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The deal: I'm in a two piece band and recently had the crazy idea to split my signal into both my twin and bass amp for extra bottom end. We are going to start booking shows and I'd like to know how to go about using this setup live....should I just tell the sound guy to treat it like a guitar amp and mic it cause it's already how I like it? Are they even going to want to use the D.I. if it's not a bass signal? Should I use the D.I.?

I know Doog used to talk about doing this in Casa Bonita....care to shed any light?

Any help greatly appreciated, thanks

It wont be hard for the sound guy if you just mic it like your guitar amp. Plus messing it as a DI will only add more mixing/potential mistakes for the sound guy

You'd be surprised how many insist on bass running through DI. :/

Ya know, Nick, if you don't mention that the amp is a bass amp, running a DI probably won't even cross their minds. There's nothing intrinsically different about using a bass amp for guitar than using a guitar amp, just slightly different frequency response/voicing. Either way, you're still working with the same higher frequencies (the bass amp isn't going to add low frequencies, but it will help define the fundamental a bit). I doubt you'll have to worry about DI vs. mic. Just mic it

Hey Nick,

Definitely get him to mic up the bass amp (if anything at all) unless the amp has it's own "speaker emulated" DI output or you've got a DI box that does likewise. Clean bass DI'd sounds awful enough as it is, put a bit of dirt into the mix and it turns into horrible fizzy nonsense, even worse with the higher frequencies of a guitar.

A few points on bi-amping that might be useful:

• Use the same power outlet for both amps or you're likely to get some nasty ground loop hum.
• Bear in mind that running the same signal into two amps will give you phasing issues, where one amp's speaker is cancelling out some frequencies from the other; the very reason why 2x12 cabs are wired as they are. With only one amp miked up, it probably won't be a problem but if they're pumping through the same PA speakers, it's quite likely. There's fancy ABY boxes out there (the Radial BigShot for instance) that'll flip the phase of one output to get past this, or you can just switch the speaker terminal connections of one of your amps if you're having problems.
• Just plain old 'splitting' the signal will cause impedance problems and interplay between the two amps. I got around this by using a Korg pedal tuner that has 2 buffered outputs, keeping them "electrically" separate. The aforementioned Radial pedal will do this, and other fancy ABY boxes.

And indeed, a bass amp won't really fill out the mix like most people think it will; you still need those low fundamental tones that a bass can provide, slapping all the bass controls up will just exaggerate certain harmonics in your non-bass register guitar sound, often making it pretty messy and muddy. However, slap an octaver into the mix, and the world is your rumbly oyster

My setup is this right now:

Vox 12 string into Korg Tuner into DOD ICE BOX Stereo Chorus (used just to split the signal, it was way cheaper than an ABY...is this likely to have buffered outputs like your korg pedal doog?), one output from that going to an EHX Germanium4 Big Muff Pi and then into my silverface twin, the other output going to my bass amp which is a GK Backline 100 1x12 combo. Also noteworthy is that I keep the distortion on the bass amp all the way down so I can use the channel changing footswitch to turn it off.

I tried this setup last night at practice and really loved it, it filled things out and sounded full. I think the fact that I'm using a 12 string helps matters...I know it's not the same as a bass but for the sake of preferring to work as a two piece and not knowing any reliable bass players who are also good, I think we'll keep this setup.

Thanks for the advice guys....I already get the feeling sound guys are going to hate me because of this rig. It was bad enough in my last band when I used to insist that my vintage combo organ be plugged into my amp because I hated the way it sounded whenever I recorded shows where they had it plugged into a DI Box and straight into the board. Albany is a shithole where there are few good bands, but most of the venues/soundguys only seem to understand droptuned metal and hardcore, and the few that aren't like that are almost too small to play electric.