Just got a new practice bass amp.....

 I was playing my bass thru my studio amp and all was fine until I started smelling transistors heating up, so I decided I needed to get a dedicated bass amp before I burnt up my studio amp. I looked at everything available and what I settled on is a Ampeg BA-108 for $99 bucks.
 
What a great amp !! The bass sounds great, the regular guitar sounds great thru it too !! It has a really nice full, deep, rich sound to it. I tried using the Micro Cube as a pre-amp to get the onboard effects and that sounded great too.
 

The only drawback is that it has a noisy line out. I'm not sure why, but I can't use it for recording like I had hoped. So putting a mic on it will be the best way to record with this amp. None of the other bass amps I looked at had any line out. They say it's for playing thru a P.A system.

I'm keeping this amp because it sounds so flipping great !! And for only $99 bucks ?? I can't beat it !!
 


[link=http://www.samash.com/p/Ampeg_BA108%20Bass%20Combo%20Amplifier_-49948210]http://www.samash.com/p/A...%20Amplifier_-49948210[/link]
 


I'm making progress with the bass, I found some "how to play bass" video's on You Tube and have been practicing at least an hour a day.

OK, serious.

If it has a noisy line out, call Ampeg and have them make it right. You should be able to record with a line out.

With that said, it's true that line out will NOT sound like it does from the speaker.

Eureka I found the problem, I just needed to adjust some settings on the M-Audio Fast Track, and record with headphones and I get a nice clear signal from the Ampeg into Sonar. For some reason the metronome bleeds thru into the signal path somehow when the head phones aren't being used.  Maybe thru the guitar pickups ?? I don't know, but I do know that wearing headphones while recording solves the problem. It maybe a routing problem inside the Fast Track interface. Not sure.

Either way, I am slowly working the bugs out and loving my new amp !!

So while I was in the amp upgrade mode, I  decided to change my studio amp from an old 65 watt Carver to an old Alesis RA-100 Reference Amp that I had laying around doing nothing. The Carver sounded good but it would peak out as it wasn't powerful enough for my speakers. The Alesis has about 100 watts and works much better and is as quiet as a mouse too. The Carver was also getting too warm for me. So I knew it had to go. Things sound much better in here already.

It's weird, all the problems I had recording the other day have disappeared and I can't duplicate them.  The metronome doesn't bleed thru the recording anymore, no distortion, no quiet buzzing noises, I'm not using any headphones.....I don't get it, all I'm getting now is a perfectly clean recording.  I am using the blank plug into the headphone jack to turn off the amp's speaker and that works. I set all my amp's controls to "7" and that seems to be the winning ticket.

I even did an 8 bar recording and made a Groove Clip and that worked perfectly.

Here's a short sample loop of my guitar and bass guitar being played directly into the Ampeg BA-108 bass amp then direct into Sonar...
 
 
http://www.soundclick.com/player/single_player.cfm?songid=11670764&q=hi&newref=1
 
 
 
 
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