FUQ (eff -yu - cue) - FAQ's with an EDGE

Tagged As: Vintage Bass Amps

Question:
I am trying ( as a hobby) to build a 200w bass amp, if it works out to be cheaper than buying a ready made one - any schematic diagram available on line?any experiences?

Answer:
Depends on what you want. Cheaper is NOT a reason to build your own amp. Just check out the sales at Musicians Friend and the like and you'll find you can usually grab some hevay power amp for a couple hundred bucks or less. of course that's just the power amp part. If you check out the places like Behringer you'll find you can get entire bass amp also at prices you can't possible match by self-construction. So what are the REAL reasons to build. There are several. One is just for pure education. Building an amp and tweeking it in to useable bass gear would be a master class in bass ampology! A somewhat less intensive sink or swim project would be to buy some used or import gear and then modify to taste. Which brings up the second reason to build. That is because you want something that can't be purchased at ANY price or if there is one it is HUGE. Some examples are a 200 watt (or more) tube amp, or better yet a solid state amp that imitates tubes. There is a guy in WV who builds Pritchard amps for guitars What he did was take solid state components and then build circuits that imitate the characteristics of tubes. Really nifty idea. He's gonna make a bass amp like this one of these days but until he does it's a killer project (his prices NOT low either). Other ideas is to concentrate on things like speakers or controls. I mean think about what your perfect bass head would have in the way of knobs and then build a bass preamp that has those. I'd use one of those bargain power amps after that for the kick. A final project might be to duplicate some vintage bass amp using the old schematic. My personal view is that old amps weren't that great, but some people are into vintage. But my advice is that unless you have one of these special' purposes, building your own amp isn't much of an idea.