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cabs for bass and guitar?

D

deerfield

Mar 25, 2013
38
2
Italy
#1
I'm not expert at tube amps, but here I've learned that most guitar tube heads are good for bass , and vice versa (bassman, v4..).

Now I happen to have a small sum of money and I've decided to bit the bullet for a 70s sounding amp for studio-home-smaller gig. I want tube. I'd like to be able to play bass thru it and elec guitar. 85-100 watt. Bass not clinically clean, guitar tone like "exile on mn street", faces' "a nod is as good as a wink"... Bass would be direct in amp, cranked for volume, perhaps only witha compressor. Guitar crunch tone would be obtained by a ts9 or similar, amp master dimed to avoid police at the door and/or blood coming from my ears.

I know something like a VT-22 would be ideal. But in a head+ cab form would be better. What options I have?
 
#4
Grab a Marshall 4X12 Guitar Cab. I played an 8 hour show(On Bass) through one once with a 700 Watt Peavey Firebass head. It handled every ounce of punishment. It was an older Cab but I can't tell you what drivers were in it except they were original to the Cab.
 
#5
I know it's probably superstitious and goes against everything Talkbass says about driver size not mattering, but in my experience a bass cab with 12" drivers tend to work really well for bass and guitars.

Maybe we're all just used to 12" drivers for guitars, or manufacturers have come to "bake in" a certain responsiveness to 12" drivers, I dunno.

All I know is, a guitar through most bass amps that have 10" or 15" drivers tends to sound like a guitar through a PA, clean to the point of being sterile.

However, my little Ampeg BA112 just smokes with guitar and bass. Go figure.

Oh, and +1 to the above comment about a 4X12 guitar half stack, at lower volumes such as you are describing they can easily handle a bass guitar and because they are fairly common won't break the bank.

Good luck.
 
#6
deerfield said:
I'm not expert at tube amps, but here I've learned that most guitar tube heads are good for bass , and vice versa (bassman, v4..).

Now I happen to have a small sum of money and I've decided to bit the bullet for a 70s sounding amp for studio-home-smaller gig. I want tube. I'd like to be able to play bass thru it and elec guitar. 85-100 watt. Bass not clinically clean, guitar tone like "exile on mn street", faces' "a nod is as good as a wink"... Bass would be direct in amp, cranked for volume, perhaps only witha compressor. Guitar crunch tone would be obtained by a ts9 or similar, amp master dimed to avoid police at the door and/or blood coming from my ears.

I know something like a VT-22 would be ideal. But in a head+ cab form would be better. What options I have?
Click to expand...
no...the qualities that make a guitar speaker sound good are not what is required for bass.....you want a motorboat that flies,someone can build you one but it will do neither very well....
 
#8
food for thought here. I forgot to mention another limitation, perhaps the bigger, I have to deal with: gear avalaibility. In Italy lots of the good used gear you have in US is not avalaible. Not many ebay or TB vendors agree to ship "fridges" to Europe and even if someone does it, shipping costs are astronomical. As a matter of fact, even the some commonly avalaible heads and cabs are way overpriced here. Acoustic gear I have never seen here, only few pieces in various classifieds but frankly way overpriced, so sadly I have to decline.

In a partial rephrasing of my original request, assuming I go with head + bass cab and guitar cab, what are my option to recreate either "that" 70s bass tone and "that" 70s guitar crunch tone? I mean, I could do it with only 1 head (v4/bassman/twin...) simply by swapping cabs?
 
#9
I said this in another thread, but an option is to use a bass amp/cab combination that is very uncoloured up to the top end of what you need for guitar, and then use an emulator of some sort to create a guitar amp sound. If it has a decent speaker cabinet emulation then you can even consider sending that to FOH and avoid a mic on the cabinet.

If you need to cover guitar and bass in the same set then a line selector and bass straight through, guitar through the emulator first.

If you need a more 70s vintage bass amp tone then a second emulator may get you reasonably close, and again, you can throw that direct to FOH. It's not as nice as a real tube amp (I've owned a few, vintage and modern) but much nicer on the back and even I couldn't hear the subtleties of a tube amp when on stage enough to warrant the weight and the escape of magic blue smoke issues.
 
#11
deerfield said:
food for thought here. I forgot to mention another limitation, perhaps the bigger, I have to deal with: gear avalaibility. In Italy lots of the good used gear you have in US is not avalaible. Not many ebay or TB vendors agree to ship "fridges" to Europe and even if someone does it, shipping costs are astronomical. As a matter of fact, even the some commonly avalaible heads and cabs are way overpriced here. Acoustic gear I have never seen here, only few pieces in various classifieds but frankly way overpriced, so sadly I have to decline.

In a partial rephrasing of my original request, assuming I go with head + bass cab and guitar cab, what are my option to recreate either "that" 70s bass tone and "that" 70s guitar crunch tone? I mean, I could do it with only 1 head (v4/bassman/twin...) simply by swapping cabs?
Click to expand...
or you could look at that as an opportunity to make some money building cabs....import raw 15's and build some quality cabs and sell them .....
 
#12
This seems to keep coming up a lot as of late....

I agree with James, Bag End 12's will work, and work extremely well for both.

And once again, to dispel the speaker size generalizations, some real world demos to my point - here's guitar and bass through a pair of Bag End 15's as well as high gain guitar through some unconventional 10's I'm working on. Nothing sterile about them and they outperform the conventional stuff. Can't make generalizations, need to take it case by case.

10's with high gain guitar
 
#14
HaphAsSard said:
OP, do me a favour and snatch this before I cave in and buy something I don't really need:
Invalid Link Removed
Click to expand...

this shop is literally 10min drive from my home ;)

howewer I'm re-thinking about my original intent. I've decided it's impratical to have 1 amp for both bass and guitar, at least for the very specific tones I want from either instruments.

regarding guitar, I'll settle on a small fender, 15 or 18w, pushed at gain and probably it will be good for reharsal and jam. If it's too much for home I'll remedy using a ts9 or buying a smaller and cheaper 5watt combo. That should bring me in 70s crunch territory.

But what for bass? a B15 would be heaven...but unfortunately doesn't fit in my budget.
 

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