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Worst amp you played through

#81
I had one of those 5watt Marshall amps, the battery powered one. It's a joke. Same with pig nose amps. The battery powered ones just can't do bass. Other than that I've been lucky to have nice gear. Played ampless for over a year to save up for a quality rig.
 
#83
wpc1996 said:
the new acoustic amps, I cant stand those things at all and all the guitar centers by me have them as like 90% of their stock for bass amps yet to find a bass that sounds good through one.
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+1000 - The local GC has a crap B200H ( I think) head with a even crappier 810 in at least one of their practice rooms. I can almost get a useable tone out of it by putting a Sansamp Paradriver in front of it. What REALLY pisses me off is the guitarists get Egnater and Marshall half stacks and we bass players get junk :rage:
 
#88
Fender BXR200 Combo.
Weighs a ton (~75 lbs) and never sounded the same twice. Awful boxy soulless sound. The fins on the back get hotter than the surface of the sun.
Too bad because it had some really nice features (multiband EQ, compressor, chorus, 15" spkr).
I still have it and use it for off-site practice spaces because it is loud enough and totally expendable.

Have to strongly disagree about the Rumbles though. I have a 30W 1st Gen and the 200W 2nd Gen and they are everything the BXR was not.
Lots of great sounds IMO, lots of deep sweet bass, light as a feather. I smile every time I use them.
 
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#89
I'll agree with the B2R. Look up mediocre and cross-reference it with diappointing in the dictionary and you will find an Ampeg B2R head.

Huge Ampeg lover over here BTW. I just remember that head when I was managing Best Buy Musical Instruments some years back. I was like "Oh a nice little reasonably priced Ampeg half stack" (we had it paired with the 410 cab). I plugged in a Fender P Bass and then immediately checked to see if we could ship back the majority of our stock. Lol
 
#92
I had two amp surprises, a bad surprise and a good one. One was the Eden WT. I wanted big fat tube and I got clean hifi tube. Barf.

My other surprise was playing for free, for about 200 people in this giant hand-built barn out in a commune. We were told amps would be there. Mine was... a pignose! Drummer had a full birch kit and he was a loud player too. I bitched and moaned before we started and was ready to basically play air bass for our 2 sets. Thing is, we were on a large, high wooden stage, a big resonant cube of lumber, and the pignose was sitting right on it. It wasn't an 8x10, but with that chamber beneath, the pignose got the job done! I was amazed. After that I totally got why engineers sometimes lift an amp off the stage.
 
#94
Bodeanly said:
It may also be worth noting the style of music you tried to play with said amp. I see there is already some hate brewing for the Rumbles, but if you're trying to blow metal through them, you're definitely not going to get a favorable voicing.

To answer OP, anything Crate. Or Sonic. You get what you pay for. They couldn't handle gigging the rock and roll.
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I play any genre out there. Still doo-doo IMO
 
#95
A few years ago I played the ItalianFest in Boston with The Tokens ("The Lion Sleeps Tonight"). The first year they supplied an MTI-era SVT with a 410he. The next year they brought me an ancient 400RB with an old worn out Hartke Transporter 410 that sounded like the speakers were half blown. I asked what happened to the SVT, and the sound guy said, "The backline guy figured you'd like this better." I had to roll the bass completely up and everything else completely down to even get a usable sound out of it. At the end of the gig, the backline guy showed up, and I thanked him for supplying me the official worst amp I ever used in my life. Cheap-asses!
 
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#98
Phil Jones D-400. They were sponsoring most of the booths at the London Bass Guitar Show. Bass Direct had them, Ernie Ball had them, and a few others did. They sounded TERRIBLE. Extremely fuzzy and fizzy no matter what the amp settings were, what the bass was, and how I played it.
 

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