Electric and acoustic/electric bass guitars need a way to make their sound heard by the world.  That’s where amplifiers come in handy.  Bass guitar amplifiers are pretty much the same as regular guitar amps but with a slight twist.  Bass amplifiers usually pack a little more punch than guitar amplifiers do.  The reasoning for that is that the actual bass guitar gives off more watts than a guitar does.  That means the bass needs more power to operate through an amp.  So if you were to play a bass guitar through a guitar amplifier very loudly, the guitar amp’s electrical wires and the speaker(s) would fry and burn up.

In all other senses, a guitar amplifier and a bass guitar amplifier are essentially the same thing.  Some of the top well-known brands of bass amplification are Ampeg, SWR, Fender, Gallien-Krueger, Eden, Epifani, Behringer, Crate, Ashdown, Aguilar, Mesa, Phil Jones Amplification, Bergantino, Vox, Randall, and Kustom.  There are combination amplifiers, which have the controls and the speakers in the same unit.  There are bass amp speaker cabinets, which just have the speakers, but no controls on them.

Bass amp heads are just the controls, but no speakers.  Then there are “stack” amplifiers, which is a bass amp head plugged into a speaker cabinet.  The amp head controls the cabinet(s) it is plugged into.  Speakers can range in size from 5 inches to 15 inches in diameter for a more surrounding, elaborate sound.  Some speaker cabinets can have from one to as many as possible speakers in them.  Some combination amps have effects built into them.  Effects are ways of manipulating the sound of a bass guitar to sound different and/or distorted.  Some common effects are distortion/fuzz, wah, chorus, octave divider, reverb, envelope filter, and overdrive.  Without bass amplifiers, there is no way to hear the wonderful noise that these instruments give off.  Check out some other pages!