Perhaps talking to them about the kind of sound your band wants might help that.
Click to expand...

Yes! I'm gonna use that dub bass tone for cleans with my guitar amp and have my bass amp being a heavy floor. I just need to split it up because it's too muddy out my bass amp. I use modulation and distortion on and off frequently from song to song.
 
#9
I do for my own amusement

My biamp rig can send 2 xlr signals - I've yet to have a sound crew not ask for a combined single signal

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I dig it for small venues (no bass through pa) there's some great stuff that can be done (chorus only through the highs)

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I will note that to do this successfully, I spent a ton of time selecting and engineering the components - the cabs are custom

Stanley Clark is known for dual amps - the issue will be if you have his budget and road crew

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I have a crossover that id sell cheap to help you
 
#12
Biamping was all the rage in the late 80's/90's.

As PA's took over the heavy lifting and you only needed a stage monitor, there's no need for bass amps that do that anymore. Also better drovers enabled better full range cabs to the point it doesn't make sense to biamp anymore.

Not to mention how do you determine crossover freqs and relative levels of the cabs to get a reasonably flat response vs some crazy step imbalance at the xover frequency.

Randy
 

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