Bass Amp

Is it ok to use a bass plugged into an ordinary guitar amp just in a home environment or will it damage the amp? I have a cheapo Rockler 10 watt and a Mustang II.

Not a good idea, unless you use an amp with the headphone option, and ensure that phones are connected-first, and the speaker is disabled while the phones are in use.

Some say a low volume may work w/ the guitar amp's speaker. <--- I'm not going to risk that one.

If you keep the amp volume low and don't crank the bass to it's max you'll be alright. It won't sound all that great but at low volumes it won't damage the amp. And by low volumes I mean bedroom volume playing solo.

Thanks fellas. I will try it with headphones and if I decide to keep the bass I will look for a dedicated amp.

I just checked and my Mustang II can emulate a '59 Bassman amp. Does this mean I can use a bass guitar in that mode or does it not have anything to do with that?

NO -that emulation is essentially an eq setting.

NO -that emulation is essentially an eq setting.

Which means????????

essentially it is setting the tone to sound like you are playing a guitar through a bassman amp (common practice).

if you want to play bass through it at any volume get a different speaker.

OK, thanks for the explanation.

I remember when I was young, played my bass through my 15G all the time for two years. Cranked it must of the time too. I have no clue how I can plug a guitar in now and get basically the sound of a new 15G out of it. That little guy's a trooper.

But no, I wouldn't recommend playing bass through a guitar amp.

I rehearse my acoustic trio using a guitar amp often. It works fine. The idea here is that you get to hear yourself play, not that it's going to be a great sounding bass amp. Just watch the volume lest you smoke the speaker. If you and the bass hang together, you'll upgrade to a real bass rig at some point.

When playing at home together, my wife plays bass through a Pathfinder 10 - it's not ideal but the volume is kept around 3-2 so I'm not overly concerned. No one is going to recommend that you do it, or be able to promise that it won't damage the amp, but honestly if you want to play through the cheapo amp at low volumes I don't see there being any major issue. Definitely better than buying a practice bass amp just to hear your playing.

The problem with small speakers/low powered amps is the amount of energy required to reproduce the low frequencies a bass generates - you won't get much bottom end out of a little guitar practice amp, but as said above, as long as you aren't driving it to its limits and are sensible with the volume knob then you should be fine for low level practicing at home. I did just the same thing when I was a kid starting out - I even used to put the bass through the aux in of my friends tiny home stereo when we'd jam at his house. Sounded awful, but was enough for us to hear ourselves play!

As for the '59 Bassman setting on your Mustang - that is a digital model of the tone of a Bassman amp - the Fender Bassman was originally designed for bassists but became popular with guitar players, mainly because it just sounds great! The Bassman setting on your Mustang will be programmed to give a similar tone to that amp, but with guitar in mind, not bass - it's not going to be expecting a bass signal through it.

If you're using modelling amps like that for a bass, I've usually found going for the cleanest signal possible is your best bet. Anything with more than a small amount of drive will get muddy fast through the small speaker.

The Fender 59 Bassman was such a bad bass amp, that many guitar players used it - because sound is good for guitar and it was LOUD ...

You cn play bass on a guitar amp, but imagine ...

A woman has cup size DDD. She wears a B-cup bra because she has no other bra. She can go shopping with this B-cup bra but she shouldn't do sports with it. The b-cup bra hasn't been designed for such a "moving mass" ...

So, you can play "normal bass lines" and "walking bass" ...
But you shouldn't do slapping ...

On my Roland CUBE-30x guitar amp, I like the Black Face Modelling when I play bass on it. It surely is a very "fenderly" vintage bass sound, but it sounds good ...

Try the modellings on your Mustang and "walk, don't run"!
The speaker of your Mustang isn't designed for "heavy amplitudes" as basses can produce ...

Alright, so no slapping a DDD. I will remember that.

I have been using a guitar amp for bass practice at home for years.
If you keep the volume down you keep the power down too.
I also have a 165W bass amp ... it's a bit loud.

Guitar speakers are tough. It's not the excursion, before we had "bass" speakers, we used "guitar" speakers. It's the way a speaker impedance and resonance frequency works (the impedance is highest around the bass/resonance frequency) - simply put, the bass puts more heat into the voice coil. This is equivalent to putting more power into it. Olde rule of thumb for using a "guitar" speaker for bass was a rating of six to ten times the maximum power of the amp, for gigging.

So if you have a 5W guitar amp with a 30W speaker, or a 10W amp with a 100W speaker - it won't blow, you can gig this with bass.

However if you have a 30W amp with only 50W of speaker, you should keep the power/volume down to 5-10W. Seeing as I cannot crank up my 5W amp at home with guitar, this should never be a problem. The 10W amp starts shaking the furniture with the bass at under half the volume knob setting (<12 o'clock)

Interesting. I always understood that a guitar speaker was designed for about 1/8" cone excursion for the frequencies it would produce. A bass speaker is designed for 1/4" excursion for its frequencies. Hence the issue of using a guitar amp with guitar speakers for bass messing up the guitar speaker.

It's all about the db's.. If the guitar amp is loafing... No worries.

It's not the excursion, before we had "bass" speakers, we used "guitar" speakers.

Yes, but in the music magazins, every second advertisment was about replacement speackers. That's what I remember from the mid/late 1970s and the 1980s ...

I don't say that you can't use guitar speakers - but slapping isb't best for a guitar speaker ...

Voice coil excursion is about the same, and probably maximum about 1-in. I've actually had a cheap speaker rip the connecting wires off, and repaired it with some braid.

Take the Celestion Heritage 55Hz G12H-30, it /is/ a bass guitar speaker that since Jimi used them has become a guitar speaker. The "H" is for heavy magnet which gives it a punchier response the the "M" Greenback. Different cone too. The low 55Hz resonance moves the impedance curve down - a speaker's impedance rises to about 50ohm at its resonance frequency (see manufacturer's graphs) - that means the voice coil gets hotter that we want it to - the lower the better for bass.

So, if you keep the power well down (remember 5W is very loud in the home) then you should have no problems using a guitar amp for bass at home, including slapping and popping. Never had any problems with that, me.

Btw - when The Rolling Stones first formed, Bill Wyman was using an AC30 for gigging, on bass. Though I doubt it had the original speakers, at least not for long.
John Entwistle also used guitar amps and cabs on stage ...