Guitar heads into bass cabs???? yes or no?

[mikey_reed]

Ok so maybe I'm an idiot for asking this question but can a guitar head be plugged through a bass cab????

I've got a hartke hrdrive 4x10 which will take a 1000w (250 per speaker) from a bass head so i would imiagine that would take anything????

help please folks.

thanks

[Machines]

It'd work, but i'm not optimistic about you clipping the head to death. It could easily generate too much distortion which isn't good for your speakers from an underpowered amp.

[BigRedX]

No technical reason why not. However it might not sound very good. A big part of the guitar sound is dependant upon the limited frequency response of the speakers. Modern bass cabs tend to be much more even through the range, so you might find that with your bass cab you're getting more top and bottom end than the controls on the guitar amp can easily cope with.

[BigRedX]

Amp clipping is bad for tweeter not the main drivers. Given what I said in my previous post you'll probably want to turn the tweeters off.

[chris_b]

For years I used a 100 watt Marshall guitar head into a bass 4x12 cab. The guitar eq was a little brighter which is what I liked about the set up. That was a long time ago, but I would expect modern gear to be no problem at all.

[Lozz196]

For acoustic, or clean, they sound quite nice. If using an over-drive sound, probably a bit more difficult to eq it nicely, but sure it can be done.

Edited July 21, 2011 by Lozz196

[dan670844]

[quote name='mikey_reed' post='1311196' date='Jul 21 2011, 09:36 AM']Ok so maybe I'm an idiot for asking this question but can a guitar head be plugged through a bass cab????

I've got a hartke hrdrive 4x10 which will take a 1000w (250 per speaker) from a bass head so i would imiagine that would take anything????

help please folks.

thanks[/quote]


Bass cabs are ok for cleans, for distortion you would have to disengage the tweater if you have one as it would sound horrid. As another poster said bass cabs have a flatter freq response rather than the scouped response of a guitar cab. You might need to drop the mids and push the bass and treble on the amp to try and get it sounding half decent. For distorted guitar its a bit more tricky as quite a bit of those nice crunchy sounds are coming from the speakers inability to deal with the signal going into it i.e. they break up, a bass apeaker will handle it and and as result may sound unresponsive sterile and muted. But quite a few of my friends that are blues and jazz players use bass cabs to play, one even uses a tweaterless 1x15! but this produces a very strong clean sound with big low end, most of them play old fender heads like showmans and duals these have a almost subterranean low freq output esp ones with valve reverb. Its a big part of the hendrixy, SRV John Mayer, sound with the highs and lows pushed up and a low mid output, But always clean, To get clean with this you need a tough speaker!

[mart]

+1 to all that. And see here for a couple more comments along the same lines:
[url="http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=144365"]http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=144365[/url]

Edited July 21, 2011 by mart

[xgsjx]

Why would it damage the tweeters? Would it be any different from DIing out a guitar head into a PA system (like is done at larger gigs)?

[Machines]

[quote name='xgsjx' post='1311595' date='Jul 21 2011, 02:43 PM']Why would it damage the tweeters? Would it be any different from DIing out a guitar head into a PA system (like is done at larger gigs)?[/quote]
Because a bass cab with tweeters has a [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_crossover"]crossover[/url] set expecting mostly low frequencies. The crossover's job is to send higher frequencies to the tweeter, if all the power sent to the cab is high frequency (such as from a guitar head) then not much goes to the actual speaker cones, this will easily fry a tweeter.

[xgsjx]

Ahh, I see. Thanks for that.
But then, another thought, what about folk like Shep whom use a lot of fx & cover frequencies from way down to way up in a single note? Would this not cause a similar issue?

[Prime_BASS]

The Barefaced midget is exceptionally good with guitar, although in a band situation the low end would be invading bassists range too much and the high end can feel kind of shrill.