How many valve amp owners carry a spare head in case of emergencies?

[bumnote]

[quote name='Beedster' post='820958' date='Apr 27 2010, 06:29 PM']All the best rants are![/quote]


does that mean i can do a bnp one?

[King Tut]

[quote name='bumnote' post='820927' date='Apr 27 2010, 06:07 PM']I think thats a rant from the heart not the head

Im the one oin our band who has the fuses, soldering iron, solder, tools, spare leads, batteries etc,

While I agree about the thought of professionalism the most valid thing to do is assess the risk. If you take a spare amp, do you take a spare cab as well?

I drive a V70 and there is room for 1 passenger and thats it. The rest of it is absolutely jammed with gear, as is the guitarist V40 and the drummers car.

Having said that, even if there was more room, a spare bass amp is not necessarily the most essential spare to carry.

I would suggest that thing that would stop most bands evening is the desk/pa amp, and I would be surprised if you or anyone takes one of those as a spare.

I or the guitarist could plug into the pa at a push. We run a desk into an active crossover and into 2 power amps. If an amp goes we could get by with a single power amp, if a pa speaker goes we could get by with 1.

If we loose the desk, theres nowhere to go. Evening over.[/quote]

I've always thought we were most vulnerable with the desk/power amps etc. As long as ur PA and monitors are decent, that's gotta be the best bet should your bass amp go down.

[Born 2B Mild]

Not sure I'm contributing much here, but to answer the OP I use an all valve head but in the car is a wee Shuttle 6.0. And in the gig bag is a sansamp.

I do take a spare bass guitar, and usually use it for any numbers requiring a different feel/tone.

If the cab fails? It has never happened to me in 35 years of gigging, but the sansamp will go through the P.A.

[umph]

[quote name='tayste_2000' post='820420' date='Apr 27 2010, 11:14 AM']Fuses are a must with a valve amp if anything going to start popping showing the early signs of a problem it will be fuses.

I blew 2 kettle leads at the start of my tour with my 400+, then it fired up normally and not a had a problem since so I put it down to cheap kettle leads.[/quote]
how'd you blow a kettle lead? to small fuse in it?

i don't take spare amps to gigs never had a problem with an amp yet touch wood. Not sure where this myth that valve amps tend to explode in massive plumes of smoke and kill all the small children and animals within 5miles came from.

[mep]

+1 for a DI box. My Speaker blew at a gig and my Sansamp got me through. The monitor is always a week link, butI stood next to the bass bins (both side by side, a great tip from our sound guy) and it felt ok.

[pete.young]

If I take the Burman anywhere, the LMII always comes along for the ride just in case. It paid off when the Burman power valves decided to fall out during the gig (now fixed with a set of Marshall-pattern retaining springs).

[Ian Savage]

The band I was last in had one of those Crate PowerBlocks in the van as well, just about enough power for bass (as well as an XLR DI output) and as a bonus didn't sound terrible for distorted guitar either.

Never had to use it, but picked it up for fifty quid when Sound Control were farming them out discontinued; you'll pay at least that secondhand, and there's no product support for them (as I recall, the manufacturer of the power module - which indeed isn't Class D, I believe they're Class H or some such esoteric thing - stopped making them because the technology wasn't far advanced enough to make them reliable) but as an insurance policy for ALL of the plank-spankers in a band, as long as you get it out and check it regularly I reckon one'd be worth the thirty quid or so you'd each have to stump up.

That's whether your main head is valve or solid-state too, by the way - the most reliable amp I've ever come across was my old singer's valve JCM2000 (nearly ten years without so much as a service), the least reliable the multiple SS Ashdown MAG heads I went through a few years back before I finally saw sense and took a refund.

[thodrik]

I generally use hybrids but carry a spare amp with me to gigs when we are travelling. It not only helps as a spare but also as an amp that I let others use when other bassists turn up to a gig without one, which they usually do!

If I'm doing a gig and I'm just taking a taxi, I will just take a combo. If anything happens the magical sansamp will come into play.

[Monz]

Sansamp pedal is my backup... it's a little strange having your bass sound come out of the PA and not behind you but it's do-able and will get you through the gig and on the plus side it just sits in your gig bag, don't forget an XLR cable though

[doctorbass]

If im using my V4B-AV i find it no great hassle to take my 700RB-II just in case.

[howieee]

I have literaly only had my svt vr for a week now. But i already have a sansamp delux bass driver which sounds ace and has a di out on it. I was thinking of getting a small 2u rack case for my old b2re head. But when i have a sansamp that is a di aswell i dont need the amp always there as a back up. If my valve amp went sudenly one night id use the sansamps di that night then just use my old amp for the next gig. And i cant see my valve amp sudenly failing. (i hope!)

[Mr Rabble]

I have a tube and a solid state head, but I only take one to gigs

[Krysbass]

My amp's solid state - a Little Giant 1000, but I also take my old and fully operational Superfly 500 to gigs as a backup.

I gigged the Superfly without a backup for a couple of years (some would say this was a bit like playing Russian roulette ) but I never had any trouble with it. Still; as has already been said; that doesn't mean something isn't going to go wrong in the future, so I'd rather have the peace of mind that comes from carrying a backup.

Edited May 20, 2010 by Krysbass

[farmer61]

Always carry a spare head and a Sansamp DI box just in case.

[TankJon]

I've not had valve bass amps but I've had plenty of valve guitar amps and currently use an all valve mesa boogie which gets properly cranked at every gig ....and its done tons!

Had a Laney VH100R die onstage but that was because it turned out to be faulty and managed to blow all the fuses in the amp once the volume hit the 10 o'clock position ...even without a guitar plugged in ...very strange.

Edited May 20, 2010 by TankJon