Post
by somanytoys » Fri Feb 10, 2017 7:37 pm
I've never played through one of those amps specifically, and I don't know if you've played a guitar through bass amps before or not, so this is all just my experience for what it's worth.
As a bass player originally, I've found with smaller "practice" bass amps (which yours appears to be in size), you won't usually get lows that are very impressive, especially depending on the wattage and speaker size. If it's a smaller speaker, especially 8" or less, or lower rated, they design the amp not to allow too much bass through, so that it doesn't blow the speaker.
The wattage to volume ratio is very different to me from guitar amps, because it takes so much more power to move bass frequencies. Small bass amps and medium bass amps can sound pretty good alone, especially at low volumes, but once you start trying to push it hard to keep up with other instruments and hold all of the bottom end yourself, it thins out and/or just distorts (not in a good way) quickly. And since you're really only feeding the amp the higher frequencies from a guitar, with no real bass frequencies for it to work with, I would think it will tend to sound kind of thin, unless you're using something like a pitch shifter to shift an octave down. I haven't played guitar out of one of my bass amps before (big or small), but I'm thinking about trying it now, just to see.
Or, something could actually be wrong with the amp or the speaker, in which case none of the above may matter or be the case. If you can, first I would try using a bass (or an octaver/ps) to see if the amp gives you a better response, or if there's any way you could try hooking up another bass speaker to the amp, to see whether it's the speaker, or if the amp is not pushing the lows for some reason. I think the EQ stack suggestion in the above post is a good idea, unless you want to keep it all original. I think any kind of a tone stack, as opposed to a single knob, would give you much more control, but maybe an EQ pedal could help, if you decide to keep it original.
It looks really nice and it's in great condition, I would think it would be worth fixing whatever may be wrong with it, if anything is. Although, it sounds kind of like the perfect rig for apartment living as-is, to help keep you from getting way too loud. Walls will block treble and mids, but bass wanders through everything - it's usually the first thing you hear at a large distance. I've pissed many neighbors off over the years, thinking "it's not that loud, shit", bass just carries pretty far at a good percentage of the volume, especially to the neighbors.
Good luck with it, let us know what you figure out.
Last edited by
somanytoys on Fri Feb 10, 2017 7:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
-David
It's a boost booster, to boost your boost - it makes your tone much muchier.
