What kind of bass amp do you use with your Rickenbacker?

[s4001]

Got rid of the heavy stuff recently.....got this....

GK 500 & GK 410 mbe - 500 watts - total weight 45 pounds.

I love my Yorkie, but I've been getting the bug to go back to the GK sound. I played a gig with one a few months back and it was quite nostalgic.

[ajish4]

At home, I have my late 80's early 90's USA Hartke. Not the Transporter, the HEAVY one...3500 Hartke head, with a 2x10 top and a 1x15 bottom. I LOVE "hi-fi" type tone I get from this rig. TOO heavy to move around, it's been rooted at home for the past 10 years. NEVER had one day of trouble out of it. For 5 years it traveled from one end of NY to the other.

My "Sunday go to Meeting" rig is an Eden 2x10XL on top, with a 4x10XL bottom. They are OLD, and feels like there is cement in these old cabs. TOTAL weight with the head, power conditioner, is just shy of 180 LBS. It lives there, the younger fellas wheel it up on to the riser and back away after we play. STILL using my Ampeg B2RE head on it. I'm worried if I upgrade to a Walter Woods or an Eden head, it just may VANISH. More than sufficient to get the job done.

I've had a Fender Bassman 100, and some other odd amps here and there, but for me the Hartke with those Aluminum cones IS choice for me.

[bluewhale]

...My "Sunday go to Meeting" rig is an Eden 2x10XL on top, with a 4x10XL bottom. They are OLD, and feels like there is cement in these old cabs...

That's my setup, too - 410XLT + 210XLT, with an Eden WT300. They stay at home. Got the head and 4x10 in 1996. It made all the difference when I added the 2x10 a few years later.

Love the sound.

[Happyface]

Two Trace Elliot SMP350 Power stages driven by GP12SMX and GP7SM preamps with dual compressors.

Two ported 4x10 Trace Eliiot ported cabinets with powered horns sat on two Trace Elliot ported 1x18's

It's not tiny. Here's a picture of it before I spilt the amps out into a rack.

Trace_Elliot.jpg

And here's a close up of the power stage now with the radio receiver.

trace_rack.jpg

Ricks sound beautiful through those Trace heads. Until recently I used a Trace 350 SMX (the X means there is a 12AX7 in the preamp circuit) alongside an Orange tube head. My Rick basses sounded better, in my ears, through the Trace.

And through at least one other set of ears.... a couple of years ago I was playing at a reunion of two bands. My buddy in the other band had no amp transport so I brought the Trace head and a 2x12" cab for him to use. He plays a 70s 4001. At the end of his show, he told me "I have never heard a better sounding amp for my bass. This thing is awesome."

I sold mine to a buddy since I am mostly playing Guilds now but with a first-look buy-back option.

[jazzmanmike]

i use my fender jazz through hartke 4x10 & 2x10 cabs and a 500w ashdown head but as i've recently brought a 'ricky' 4003s thats what i'm going to be using at band practise on monday.

[Kiddwad57]

Lately lots of gigs provide a Radial BassBone and those personal mixers with a set of 'phones. Otherwise: Walter Woods (1992) and 2X10 Bag End or a Gallien-Krueger MB150S. Still, it's always fun to plug into the Vox AC50 and an old Essex cab with no guts and 2X12s. I don't have a Ric-O-Sound, so I haven't tried the two channel thing yet.

[Badanovski]

How do you get away with it? I bought an AC-50 that I paired up with a JBL k-140 to use at rehearsals. It was never loud enough so I let the guitar player use the AC-50 for his clean sound.

[Kiddwad57]

The times I use the AC50 are rare these days. But when I "rock out" its in a blues/roots/Americana vein...30 - 40 watt amps with a focus on the tunes and sounds rather than volume. The clubs are small and people want to dance and socialize.

I used to run it through an 80's V115 Vox cabinet, very much like the famous Music Man cabinets of the 70's. Really efficient, with a great Celestion Power Cell in place of the stock Fane. A fun way to use the AC50 is to patch the normal and brilliant channels together and find your tone by balancing the volumes. That was my rig throughout the '80s.

As time goes by I've found myself playing more acoustically oriented things...musical theater, orchestral, dance band, some jazz; and that's on a string bass or a combination of string bass and electric (The Ric fretless and a '93 Jazz V). The Vox isn't suited for most of those gigs, too much residual noise, although the sound of the string bass amplified through it is very nice. But the Vox head is around 40 pounds by itself...the Woods is 8 pounds. The Bag End 2X10 is fantastic; when the carpet wore out I stripped it and had it finished in pickup truck liner. It looks like new.

Anyway, it seems these days that the smaller the amp the more the gig pays; go figure!

[Blackstar]

Early 70's Sunn Coliseum Lead through a 70's Peavey 412F (I think that's the designation).

[jps]

...Walter Woods (1992....

Nice to see another Walter Woods owner/user, not many of us on the RRF (I think just the two of us, actually!). I have a 2001 Super. Great amps!

[Kiddwad57]

The first time I played through a Woods I didn't like it. It was the 150 watt version and didn't have the presence I was used to. I'm really a tube fan. I love the Vox, which easily keeps up with a typical 150 watt transistor amp, but decided to move into an SVT through a compact 1X15 cabinet made in Takoma by a company called Energy. Bassists in the Pacific Northwest paired them with SWRs early on. A friend of mine called it the ultimate B15. But the tubes blew and it cost a fortune to fix. SOLD! Then I called Walter, a really cool guy, who let me know that I needed 800 watts. The power makes a big difference in tone. He said that he based the preamp circuitry on the black-face Bassman!

[jps]

I have had a couple older models over the years, from the early to mid '80s era, they definitely sounded different (mellower/fuzzier) compared to the Electacoustic models, and I have read that they even varied a bit over the early years of production. The Super (that I bought new from Walter) has sounded really nice with quite a few different speaker cabinets of various configurations, and many different kinds of basses, too. Very wide frequency range with a very nice, deep, subterranean bottom end. Especially so with my LDS 2126 cabinet with it's two Eminence 3012LF drivers.

Walter is indeed a really nice guy and I have had many pleasant conversations with him over the decades.

[BAD RONBO, KiLLeR DWaRfS]

Man up, and get one of these!

you mean this ???

http://hiwatt.org/pix.php?p=RonboKit

[jps]

Yeah, that was the prototype you swindled down to your Man Cave, right?

[CatHead]

Ampeg SVT 5 into an SVT 610 HLF? You cant beat the Ampeg and Ric combination for me. Clean strings with a bit of valve warmth.

Also use a TC Electronic Staccato '51 into an RS210 for those smaller gigs, completely different sound though!