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I hate all amplifiers

#82
This seems like a troll thread but I’ve been there.

Bass tone is an elusive thing to chase. A great solo sound isn’t a great ensemble sound due to real world factors like physics.

So. Yeah. Finding a good tone is a pain at times. Since you want something that works both solo and with an ensemble. But that’s not really an option. So you kinda have to have something worked out for both conditions, that you then alter based on the venue acoustics.

Which then, as others have mentioned, generally just gets high/low passed into a weird boomy mass by the foh person. So the majority of the audience hears that + a touch of real tone from your onstage rig.

Quite a vexing situation. No real winners. Best you can do is work diligently to make your rig sound good enough while standing in front of it.
 
#83
ashtray said:
I’m an average player at best, but 15 years ago I was finally at the point where I had some extra money and could put $2k in to a new rig. I was buying $2-300 amps or cabs for years but now I could get one of the “special stuff” I had only read about on Talkbass.

My highly skilled bass playing friend joined me a day long trip around Los Angeles, playing some pretty expensive new rigs. I was shocked at how much I didn’t like. (I brought my Am Dlx Jazz bass with me - and was also shocked at how it sounded through a sterile amp. The bass has these large pole pickups and I learned the bass has this gnarly built in tone that I just hadn’t expected, and never noticed before through the cheaper amps I had been playing.)

So I’m trying these different cabs, and they all sound different from each other - and so many I just didn’t like! And the amps were tough to find one that wowed me. Until I tried the Aguilar AG500. That amp had the tone that was in my head I was searching for! Every note sounded full and warm. Next to shop for cabs - well, the only one I liked was a Glockenspiel non-US model the shop picked up from the recent (that year) NAMM show. At $950 a piece, two cabs were out of the question. In retrospect, one cab would have been fine! I didn’t buy anything but at least the 6+ hours hadn’t been in vain.

I was able to pick up the AG500 - nearly 10 years later (!) and then fell in love with the Aguilar DB cab’s sound.

So why did it take me 10 years? Bc I bought a QSC power amp, and a single rack space pre-amp, and plugged it in to this custom cabinet I got cheap off Craigslist and the setup sounded amazing! I loved it! Ok, it weighed a ton, but aside from that, wow!

I still have that rig but it’s packed away. Since I got the Aguilar setup, I’ve only been playing that.

But that is my story - took trying a BUNCH of rigs before matching one to the sound in my head I was chasing. I even bought more amps and cabs after that, really nice ones people rave about. Didn’t like them. Went back to my Aguilar stack and was super happy. Stopped buying bass rigs.
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IMHO taking a road trip and actually trying a bunch of gear is the best way to figure out what you like, and what you don't. The only way to improve on this would be if you had the chance to use your favorites rigs on a few gigs before making the final decision.
 
#85
You just need to buy another 20 or 30 to find the one you like. That worked for me!

Seriously, whenever I have felt like I "hated" an amp, often it was the influence of bad room acoustics, so make sure you're in a space that is sympathetic to the kind of sound a bass amp puts out, and that you aren't hearing the bass in any monitors or side fills. Also, sometimes bass tone can get obliterated by low end coming from a guitar amp (especially a 412 cabinet or something that size) or a keyboard rig, so make sure anything like that is out of the equation.

One of the biggest destroyers of bass sound in a live venue is when subs are built into a stage, especially when they are out of phase with your amp. Sometimes when that's happened I feel like chucking my amp into the nearest dumpster.

If I were to make any specific recommendations though, I really like my Mesa D800+. It has repeatedly risen to the top of the pile among my amps, through all kinds of cabinets.
 
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#86
Welcome to TB!

If you like the sound of your DI, just plug its unbalanced output into the effects return of whatever amp you still have. That will bypass the preamp stage and feed your signal directly to the power amp stage, on the amps I'm familiar with.
 
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#89
At some point…after 15 or 25 years of playing, whichever it is, if you still hate all bass amps, it may be time to consider user error. I don’t mean to be harsh, but your own playing is the common factor here. May be time for some lessons, get a fresh perspective to how you approach the instrument.
 
#91
tvbop said:
The OP's missing a couple of very important points when going down this tone rabbit hole.

Are you a famous musician? If you are then you will have your tone whatever anyone says, and good luck. However if your a working musician then your "tone" whatever that is will be shaped not by your amp but by the FOH dude or the studio dude and producer.

All musicians get hung up on their stage sound cause thats the tone only you hear on stage...but out in the auditorium or on the record its a whole different bag of chips and frankly matters not much what amp your using.
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Mine’s mostly in my fingers and choosing basses with hot pickups that respond well to them. FOH can certainly change the tone if they intend to but I try to make my groove baked in.

Hopefully I don’t play at any venues where I can’t trust FOH. I just intend to hand them solid ingredients. The stage sound is for me and my brothers on stage. If it sets our vibe right then we play well
 
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#93
tvbop said:
The OP's missing a couple of very important points when going down this tone rabbit hole.

Are you a famous musician? If you are then you will have your tone whatever anyone says, and good luck. However if your a working musician then your "tone" whatever that is will be shaped not by your amp but by the FOH dude or the studio dude and producer.

All musicians get hung up on their stage sound cause thats the tone only you hear on stage...but out in the auditorium or on the record its a whole different bag of chips and frankly matters not much what amp your using.
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Not necessarily so. Come with a really good sound that they don’t have to tweak. Introduce yourself to the sound person. I’ve heard me FOH in small to large spaces and it sounds like me. I’ve even heard board tapes and though they may lack some air they sound like me. The Sound check the engineers smile and nod.

I know there are some engineers that aren’t good. Meanwhile you bring your good intensions and rich not over boosted smooth noise free signal.

I wondered why people were using Reddis. They cared about what they were giving the board. You don’t want the engineer to decide what you sound like. Could be that DI out of your head is an afterthought in the manufacturers budget. I don’t plug into whirlwinds. The least my backup is a Countryman.
 
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#98
lyralain said:
In 2022, you don't need one.

Get a good audio interface and run DI into a computer. Use zero-latency plugins (such as ableton stock) to sculpt a signal chain with exactly the frequency characteristics, saturation flavors, and so on that you want. Run it back out to a PA system when performing.

Sculpt multiple chains, even. Make a bunch of preset chains. Drag n drop them as you please, have a controller to switch between them as needed.

No more being stuck with one amp's specific non-linearities, a cab's weird resonances, all the headache of mic selection & positioning. No more spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on gear. The best part is if you want that imperfect sound of a 'real amp' there are plenty of distortions modelling specific amps, & impulse responses that capture a specific cab's wacky frequency response you can just drag and drop in.

The expensive 'human brain like shiny expensive object, me no want touch computer' equivalent of this would be going with a tone profiling amp like a Kemper. Or some of the pedals out there that do the same.
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Have you really used this setup live? IEM or monitors?
 
#99
chadds said:
Not necessarily so. Come with a really good sound that they don’t have to tweak. Introduce yourself to the sound person. I’ve heard me FOH in small to large spaces and it sounds like me. I’ve even heard board tapes and though they may lack some air they sound like me. The Sound check the engineers smile and nod.

I know there are some engineers that aren’t good. Meanwhile you bring your good intensions and rich not over boosted smooth noise free signal.

I wondered why people were using Reddis. They cared about what they were giving the board. You don’t want the engineer to decide what you sound like. Could be that DI out of your head is an afterthought in the manufacturers budget. I don’t plug into whirlwinds. The least my backup is a Countryman.
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My GK700RBii has a great DI. I got to hear the raw audio from it Saturday as we got a 5 cam video / multichannel audio from the sound guy for some dollars. I liked what I heard
 
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#100
I went to see Level 42 back in the early 80s at a smallish theatre. Stood right at the front and Mark King played through his 810 Trace Elliot rig and sounded amazing. Saw Level 42 for the second time last year and the whole band were using IEM and MK had a Markbass 410 rig on stage that might just as well have been switched off. I expect the sound was acceptable somewhere near the mixing desk but front of stage was meh! I'm sure bands have a lovely experience with IEM.
 
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