Bass Amplifers

Music Central: Sound Advice!

The first consideration is size. Yes, size matters with bass! Even at home, practice can be less than thrilling, pumping out your latest killer riff through a 15 watt, 6 inch speaker. If you're attempting to play with a drummer, you're going to need around 100/150 watts to get over him some of the time. 40/60 watts just won't cut it. How many school bass amps have you seen have a hernia? Of course money rears it's ugly head. But it takes a lot of wattage to turn bass low frequencies into sound waves. Most weekend players probably go out with an amp between 200 and 400 watts.

The thing to think about is “Headroom”. This is the amount of volume you have left after you set your average stage level. With bass you don’t want to be running the amp that hard. In an ideal scenario running you bass amp on around 6 out of 10 would be great. It's like having a V8 but only using 4 cylinders. You always have plenty in reserve. Unless your going for an over-driven bass sound, you don’t want to be running your bass amp that hard.

It's pretty common for a stadium band bass player to be running between one and two thousand watts through multiple cabinets.

Speaker choice for bass guitarists comes down to the sound you're trying to create. The smooth and funky bass heard on most of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s recordings usually relied on a “P” or “J” type of bass through a 400/600 watt amp and a 2 x 15” cabinet. Enter the slap and pop world, and the quick response of a 10” speaker started to make its mark. These days a lot of players use a combination of 15”s and 10”,s to achieve their sound.

An Amp... is an Amp... is an Amp.........Right? [More info...]