I recently bought a bass, just for home recording and noodling around, and I tried it into the KPA. Far from doing any extensive profile search and tweaking, I loaded an Ampeg profile and it sounded quite good...then I somehow switched to a Cornford Carrera clean profile, that I use for guitar, and then it was sounding just phenomenal!
The question is: is there anything wrong with using a bass in a guitar profile? I mean I know one is free to experiment and find what sounds best to them and all that but I mean, may I just be very biased because I play guitar and I am used to mid range sounds, while in fact that's not the bass' natural position and in a mix it wouldn't cope well with the rest of the instruments?
Thanks for your input!
Bass into guitar amp
- Laimon
- Closed
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Certain guitar amp profiles will sound awesome with bass guitar. Nothing wrong with that.
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Certain guitar amp profiles will sound awesome with bass guitar. Nothing wrong with that.
Indeed this combination was really clear, snappy and articulated, quite a pleasure to noodle around with!
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Who cares what you use to make your instrument sound good?
The KPA is able to handle frequencies on either side of the "guitar-spectrum". What happens at the low-end may be a undefined/unknown for many profiles, but I'm sure that a fair bit of clean profiles coincidentally work well with bass.
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The only way to check the "mix-compliance" is to lay down some tracks!
Also, you might play along with some song and see how it cuts. But a bass doesn't only have to cut, it has to build sound foundations as well in many genres -
The only way to check the "mix-compliance" is to lay down some tracks!
Also, you might play along with some song and see how it cuts. But a bass doesn't only have to cut, it has to build sound foundations as well in many genresMy point exactly: playing bass through guitar amp might sound good in the room, but might actually lack some frequencies range that bass is supposed to provide to complement the sonic picture. On the other hand the problem I had with sampled bass (I never owned one before, so I used samples) is that I couldn't get them for the life of me cut through the mix. You could hear the rumble underneath but the attack and all those nice crunchy overtones got lost.
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"You could hear the rumble underneath but the attack and all those nice crunchy overtones got lost."
The crunch in the bass guitar sound may have been masked by the low end in the guitars.
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Indeed this combination was really clear, snappy and articulated, quite a pleasure to noodle around with!
'Noodling around with', as you put it, will not provide real evidence if it will work in a mix.
As always (and the same is true for guitar profiles as well) try it in a musical context.
Your judgement shouldn't be influenced by guitar amp/ bass amp terminology though. -
I have no doubt that a guitar amp can serve well as a bass amp.
The Fender Bass amp has been taken over by guitarists, on the other hand.
It might be that vintage bass amps and guitar amps do not differ that much in general. -
Guitar amps have always worked well enough for Lemmy.
I like to record a bass track with the same tone I used on my guitars, EQ it so I get just the lower mids - 200-2000Hz or so, and then blend it in with a clean signal that I've compressed and EQed to provide the "bass" part of the sound. It seems to help glue everything together.
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Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age uses/used Bass amps for his guitar tone. Or have you heard of the Band Royal Blood? A two man group -> bass and drums but the bass sounds like a guitar. so anything goes.
You might wanna record a di track that provides the lows plus the guitar amp track. That leaves you enough options when it comes to mixing.
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Many people mix a clean DI bass signal with a bass that's overdriven into distortion by running it through a guitar amp. Blend the two well and it will sound great.
Pete Townshend of The Who is the guy who popularised the idea of playing guitar through a bass amp, when he saw how well it reacted to his guitar.
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Try and use the parallel path It should provide for the right amount of grit blended with your DI tone.