Can it be done?
Can a guitar amp be used for bass???
We have some very savvy gear folks in this forum, and I’d love to get their input here on exactly how and why the speakers blow… but for now, I’ll answer this question (that comes up very often) with my own experiences.
First, the basic answer: yes.
Yes, you can use a guitar amp for a bass.
Pros:
you can hear yourself.
Cons:
You probably won’t hear enough low frequency
You’ll probably blow the speaker trying to hear enough low frequency
You’ll be under-powered because low frequencies take more power to amplify
My guitar-amp experiences?
When I started, I had an 8" guitar amp as my practice amp. It was also my only amp. I played in a punk/metal band with my friends, and within a year, the speaker was demolished. I had it cranked all the way up all the time, and it was just a poor little practice amp.
It worked great as a practice amp in my room, but didn’t work at all in a context with moderately loud guitar… and let’s not even mention the drummer.
More recently…
I bought a Bassman 50 - 50 watts of tube power for, as the name claimed, a bass player. Alas. The bassman is not enough power for bass. It’s great for a practice room, or an exceedingly tasteful acoustic group… but with keys and guitar and… let’s not even mention drums, please.
Unless you’re this guy and you’ve got the thunder of the rock gods on your side, I’d recommend against a guitar amp for bass.
I’m not sure Lemmy used guitar speakers, that’s the important points when using a guitar amp with a bass ! (speaking about the gear that could be destroyed). At the time, the 12" Celestion speakers (used by Marshall) existed in two different versions with different resonnance frequencies, one version for guitar and one for bass.
The Marhsall amp heads of all the Plexi-era (which is what we see on the left on the picture with “vroom” painted on it, the one on the right being a more modern JCM900) existed in different versions for bass or guitar but were in fact very similar, only one or two very minor voicing differences.
Also I know Dusty Hill used to play with a guitar amp to have this very focus mid-rangy punchy tone. A friend of mine who used to play in a pro ZZ Top cover/tribute band told me that little trick. He told me about Crate guitar amps. Here is a picture of my friend (on the left) to proove that he’s a pretty serious guy about ZZ Top :
When we were broke college students gigging, we just used a mixer into our stereo amp (which was pretty beefy) as a PA to amp all the instruments. The amp did fine, but we were feeding a guitar, bass, two keyboards and a drum machine through it, and it was not kind to the speakers at all. Given that a stereo is designed for a broad frequency range (though not raw instruments I guess), I think a guitar amp’s speaker would just get shredded. I have never tried it but like Gio says - you can do it, but I wouldn’t.
To be honest in our case my synth was probably the primary culprit. Stereo speakers are designed to play recorded and profesionally mixed and compressed/limited music. They are not designed at all to play high amplitude nearly raw square waves (and so on) out of a synthesizer. But it was what we had (and we even made the woofer cabs ourselves
This seemed like the proper topic to add my comment, even though it’s an older topic.
I only recently got my Ibanez miKro bass, and am using a Fender Princeton 65 that my son got from his cousin, when he bought the cousin’s old Epiphone guitar some years ago. I know it’s not a bass amp, but it does have one 12" speaker, and I am only using it for practice, at a minimum volume.
My son has never used this Fender speaker much, as he rarely plays the Epiphone. He favors his acoustic guitar, for which we have a Crate CA-15 Acoustic amp with an 8" speaker (also almost never used). I would not use the Crate amp with my bass.
If there’s any reason not to use the Fender with my bass just for practicing, I’d appreciate it if someone would let me know.
A low volume, it might be fine. At high volume, it might blow the speaker as it won’t be optimized for low frequencies. If it has a headphone jack and you are using that, that should be fine too.
If the speaker starts getting distorted or making pops and crackles and such then that’s not a good sign.
Thank you for the input. I certainly don’t want to damage my son’s speaker, so I’ll look out for pops.
I am still awaiting a Vox amPlug 2 Bass Headphone Amp to use for practice (I do not currently have a smartphone, so can’t use the Nux Mighty Plug), and that brings up another question. Can I use the Vox AND hear the B2B lessons at the same time? I don’t see how that would be possible, since my headphones would be hearing the bass only. Is there a way to use the AUX in on the Vox to connect to my computer?
My headphones are Grado Labs SR225e, so are open-back, and right now I can hear the Fender amp while wearing them and doing my lessons using my computer. I know I could use the Vox while practicing outside of lessons, but I haven’t gotten to that point yet.
Yes, that’s no problem. I do it everyday. Connect an aux cable to your headphone out on your laptop and into you Vox amPlug Aux In. Your laptop volume controls the volume of the Aux, but you can also control it with the Aux volume dial on the amPlug.
