Practice Amp Conundrum

neutron619 · January 21

Hello Chaps,

I'm a noob here on the forum and with respect to playing a 6-string so I'm hoping to get some advice from more experienced folk about what to do in the situation I find myself. I think I might want to buy a new amp of some kind, but I'm an untalented guitarist and not experienced enough to know how to weigh up the factors involved.

Quick sit-rep:

I'm a bassist by trade and play in a small trio band and the local church band. I play a little guitar (badly!) when I have to - e.g. to fill in some rythym / strumming if that's more helpful than bass on any given Sunday.
My daughter is currently learning guitar and flying along with it. I'm doing my best to encourage her.
I have a couple of guitar amps I've picked up over the years - a small Marshall Practice amp (10W, I think) and a Fender Champion 100.
- I don't like the Marshall amp - it's small, nasal and boxy (but I got it for free). It's currently on loan to a friend.
- I like the Fender amp very much, but it's far too big for home practice - we can't turn it up past 2 on either channel before we risk complaints from the neighbours / blowing the windows out / deafening ourselves. On the other hand, we've been using it quite effectively in both of my bands (in church-sized spaces) and all the relevant guitarists seem to enjoy it. My daughter currently practices on this one.
I think I'd like to stop carting the Champion around and just leave it in the church which is far more convenient for both bands' practices.
I think I'd then like buy a smaller practice amp for my daughter and I to use at home.

On that basis, I've been looking at things like

Fender Champion 20 / 40
Fender Mustang LT25
Line 6 Spider V 30
Line 6 Catalyst 60

Questions I can't satisfactorily answer:

I already have a Helix Stomp which I use with both basses and guitars, so do I need to bother with a modelling amp?
Flipped the other way: my daughter isn't capable of using the Helix as she's still small-ish, so perhaps a modelling amp with presets will encourage / excite her into making new sounds without the complexity of creating Helix patches?
I like the whole Helix "ecosystem" so is it better to buy a Line 6 amp that has some of the Helix FX built in because it'll be familliar?
Or, should I go with the Fender amps because they're cheap, cheerful and I like them, and, if I went with the Mustang, give me another implementation of "modelling" for an even wider variety of tones?
The LT25 sounds like a good option:
- [+] it's the right size, power- and feature-wise, but
- [-] it only has an 8" speaker. Perhaps I'm biased as a bassist but isn't that rather small?
Overall, the Catalyst 60 also seems like a good option:
- [+] it has a 12" speaker, which ought to sound better with modelled tones, but
- [-] it's hardly any smaller / lighter / less powerful than the Champion 100, but
- [+] it does have a half-power switch so I could run it at 30W at home, which sounds a lot more reasonable.
- [+] The app that runs it looks simillar to the Helix interface so it would be familliar,
- [-] but the FX / etc. on there are straight off the Helix, so there's nothing "new" - I could probably create an identical Helix patch for any sound it could make, so I'm essentially paying for a speaker in a box.

If I were a more experienced guitarist, I could probably give weight to each of those considerations and come up with an answer, but as a bassist, it's not my area of expertise. Please could anyone lend some experience to the questions above?

Many thanks in advance.

HAL9000 · January 21

Fender Champion 40 is cheap as chips, sounds like a Fender, and control set is essentially the same as the Champion 100.

Fender Champion 50 has a Celestion speaker and sounds more three-dimensional but a bit more ‘modern’ than the 40.

I understand what you’re saying about an 8” speaker being small. Part of the sound of an electric guitar is a 12” (or less often a 10”) speaker, and I agree that 8” is on the small side.

ICBM · January 21

Welcome to the forum

I’m also a bassist (as well as a guitarist). I’m not actually familiar with those amps other than the Champions, but...

Most important - the power output isn’t a useful guide to volume, 30W is as deafening as 100W in the house - your Champion 100 is almost certainly producing less than 1W with the volume on 2. The only thing that matters is how good the taper on the volume control is.

Speaker size does make a difference - a larger speaker is generally louder and fuller-sounding, although some modern small speakers (and cabinet designs) have a good tone despite their small size. For example the Fender Rumble 25 bass amp sounds far better than the Rumble 15 even though both have 8” speakers - because the 25 has a slightly better speaker and a much bigger cabinet.

Given what you’ve said I would probably ask your daughter! The Catalyst looks the best option for flexibility and familiarity for you, but if she would prefer something smaller and simpler then the Mustang would probably be more familiar to her.

Sync · January 21

Nothing with built in speaker gives you that church worship distortion vibey reverb delay sound along with the janggly cleans like a Fender Mustang amp.

And in my experience, nothing replicates that Fender sound for affordable performance as well as the Fender Mustang Amps.

I have used a Fender Mustang III v1 then v2 100w 12" since they launched live, and even with the weight/size penalty it's still worth it over small speaker options imo.

I still can't find a better value alternative for both home volume or small gig than these. The Mustang GTX aren't cheap but a worthy successor if cost no issue. However, you can pick up pretty mint Mustang III v2 for so cheap these days it's worth it. FUSE software and the 2.2 update are still available from various mirror sites. In main auditoriums, I use as an additional fold back with mic'd speaker or just line out.

By the time you get a good modelling pedal, pedalboard and budget amp etc etc you've hit the GTX100 pricing anyway which includes a brilliant footswitch too.

Great solution for you and your daughter.

neutron619 · January 21

Hello all - many thanks for your responses - there's plenty to chew on, so to speak.

To address a few of the points covered and add some more thoughts:

I think having read the responses, I'm more convinced of my desire for whatever I get to be a 1x12" rather than anything smaller. I'm not saying one can ever predict this stuff by reading a specification and I will go and listen to the various options when I can nail down a shortlist of 2 or 3, probably including one of the 8" amps, but I am left sitting here feeling it's a shame that no-one makes (probably for totally justifiable engineering reasons!) a simple 15W amp in a nice big (light) cab with a 12" cone.

I recall upgrading my first "cheap Chinese crap" bass amp (with an 8" cone) to a Fender Rumble 100. I didn't play any louder, but the improvement in clarity and tone over what went before was like night and day. Even my wife noticed and commented, unprompted, what an improvement it was. I'm sure there's all sorts of pre-amp, EQ, etc. influences there too just from it being a higher quality thing, but my prevailing instinct remains that a 12" cone run cool will always sound better than a (say) 8" cone run hotter. Probably some bassist bias in there though!

I've asked these questions in a couple of places and the Champion 40 has come up as a very sensible, pretty much unarguable answer in both. As it happens, I played the 100 this morning with an LP and had some nice (but very basic!) rythymic stuff going on - definitely a hint of the "church worship distortion vibey reverb delay sound" and the best thing about it was that a congregation not necessarily looking for or used to that kind of more "up beat" performance style didn't sit there stone-faced, but actually danced - some of them at least. The rest of the band seemed pleased with the sound too, in spite of our usual more competent guitarists being away (though I'd rather have played a bass...!).

The point of describing that isn't to boast but to observe that the tone / sound each of us can get out of that amp "just works" and there would be a good synergy between having a 40 at home and the 100 in the church and being able to transfer effortlessly from one to the other as they are essentially the same amp. If my daughter ends up playing in the band, which is her ambition, that also works nicely.

The reservation I have is whether I might be missing a trick, or at least the possibility of some variety. If I want the sound of a Fender Champion and all its possibilities - well - I have one. The difference between the 40W and 100W version is probably the distance between 9 and 10 on the volume knob, which I'm never going to hear (or survive!) anyway, so what am I paying the money for? Especially since the weight saving isn't massive with anything having a 12" cone. I'm undecided on this particular point.

The thing that set all this off, other than lugging a 45lb amp up and down the street on a regular basis, was that I saw the Mustang amps without ever really having been aware of them before. My interest was piqued by the modelling stuff, I admit - probably why the Helix has always appealed - but initially I was just curious about how Fender had arranged their approach compared to Line 6 / Yamaha. I did think it would be a cool thing to be able to present my daughter with something fun (compared to a Helix which is probably more like "hard work") for her birthday next month, but it seems to have gone from being a relatively simple problem to something much more interesting, but harder to sort out. Again, I'm sitting here wishing Fender had put a 10" or 12" cone into one of the smaller Mustangs - I think I probably wouldn't be dithering so much about which way to jump if they had.

That got long and I've now got to go research BOSS Katanas and Blackstar amps under this heading too - but thank you again for all of the contributions which are much appreciated. I'll come back when there's more to reply to or I've made some more progress.

ICBM · January 21

neutron619 said:

it's a shame that no-one makes (probably for totally justifiable engineering reasons!) a simple 15W amp in a nice big (light) cab with a 12" cone.

They do - there are quite a few very expensive hand-made valve amps which fit that description.

[Obi-Wan hand movement] These aren't the amps you're looking for...