will a guitar hurt my bass amp?

a guitar will absolutely not hurt your bass amp in any way. guitarists used to use bassman amps back in the day to get the "brown tone." it will be perfectly fine to do this.

The only thing that would hurt anything would be if you used a bass guitar through a guitar cabinet. Using guitar heads is perfectly fine though. It just gives you a different tone. Just dont use guitar cabs for basses!

I think the reason why guitar and bass cabs are different is because bass ones have more space from the back of the enclosure to the drivers themselves so they can move more air. Guitar cabinets are more shallow, so it is potentially unsafe to use them with a lower frequency bass guitar. Just dont quote me on this because I am by no means an amp expert. These are just my rules of thumb.

 

From what I understand, JT would beg to differ.......

 

oh crap!!!

Hes gonna make those little rolly-eyes at me and then explain why Im an idiot... I just hate that! No!!!!!!!! I should delete my post before its too late... oh well more posts for me

 

my only advice would be, if your cab has a horn, to turn it off. otherwise those high notes are like needles in the eardrum.

 

you can use guitar cabs for the UPPER frequences of bass, as JT does. Push low f# through a guitar cab cranked up and you had better be prepared to dodge the cones as they come flyin out of the cab.

 

i think the key word in your last paragraph is frequency response. Bass cabs are tuned different than guitar cabs are, most guitar cabs arent designed to handle the low freq's.

But we bassists use 10 inch drivers where as guitar players usually use 12's so the speakers more than likely can handle the low's of the bass. One guitar cab that comes to mind are the old Hartke 4x12 guitar cabs, those can handle bass guitars without a problem and imo are actually better for a bass than their 10 inch drivers are.

 

This isn't necessarily the case. While guitar cabs generally use 12s, they will not necessarily have power ratings or low frequency properties similar to drivers used for bass cabs. For instance, on typical 10s used for bass, the voice coil is usually 3.5 to 4 inches in diameter, while voice coils for 12s used in guitar cabinets are usually 2.5 inches or less. The magnets are also a lot larger on the tens. Bigger magnets and voice coils tend to mean that a driver is better suited to low frequency reproduction and can dissipate more power. In most cases, guitar speakers are voiced very differently. Their LF cutoffs are usually around 100Hz as opposed to 40-55Hz for bass speakers. This is not the case for all 12s of course. For the most part it's inadvisable to run a lot of low bass through a guitar cabinet, the voice coils tend to melt or get blown out of the gap. While this is amusing to watch, you probably wouldn't want to do it to a Marshall 412 guitar cab.... Well, if your guitar player pissed you off enough......

 

But the question was guitar through a bass amp if I am not mistaken...Right?

 

Yeah, it went a bit off topic. No problem running guitar through a bass cab, other than it usually sounds like crap.

 

If it sounds good thats great Funny thing about guitar strings breaking when you pop them...

 

As several have said, you won't have a problem running a guitar through a bass rig, but you might need to tweak your eq to make it sound good.

I play bass through a GK microbass combo with a 12 and an RBH 2x10 extension cabinet with a tweeter in a medium-loud country-rock band. I play electric/acoustic mandolin on a few tunes, and find that if I cut the lows and low-mids to nothing, the mando sounds very good through the rig--almost as good as through my SWR Strawberry Blonde, which has a 10 and a tweeter and is designed specifically for electro-acoustic instuments.

 

I bet it wouldn't be too horrible playing a guitar through a v4-b or an SVT. Whaddya think?

 

I don't think running a guitar through your bass amp is too good... My friend, a guitarist , plugged his guitar w/ dist. into my hartke 3500 head.. it sounded great.. yea.. but when I plugged back in, I got this popping noise. I think it's b/c of the different ohm rating between guitars and bass. Or... it could just be that my amp sucks. either way.. I don't let guitars in my amp.

 

instruments dont have ohm ratings

 

no, but the pedals do.

 

i don't think they have ohm ratings either!

 

well i mean, i guess guitars have output impedence, as do bassess and pedals, but they shouldnt be different enough to change anything (input impedence on the pedals can make you sound like crap, buts a whole nuther story).

guitars dont hurt bass amps...distortion might hurt tweeters, but not all guitarists use it, the question wasnt if distortion hurts bass amp, and not all bass amps have tweeters.