One decent amplifier for bass & guitar?

[Enaitz]

Good morning.

I'm trying to find a decent solid state amplifier that I could use to play mainly guitar, but where I could also plug my Epiphone Viola bass for good. I currently have a 30W Marshall Valvestate for guitar and a Marshall MB30 for bass, and I would like to sell both and buy my first decent amplifier, I mean a really good one.

Please, keep in mind that I want it to play at my living room, so I don't want tubes (about 20 to 30 solid state Watts would be OK). I use some pedals so I would like a very basic amplifier, with no included FX, and preferibly being single channel and without overdrive knob. But I also want it to sound great both on bass and guitar.

I'm playing mostly blues (Bloomfield, Clapton, ...), classic rock (Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Doors, Iron Butterly, Queen, ...) and psychedelic (early Pink Floyd, SRC, ...). No metal or ultra high gain at all, so an amp with a Fender clean style of sound would be much appreciated.

Any suggestion?

[jh45gun]

Most ALL SS SMALL amps are cheap and inexpensive in price and parts .What you have now is probably the norm. That is the nature of the beast and they are marketed as practice amps. More serious amps set up for gigging are higher powered and are gonna be more in wattage but also in quality. What your asking for is a tough choice. I see you having two choices. I would get a higher quality amp either SS or tube and take out the guitar speaker and put a bass speaker in it so it could handle the bass. That would cover what you want. Or find a better bass amp and play guitar through it. Either way would work and as far as recommending an amp there are so many choices I would check locally and go from there. There no magic answer too many choices you could pick. Bottom line is what ever amp you pick needs a bass speaker in it.

[sliberty]

I agree that your req are tough. If it were me, I would buy a SF (68-72 roughly) Fender Bassman, and a cabinet with bass speakers. That are bass amps, but great for guitar too. I would also buy an attenuated so hat in the living room, I could still crank it up for great guitar overdrive without rattling the place apart.

[Tee1]

Not sure about SS amps for this dual purpose, seems a big ask and you'll likely not be satisfied with one instrument.

Now if you were wanting a serious guitar & bass rig, i'd go for a Selmer Treble and Bass, Low wattage Fender Bassman head, or Marshall 2061X 20W Lead & Bass and a 2x12 cab with Celestion G12H(55)s, but that's not what you're after.

Cheaper valve alternatives might be a Fender Musicmaster amp, or maybe at a pinch, a Laney Cub 10. I always thougth mine was quite bassy/beefy sounding for its size.

[63dot]

I think if you can rethink the tube thing, and if you don't plan to crank the bass too much, get the Fender Bassman. It's a gorgeous sounding bass amp even though it's not set up to have somebody try to be Flea on steroids with EMGs, and the accidental use of it for guitar has put it on the best of list for old Fender amps for guitar use. If you want one amp that can do it all the Bassman comes pretty close and anything else to fine tune it could now be done with the whole array of pedals and rackmounts.

[jh45gun]

I agree on the Bassman and As far as the Music Master Bass amp goes they are great amps but they do better with a speaker up grade and if 6V6 tubes I would do the transformer upgrades like I did for more power and clean sounds. It is simple like he wants one channel and with the mods easy be loud enough for his requirements .We are talking about getting the amp which runs about 300 dollars the transformer change which is 116 dollars US and a decent bass speaker 75 to a 100 US. for the money to buy the amp and up grade it you would be better off to buy the Bassman amp. Sure you could use the MMB amp as is but they as is never were liked as a bass amp even a practice one but as a guitar amp they are great especially with the mods.Actually you can do the transformer upgrades with the 6AQ5 version too but there are some other tricks that Muchxs knows about that I did not ask because I have the 6v6 version.

[dconeill]

There are two misconceptions here, I think.

First regarding "guitar speakers" and "bass speakers", referring to the drivers. It's true that the frequency response curves and breakup responses of drivers meant for guitar and for bass might be a little different. However, the real difference between guitar and bass speaker systems is the cabinet. Most guitar speaker cabinets are little more than boxes, with little or no design thought going into them. Bass speaker cabinets, on the other hand, help tune the response of the overall speaker system by incorporating the response characteristics of the driver into the design of the cabinet. Some bass speaker systems are better than others, of course. Another thing that the cabinets do is to control driver cone excursion - if a driver is used in free air (like a guitar cabinet) for bass frequencies, it can tear itself apart under some conditions.

Then there's the question of guitar amplifiers versus bass amplifiers. All an amplifier does is to make a small signal bigger. But various design considerations - distortion, behavior at full power, and others - will affect how the amplifier behaves under various uses. There's also the effect of the preamplifier, which can add all kinds of signal processing (tone control, added distortion, etc.) to the original signal before the signal is sent to the amplifier. In the guitar and bass world, typically but not always the preamp and amplifier are housed together in a single chassis. There's no reason at all that a guitar amplifier (the preamp and amplifier, together in a single chassis) can't be used for bass, or that a bass amp can't be used for guitar. You might or might not like the result, depending on the design characteristics of the particular device being used, but it would work just fine at the basic level.

As far as a small, single amp for home use with both guitar and bass, there are all kinds of choices. At low power levels, e.g., 20 or 30 watts, most of them will be cheap and unsatisfactory. But something like the Boss Cube line might be worth investigating. On the higher dollar side, amps like Acoustic Image, Henriksen, and Phil Jones are designed for use with both bass and guitar, but they're designed for very clean output, and they're not rock amps by any stretch of the mind. There are a number manufacturers of small, clean bass amps, including AI, Henriksen, Phil Jones, SWR, Eden, Markbass, TC Electronic, Gallien-Kreuger, and others - but they're not cheap. At the cheaper end, there's Peavey, Acoustic (different company than AI), Carvin, Boss, Fender, and others who make serviceable physically small bass amps.

I think the OP's best bet would be to buy a reasonable quality, small bass amp targeted at the jazz and upright player, and put something like the very promising Zoom G5 in front of it to get the guitar picante sauce mixed in to the recipe. Careful attention will have to be paid to budget, of course.

[dan1952]

I have used an Ampeg B100R Rocket Bass amp for quite a while for both guitar and bass. 1x15, 100 watts RMS, loud enough for most any non-blasting bass gig, loud and clean for guitar, plus the built-in compressor works great for guitar, a lot like the Lab Series amps that Ray Flacke and B.B. King have used. Built like a tank, and it has a really cool look!

[63dot]

dconeill, +1 ^^^^^^^^

[jh45gun]

Fender used closed back boxes for years for bass and they sounded great. Some of their open back amps as well. Yea for dedicated bass I agree a dedicated bass cab may be different from the standard cab but for what the OP wants either will work he is not playing an auditorium and in I would guess the standard cab would sound better for guitar than a bass tuned cab.

[Justinvs]

I have a 410 Carvin cab that sounds really good with either bass or guitar and I've used it for both frequently. However, my bass amp, an older Peavey BassMax 400 sounds great with bass, not so great with a six-string. I've never really tried it the other way around, but I think my Windsor head might sound pretty good with both. If I get a chance I'll fire it up and report back.

One thing you'll want if you go with a bass amp are some good pedals, espially reverb/echo/delay and EQ. Been my experience that guitar through a bass amp can sound awfully flat without some serious tweaking.

[jh45gun]

Depends on the amp the Bassman amps that Fender made up through the SF era sounded great with guitar.

[Justinvs]

Originally Posted by jh45gun

Depends on the amp the Bassman amps that Fender made up through the SF era sounded great with guitar.

Yeah, that's true. Some Marshalls, too. But, I would still reccomend at the very least a delay or reverb pedal. Iused to play through a SF Bassman head and loved it for bass. Man it had a sound! But the few times I switched to guitar through it I was a little dissapointed, especially compared to my Super Reverb.

[sliberty]

Guitar speakers can sometimes "hit bottom" when pushed with bass frequencies. By that I mean that their voice coils can reach the extent of their travel, and this can result in a mis-alignment of the coil. I have a friend that has lived through this all too many times. Whether this is caused by the cabinet design or not, it shouldn't happen with a bass speaker as it is designed to handle those frequencies and more.

[gypsymoth]

misconceptions? he's playing in his living room.

a full range PA type speaker (delta pro/fane crescendo/ beyma whatever etc) will take care of his needs, with most any small amp. I'd watch for a little WEM or something (someone on here is a SS designer of repute - I apologise for not remembering the name right now - maybe he'll pipe in with a thought), but if you do want a really good one, an old hiwatt 1x12 combo would be it.

there are plenty of specific bass versions of old combos that were open back, Sound City concord comes to mind.

yes, hiwatt heads were designated "all purpose" on purpose. the MV would cover your increase in watts (50), you're stuck with tubes though

[Enaitz]

Many thanks for your replies.

By the way, and intending to take it easy and not having to buy separate parts and assemble them together, I'm looking at the medium quality small bass solidstate amps.

At my local store they have two, the Fender Rumble 30 and the Orange Crush PiX 50BXT, I'll have to go to the store this week to try both with guitars and basses, but these are the kind of amps I'm considering by now.

[jh45gun]

Well for home that Fender Rumble might be fine but I will tell you I had a 60 watt version and that darn metal grill rattled like crazy and vibrated it really ruined the sound and I am a huge fan of Fender amps but I was less then enthused about this one. I wanted to down size make it easier to carry in this amp instead of a larger 2x10 bass cab and a Kustom head. We used the amp once at a gig it was not loud enough on stage to hear well (stage volume it was lined out to the PA) and that rattle drove the bass player nuts. Fortunately for me I was able to take it back and my gear was still at the store so I traded back. I still have the cab but got rid of the head. Now maybe Fender fixed the grill problem and it might work great for you I hope so. For what it is worth it did not sound bad with guitar with a reverb pedal added.

[63dot]

Originally Posted by jh45gun

Well for home that Fender Rumble might be fine but I will tell you I had a 60 watt version and that darn metal grill rattled like crazy and vibrated it really ruined the sound and I am a huge fan of Fender amps but I was less then enthused about this one. I wanted to down size make it easier to carry in this amp instead of a larger 2x10 bass cab and a Kustom head. We used the amp once at a gig it was not loud enough on stage to hear well (stage volume it was lined out to the PA) and that rattle drove the bass player nuts. Fortunately for me I was able to take it back and my gear was still at the store so I traded back. I still have the cab but got rid of the head. Now maybe Fender fixed the grill problem and it might work great for you I hope so. For what it is worth it did not sound bad with guitar with a reverb pedal added.

That's terrible that this happened. Wasn't there a way to make it stable?

[jh45gun]

Originally Posted by 63dot

That's terrible that this happened. Wasn't there a way to make it stable?

Well we made sure the grill was screwed down tight but it still rattled you could see it flex when playing bass through it. It sounded good but the rattle ruined any love for it.

[63dot]

Originally Posted by jh45gun

Well we made sure the grill was screwed down tight but it still rattled you could see it flex when playing bass through it. It sounded good but the rattle ruined any love for it.

Looking at the MF/GC ads for them make it look like a good, rugged all-around choice for the OP. And it's a Fender. It's a shame that the most famous amp maker in the world would design this with such a flaw in it.