Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

My past three bass gigs have been severely marred by some amp trouble I've been having. The only reason I let it go so long is that I thought it couldn't possibly be my rig - I assumed it was the bass I was using, or the cable, or the room. But after playing in a familiar room with a familiar bass and a new cable last night, it's gotta be something with either the amp or the cabinet.

My combination of a Markbass LMKII head into an SWR Workingman 4x10 cabinet has been 100% trouble free for over two years of hard gigging. This is a light solid state head into a HEAVY behemoth of a cabinet. In the past, our singer would be begging me to turn down with the master volume on 6 and the gain at about 5. My tone would be loud and punchy as hell.

Well, last night, I had the master volume maxed and the gain at around 8 and he was asking me to turn up. Even my drummer was puzzled. "Why do we sound so off tonight? I'm just not feeling it like I usually do".

With the volume controls nearly full on, I was getting a fairly loud but fuzzy signal - the type of overdriven bass tone that some actually like (), but totally lacking in the headroom department. My sound is reliant on huge lows with very little treble, and cleanliness, and I was getting neither.

I know the obvious troubleshooting tactic would be to plug the Markbass head into another cabinet to isolate the problem, but I won't have the opportunity to do that for a few days. If any of you have any insight in the interim, please share!

Unfortunately, there can be no insight without troubleshooting, John. You're going to have to try different amp and cabinet combinations to find the source of the problem.

Have you tried a different speaker cable that is known to be good?

Start with the things you can sort out the quickest. Cables, jacks, have caused a fair amount of trouble in the past (someone I know once used the worst possible cable combination with terrible results- speaker cable with guitar, instrument cable for speaker). Try plugging the bass into somebody's guitar rig (keep it really low) to certify those pieces as non-contributors.

You can even use your bass cab as a slave to somebody's guitar rig to further isolate the problem.

This is sorta why I usually drag an extra amp to a gig, however.

Yes, make sure you are using a speaker cable (non-shielded) for your amp to speaker connection. An instrument cable won't handle the high power of the amp's output.