Bass cab for guitar?

[Yan_Huriey]

Hi guys,  I wanted to lean on your consummate experience, I'm playing a lot of guitar these days and looking to get my gigging rig sorted out.  I've been using a Reidmar 250 (which i love tonally both on bass and guitar), and it's plenty loud enough for now.  I've toyed with getting a dedicated guitar head,  I'm wondering if I really need to as the Reidmar is freaking awesome and I use a Quad Cortex which has great amp sims onboard.  I love the reidmar, it's got the best amp EQ I've ever used, it's just the sound I want.

 

Now I have a 1x12 EBS classic cab, and I mean it's OK, I'm not sure whats going to happen when I really start pushing it, plus it's sligtly leaning towards the vintage side, which is fine but I'm looking for a slightly sharper sound.

I'm wondering what bass cabs would do this well, I'll be playing punk rock, classic rock and metal.  And on my bass the same, as well as funk.

 

I thought a Barefaced 2 x 10 or 2 x 12 might work well, but you guys always have great suggestions, so I'd like to hear your thoughts.

 

Something that doesn't weigh a f*king ton would be nice.

 

'One amp to rule them all, one amp to find them, One amp to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.....' 😈

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

You can use a bass cab for guitar but you won't get any crunch or compression, let alone anything close to woman tone out of it. The only way you'll get anything other than totally clean is with effects...unless you manage to score a '59 Bassman. 

[Lozz196]

I used a Barefaced Big Baby II for guitar and it worked quite nicely. I was putting a Marshall JCM900 type sound through it. 

[Japhet]

Played a gig recently where the guitarist had amp problems and ended up playing through my Fender Rumble 100 which I happened to have in the car. It was an emergency solution which actually sounded really good.

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[Rayman]

I played guitar for years through a couple of different bass amps, no problem. In fact when I went back to a Fender Princeton guitar amp, it sounded thin to me. It took a while to re adjust.

 

You might not get that high end sparkle, but you a lovely warm tone.

 

Decades ago, probably 4, my brother bought a Vox combo from Rhythm House music in Stockport to play lead/rhythm guitar through. He used it for years. It always did have a warm tone to it. Turned out it was a bass amp.

[PinkMohawk]

Played a few shows where bands with two guitarists needed to borrow my Ampeg 8x10, it always sounds pretty f***ing good to me.

[Tdw]

Probably the best (home use) guitar sound I've ever got was a trace elliot v6 into a acme low b2  cab, it was super detailed, all frequencies really clear and very smooth. This was a clean sound though and there was no way I was going to try to get the v6s 400 watt valve power section to distort! I suspect that with the right pedals this would have been an amazing although inconvenient live rig.

[Phil Starr]

The secret of guitar amps is going to be more in the speakers than the amp itself. Guitar speakers for electric guitar are pretty much used because they are very coloured and designed to be so with a soft/thin paper cone which operates under break up creating a huge frequency hump in the 1-3,000Hz region. They are designed for high efficiency often reaching over 100db/W for a single driver and about 6db more than a comparable bass driver. They also have a higher resonant frequency as bass goes an octave lower. However both guitar and bass can sound great through the same speakers, which is what a good PA does. If you want to use the same back line for both you effectively need to think in terms of a PA on stage just for your back line. If your back line has no 'colour' you can add it in with eq and amp sims. If the sound is coloured to start with it is very hard to take it out. The easy way to do this is to go FRFR.

 

If you are happy with your amp sims as you seem to be then you probably don't want to add too much extra colour from your cab, something with flat/neutral sound will be better. The Barefaced Big Baby is fairly neutral which is why that was successful for @Lozz196 even cleaner sounding is the LFSys Monaco and lots of people are doing this with active PA speakers with RCF and QSC being the go to cabs and a few Yamahas being used as well. You can then add in the tones you like for bass and guitar with multi-fx. I've seen people loading guitar patches onto their Zooms giving them a mix of guitar and bass patches to use in the same units.

 

[Beer of the Bass]

I've played a couple of different guitar amps into my bass cabs, it's not bad as such, but for clean to lightly driven tones it seems a little polite.  It could be good for a warm, clean straight-ahead jazz tone (and indeed some of the Henricksen jazz amps use the same driver as my bass cabs), and I've seen people make it work for unconventional heavily EQ'ed drive sounds. But for more "normal" guitar sounds it might be lacklustre.