Bass amps

So you have you nice bass, whether an upright or bass guitar and you need an amp.

For bass guitars the amps come in a variety, pick the mood of music you want to play and there is an amp for that. Here I will mention only one that I was impressed with enough to buy: the Roland cube. You have your choice between the 20 watt 1x8, 60 watt 1x10, or the 120 watt 1x12. I have played both the 1x8 and the 1x12. The 1x8 is great for a practice amp but by far powerful enough for small room gigs. The 1x12, on the other hand is loud enough to go with a full size jazz band in a medium room. The great thing about the Roland cubes, other than their loud, tight sound are the effects that come onbaord. You can model famous amps of the past, and you have distortion, reverb, delay, chorus, etc. The Roland effects pedals are awesome and the fact they come built in is even more awesome. So why did I get rid of my Roland, well they don't play well with upright basses.

For upright basses the choices are fewer, much fewer than for electric bass. For years apparently the standard amp was the Gallien-Krueger MB 150. Great sound, 12" speaker, only 25lbs. And it costs less than a $1000. Unfortunately I have not yet had a chance to try this one. The other brand that seems to be talked about a lot is Acoustic Image. Again I have not tried these and they are a bit out of my price range at the moment.

For me, when it came to buying an amp, I really liked the sound of the Ampeg. I needed something that would give real presence, even when in a large room and I had no house speakers to rely on so I opted for the Ampeg BA600. The BA has 600 watts to push the sound. I had a choice between 2x10 or 1x15. The 1x15 handled the low E string of the upright bass much better than the 2x10 so that is the one I bought. I could just kick myself though, traditionally Ampeg's warm sound was attributed to its tube preamp. For a few years--that is right at the time I bought mine--Ampeg experiemented with solid-state then decided to go back to tubes. If you buy it today you will get the tube sound. Still the Ampeg does what I need it to do, reproduce the sound of the upright, unchanged, in a large way. It doesn't boom or distort--it simply takes the sound of my upright and makes it a whole lot BIGGER. Oh, did I mention it has two inputs, so I can keep both the upright and electric plugged in while using a volume pedal on the upright to go back and forth between instruments. And it has everything on the checklist below that I needed. Win/win.

OK so there is a drawback to the Ampeg, which really is normal for most bass amps under$2000. It is heavy--50 lbs. As I get older I feel more and more reluctant to haul the thing around. If you have the money, you can get smaller, hence lighter amps that will give you the same presence of sound. I am saving up for one so someday I will add a review of that amp to this post. Only drummers have more gear than bassists <sigh>.

Amp Buying Checklist:

●Does your amp need to fulfill many roles or just one specific role. For example do you need it to double as a practice amp and will you be playing both electric and upright basses throughit?

●When choosing a bass amp for electric basses, make sure it can handle that low B string without distorting--even if you don't have a 5 -string bass now you may might upgrade later--a lot of music now a days expects that low B string.

●Consider does it have a line out to go to external speakers or "house" speakers? Many amps today have this but be sure to check.

●What built-in effects or modeling do you need/want?

●Line in for mp3/cd player so you can jam along with music?

●Headphone out for those times you want to practice without disturbing others?

●Builtin tuner?

●And finally, ease of transport. Consider how you are going to haul that thing around with your bass(es).