bass through Guitar Amp

wellREDman · September 22, 2015, 03:33:56 PM

this may be a stupid question but ; not playing a bass through a guitar amp is about the speakers right? I should be ok if Im going through headphones?

dadagoboi · September 22, 2015, 04:29:53 PM

The only thing you could blow up would be the headphones but your ears would probably be bleeding by then.

Dave W · September 22, 2015, 05:45:07 PM

Right. The amp's EQ might not be as well suited for bass but you should be fine using headphones.

wellREDman · September 23, 2015, 03:07:57 AM

cool that's what i thought. thanks

Alanko · September 23, 2015, 07:16:23 AM

There may well be some low pass filtering going on, the amp will clip a lot easier and the 'bass' knob on the amp will shovel the muddy frequencies without restoring any fundamental bass. Having said all that, I've found some guitar amps to sound nice and warm for bass if you want a more vintage tone.

wellREDman · September 23, 2015, 02:48:51 PM

not too bothered with the niceties of the sound, I'm learning songs for college and need to play along with them, my bass amp has neither line in or headphone out, my guitar amp does

Alanko · September 24, 2015, 04:22:47 AM

Will do the job just fine. I got through the first couple of years of college on small guitar amps. In a weird way, small amps that don't try and reproduce the fundamental of the bass note sound nicer, in my opinion, than those that do. I was recently small bass amp shopping and ended up with a Fender Rumble 112 of some sort. I tried a slew of small bass amps that tried to do the 'small subwoofer' thing and just had no character or balls to their tone. The most disappointing was the Orange Crush series, that had a warmer more mids-friendly tone but had some horrendous always on compressor somewhere in the preamp circuit.

nofi · September 24, 2015, 08:46:18 AM

ha! i went looking for a small amp for my abg. like you i tried the orange crush stuff but with my acoustic bass they sounded harsh and had a gain control that is useless to me. i settled on a fender rumble 25 amp. a minimum number of eq controls and the best small amp tone i ever had for my abg. very warm sounding with lots of bottom used with tape wound strings.

Pilgrim · October 31, 2015, 02:59:43 PM

I've heard a number of good comments about the Fender Rumble combo series, and they're also light enough to make them more attractive.