Archive for May, 2006

OK, I admit I’m a bit of a “gearhead” when it comes to basses, amplifiers, and other related possessions.

My old bass amp is a SWR SM-400 which was donated to me by a dear friend several years ago. It has served me well over the years, but it’s starting to show its age. The volume and EQ pots/sliders are starting to get all crackly, and the amp hum and hiss in the upper range is getting louder every time I turn it on.

Also, my favorite pre-amp, a Trace Elliot V-Type tube monster, is starting to have problems of its own. A while back, one of the input jacks stopped working for no apparent reason. This pre-amp also generates some hum and hiss of its own - maybe that’s just unavoidable when you’re working with tubes.

Finally, I guess I came to a realization that my rig was huge (and I mean massive!) and didn’t sound quite like I wanted it to sound. You know, we electric bassists can feel the acoustic sound of our instruments as we play them, and it’s tough to find a way to express that raw, woody sound through the pickups, cables, amplifiers and speaker cabinets in a pure and untampered form. I never felt that my old rig could express my sound properly. Even though it was “pretty cool” to have 3 cabinets and an amplifier, and having bass come from a speaker stack that approximates a “line array” does really project better than a single cab.

Today I received the first component of my new rig, a Carvin B800 bass amplifier. It’s small, relatively lightweight, and simple, and it can crank out a beastly dose of power. (500 watts into 4 ohms, or 800 watts into 2 ohms, which beats the SM-400.)

It has a 6-knob EQ section, with frequencies tuned for bass that are actually musical and usable. I thought I’d miss having a semi-parametric EQ, but so far it seems that the B800 just works and does so in a way that doesn’t take a lot of fiddling and fussing to get a good sound. The amp itself is very quiet, with almost no hum or hiss, and has a lot of simple but well-thought-out features, such a mute switch, a tube-less “drive” control, and a basic effects loop.

And, get this - it weighs about 25 pounds, and is mounted inside a nice enclosure with a handle, so I can carry it with one hand. That’s a hell of a lot better than my old amp setup, which nearly filled an 8-space portable rack and tipped the scales at much more than 50 pounds, and was awkward to carry after a late-night gig.

But the best part is the price. I got mine for just under $500 - which included shipping and an extended 1-year warranty, just in case something goes wrong. Carvin has always been a great value.

In my opinion, Carvin really needs to promote this amp more, and get it in the hands of more bassists. It works well and it needs the exposure. Carvin has typically been seen as a “budget” bass amp company, and doesn’t have quite the visibility of the other big-name brands (e.g. Ampeg, SWR, Eden) or the name recognition of the high-end, high-price brands (e.g. Aguilar, Euphonic, Epifani). I mean, really, name one famous bassist who uses Carvin rigs. Go ahead, think about it - I’ll wait. Anyway, Carvin has this amp priced and designed just right - less expensive than the famous, mass market amps, and with a quality on par with or better than the higher-priced amps.

What would be nice - and this is just me dreaming here - would be an expansion unit for this amp, for those gigs where you need more power and more cabinets to push more stage volume. Having another B800 (or its big brother, the B1500) would be a bit of a waste, since you wouldn’t need two EQ sections and pre-amps, and that would be inconvenient anyway - why need to tweak two sets of knobs? I propose a single, mono-block amplifier only, of similar shape, size and design, which takes a line-in from the B800 (maybe tapped from the Direct Out or Effect Send jack) and pushes, say, 750 watts into 4 ohms and 1200 watts into 2 ohms. Just a suggestion.

Next stop is the cabinets. I currently have 3 SWR cabinets - a 2×12 “Bigfoot”, a 4×8 “Henry Jr.” and a 2×10 “Goliath Jr. II”. Each has a good sound for certain aspects - the Bigfoot is great for thick bass and low mids, the Henry Jr. has excellent upper mids and clarity, and the Goliath Jr. has punch and crispness - but I always seem to end up using at least two of them at any time to get the kind of tone that I need. And none of them handles the deep bass especially well - I don’t feel the fundamentals of most notes on the B string.

So I’m taking a risk and trying something totally different - an Acme Low B-1 cabinet is (supposedly) on the way to me, and I’m eager to try it out. It’s a rather small 3-way cabinet - roughly cubical, 16″ per side - and has great reviews from a wide variety of bassits. This will hopefully be a big improvement over my current cabinets, which I can carry to jam sessions easily. If this ends up working well, I may get another Acme cab for louder gigs. The Carvin B800 should be able to handle two quite easily.

At some point I expect I’ll need to sell (or give away) my SWR cabs, since I probably won’t be using them much after the Acmes have proven their worth.