Bass Amp Mute - Why ?

[Marvin]

I wish I'd had  remote volume control or mute for one guitarist I did a few gigs with. He always angled his speakers across the stage...so more or less at me. So for those gigs I had him at full volume, it was really irritating.

I usually use my tuning pedal to mute, but will use my amp's mute, or pedal if I want to put my bass down and not change any settings. 

It seems most guitarists have everything on '11', so if they turn a dial, let's say the volume, down to mute then they just turn it back up to 11

[EBS_freak]

37 minutes ago, Marvin said:

I wish I'd had  remote volume control or mute for one guitarist I did a few gigs with. He always angled his speakers across the stage...so more or less at me. So for those gigs I had him at full volume, it was really irritating.

I usually use my tuning pedal to mute, but will use my amp's mute, or pedal if I want to put my bass down and not change any settings. 

It seems most guitarists have everything on '11', so if they turn a dial, let's say the volume, down to mute then they just turn it back up to 11

He had it half right. Across the stage means there’s less bleed into mics. Trouble is, you have to have the volume at the appropriate level also.

[Aliwobble]

I’m a little paranoid, I’ll confess, but I see a mute button as a marker of gear intended for professional use.  When something goes horribly wrong in the noise department, I want to be able to shut it down before it destroys my speaker drivers, ears, expensive PA, and professional image.

[agedhorse]

3 hours ago, Aliwobble said:

I’m a little paranoid, I’ll confess, but I see a mute button as a marker of gear intended for professional use.  When something goes horribly wrong in the noise department, I want to be able to shut it down before it destroys my speaker drivers, ears, expensive PA, and professional image.

In pro audio, mutes can be used for a variety of applications, not just to kill a channel.

For example, most pro audio consoles have mute groups, where a number of channels assigned to a mute group can be muted with a single switch. The most common application for this is on effects returns for killing the returns between songs for talking. They can also be used for groups of instruments, where say there's an acoustic set and an electric set (or songs) and to switch between them the unique instruments would be assigned to mute groups so say the acoustic guitars and say mandolin could be muted during the electric set.

Why not use subgroups for this? You can if you are not mixing monitors from the FOH console, because the pre effects sends (monitor mixes usually) would not be muted so the benefit is not there. Of course this has all been made a little less relevant with multi-input digital consoles, VCA/DCA's and input to channel patch duplication (main and post eq/fx monitor mixes from the same channel).