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? for tube amp breakup at low volume

O

oldcatfish

Jan 8, 2011
1,549
967
#1
I have a question for bass players that love tube amps and love to crank them up for "the tone."

I also play guitar, and it is a common practice for tube amp users to use power attenuators /power soaks, so they can achieve power tube break up at lower volumes. It's such a common practice that many newer tube amp designs now have them built in.

But, I've never even heard of a bass player using a power soak, yet many die hard tube players say that they don't mind schlepping their ultra heavy weight rigs because it's difficult to emulate the power tube breakup tone from a solid state amp. But you wouldn't be able to achieve the break up at a lot of lower volume gigs...so wouldn't a power soak be the answer? Or is their some reason that they won't work with bass amps.

This is just a question to satisfy my curiosity...I don't even own any bass tube amps.
 
#4
Yes, I realize that speaker break up is a part of the tone...but I'm just surprised that the newer bass tube amps don't have built in power soaks like the new guitar ones do. thekyle55 might be right...it could just be the higher wattage issue/size required could be why.

On an oddly inversely related note, there doesn't seem to be a solid state high wattage "micro amp" trend in guitar amps either. Maybe it's just the nature of what works best for each instrument.
 
#5
oldcatfish said:
Yes, I realize that speaker break up is a part of the tone...but I'm just surprised that the newer bass tube amps don't have built in power soaks like the new guitar ones do. thekyle55 might be right...it could just be the higher wattage issue/size required could be why.

On an oddly inversely related note, there doesn't seem to be a solid state high wattage "micro amp" trend in guitar amps either. Maybe it's just the nature of what works best for each instrument.
Click to expand...

Some new amps like the fender bassman and the new Mesa strategy and prodigy amps have switchable power sections for recording purposes or lower volume jams.
 
#7
oldcatfish said:
...yet many die hard tube players say that they don't mind schlepping their ultra heavy weight rigs because it's difficult to emulate the power tube breakup tone from a solid state amp.
Click to expand...

Basses need more power in a relative sense.

I don't know that many bass players who use tube amps for the "breakup", which for guitar would be called crunch, or distortion. Most bassists I know who use tube amps use them for the tone and the dynamics. When breakup is desired, it's a much more nuanced kind of breakup, more of a grind. 300 watt SVT's are popular because they have so much headroom before they distort. That was the intent of the design.

A bassist who really wants some tube distortion should probably be using no more than 100 watts, which could be cranked up without being as ear splitting as 100 watts for guitar would be.
 
#9
I get all the grind I want using the low power 50 watt setting on my head. i generally gig it using the 100 watt setting unless it's going to het loud in which case I carry a Genz streamliner and forego the tube amp.
 
#10
bertbass666 said:
It's not just the amp that breaks up but the speakers as well, that's what gives that sound. If you play below a certain volume then you don't get it but above that volume, shear bliss.
Click to expand...
Although speaker breakup and farting is often present with very loud tube amp compressed bass sound.
Both I the acoustics of my isolation booths and my microphones would
rather hear the loudspeaker operate within X max than somewhere near
X lim.
So for recording big bass tube amp shenanigans a very good powersoak is absolutely vital.
I use a custom built Sequis motherload dual pro for the purpose in my studio.
There is only so much good bass you can put in (even a properly designed room with huge bass traps) before things start getting excessively resonant and far too muddy.
Power soaking an SVT is often best done by placing the eight by ten face down on a carpeted concrete ground floor and then switch to 2 ohms using a a 4 ohm motherload in the other speaker output to deal with half the output power.
The joy of that is you can put together a few small cabs with your favourite sounding speakers running from the speaker output of the motherload.
and take the speaker sim line level as the DI choose microphones and
find nice places round your speaker cones.
That was all so much fun doing that and finding just what you are looking for, fresh and original but hey! today you just buy a Kemper, a lightweight power amp, a fearful, or some other studio monitoresque cab and go hunting amp profiles so your live sound is actually basically the one off every album your producer and record label has released recently.:help::D:hiding:
 
#13
oldcatfish said:
On an oddly inversely related note, there doesn't seem to be a solid state high wattage "micro amp" trend in guitar amps either. Maybe it's just the nature of what works best for each instrument.
Click to expand...

Actually, quite a few jazz guitar players have been using stuff like Walter Woods and Acoustic Image amps for decades now. Uber-high wattage just isn't necessary for nearly as many guitar situations as bass ones though.
 
#15
OP - Allow me to be the first bassist you've heard of that uses a power soak on my amp for both rehearsals and gigs. I use it so that I can switch back and forth between a cleanish sound and an overdriven sound. I've found that my amp on 3 is around the same volume as turning it up to 6 and then cranking the power soak down 3 dB. It works perfectly and takes me about 3 seconds to turn the two knobs between songs.

My amp is 100 watts, and I find that it is more than loud enough to keep up in our small practice room with the drums and my guitarist playing a half-stack.

At gigs, I'm plenty loud enough in smallish rooms, and then I mic and go through our PA for bigger places.
 
#16
bigchiefbc said:
OP - Allow me to be the first bassist you've heard of that uses a power soak on my amp for both rehearsals and gigs. I use it so that I can switch back and forth between a cleanish sound and an overdriven sound. I've found that my amp on 3 is around the same volume as turning it up to 6 and then cranking the power soak down 3 dB. It works perfectly and takes me about 3 seconds to turn the two knobs between songs.

My amp is 100 watts, and I find that it is more than loud enough to keep up in our small practice room with the drums and my guitarist playing a half-stack.

At gigs, I'm plenty loud enough in smallish rooms, and then I mic and go through our PA for bigger places.
Click to expand...

--Ok, this is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Out of curiosity, how did you get the idea to start doing this. Most guitarists seem to know about this, while most bass players seem to think I'm crazy when I talk about this concept.
 
#18
oldcatfish said:
--Ok, this is EXACTLY what I'm talking about. Out of curiosity, how did you get the idea to start doing this. Most guitarists seem to know about this, while most bass players seem to think I'm crazy when I talk about this concept.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure how to answer how I got the idea. I've played with guitarists that used power soaks and such for a long time, so I've always known about it.

The biggest leap for me was trying out a 100-watt amp. I thought that there was no way it was going to be loud enough, because Talkbass had always taught me that bass needs like 5-10 times the wattage that guitarists use. I tried a 100-watt all-tuber into an Ampeg 410 in a music store one day when it was really empty and asked if they minded if I cranked it up. They said go ahead, and I was absolutely in love with the sound. And it was so freaking loud, I knew that it would be plenty of power for my purposes.

Until I got the power soak, I actually was running the amp with half of the power tubes pulled so that I could get it dirty at a more reasonable volume. But the power soak makes it so much easier to tweak it to the volume I want.

I will say, however, that the tone starts to suffer when the power soak is cranked way up high, like over 30dB of soak (it gets dark and muddy). But as long as I'm in that 3-6-9 dB range, I don't hear any noticeable difference in the tone.
 

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