Home practice/jamming amps for multiple instruments

[Li Shenron]

I am gathering some preliminary thoughts about this...

 

We have various instruments in the house, some of them are classical/acoustic, and then we have electric guitar and bass. We're currently looking forward to buying an electronic drumset.

 

I only have ONE small-and-old amplifier at home (15W Squier) which does its job for practicing and jamming with both the guitar and bass, although I have been planning for years about replacing it with an even smaller one, smaller both in size and power.

 

Now the whole thing is really about my kids, who are still in grammar school but are starting to show interest in music. It'd be very nice to be able to jam together with the whole family... We don't have a dedicated room for this (unless I decide to give up the garage) but our living room can definitely be arranged to fit the drumset, and have the four of us play together. We won't be free to make as much noise as we want, but we also don't need to acoustically isolate the room. OTOH we also probably would NOT want to be very loud at all, so a few watts is really all we need.

 

So what would be your suggestions for amplifying the following three electric instruments:

 

- guitar (typically played through a Boss GT-8)

- bass, with active pickups

- e-drums

 

Once again, keep in mind we really don't need many watts and I would rather minimize the weight and space occupied by the amps, so as to make it easy for the kids to set their instruments up and then put everything away from the livingroom when finished.

 

With the GT-8 and e-drums already delivering a heavily processed sound, my feeling is that we probably shouldn't be looking for amps with their own "personality", but we might be better served by amps with a neutral response. Quality can be low, since they are just for practicing/jamming, but obviously we don't want something that sounds atrocious... I am even wondering if, all considered, we should rather look at bare speakers or monitors instead of real amps (at least for the e-drums).

 

In general, I guess that we should be looking for one amp/speaker per instrument. I know that there are amps with multiple inputs, which would nicely save some space, but can they handle completely different instruments? In addition, they would mean that the sound of multiple instruments would come from the same direction.

 

As I said, these are all pretty much preliminary thoughts only, so we're open to all suggestions

[Mr.Grumpy]

I'd suggest a small PA ("Public Address") system, the kind with two speakers and a 'powered mixer' amplifier.

 

http://www.guitarcenter.com/Harbinger/M60-60-Watt-4-Channel-Compact-Portable-PA-with-10-in-Speakers.gc

 

E-drums can plug right in. For guitar, you'll want to find a setting on the GT-8 for "speaker simulation" or "cab simulation" and turn it ON. For bass guitar, you can get a usable tone plugging 'straight in' since each input has it's own tone controls. Or you can use a device like a Behringer BDI-21 bass direct box between the bass guitar and PA amp.

 

I was in a band where we rehearsed through a small PA system like this. The guitar player still used his amp, but the e-drums, my bass guitar and the singer's vocals all went through the PA. It had plenty of bass for my needs. E-drums are the way to go for playing at reasonable volume.

 

 

[WRGKMC]

I'd agree with Mr Grumpy. A small PA sounds Ideal. One or two of these small Kustom units would probably be ideal. These units are all self contained and can be linked so if you need more power or more channels you simply link more units together. https://www.musiciansfriend.com/pro-audio/kustom-pa-pa50-personal-pa-system/h74861000000000?cntry=us&source=3WWRWXGP&gclid=EAI aIQobChMI1vCwyZa32gIVw7fACh0_EAF0EAQYASABEgLiAfD_B wE&kwid=productads-adid^221957295815-device^c-plaid^335491604793-sku^H74861000000000@ADL4MF-adType^PLA

 

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These have 3 channels per unit and are 50W each which is minimal for a PA. I'd suggest you have two so you have 6 channels at 100W which should be ideal for your needs.

 

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[Li Shenron]

Those options sound quite good! They are actually quite a lot more powerful than I think we need. They are also a bit heavy and bulky for my kids to operate and move around, so they'll probably have to stay in the living room at all times. I really like the simplicity/ease of use of this solution, and the fact that you can fit all the instruments into a single unit.

 

The opposite solution, as I thought originally, would be to get separate small amps for each instrument. There are really many TINY practice amps around these days, but are they decent or do they just sound terrible? For example the VOX AC2 Rhythm Bass (https://www.thomann.de/gb/vox_ac2_rh...f=search_prv_7) doesn't seem bad. Clearly 2W in power are truly miserable, but again it's just for practicing and singalong jammin' in the living room. An advantage of these, is that the kids will be free to bring them to their bedroom at any time, when wanting to play/practice on their own. These diminutive amps all have pretty positive reviews on Thomann, but I wonder if their usefulness ends when you try to play along other instruments.

 

Yet another idea that came to my mind, is to try and get instead a home theater system (we previously thought of getting one for watching movies in the same room). I know it's definitely not meant to be used with musical instruments, but two of them (guitar and e-drums) anyway already have heavily processed sound. I would then get a separate amp for the bass only. The advantage (besides being able to use the same system also for movies) is that we would probably be able to choose freely how to direct each instrument into which speaker, and also take advantage of stereo outputs of the GT-8 and e-drums. But maybe the sound would just be too bad?

[Mikeo]

Is the JamHub still available?

[video=youtube;I1sP6dI6BhU]

[WRGKMC]

Those options sound quite good! They are actually quite a lot more powerful than I think we need. They are also a bit heavy and bulky for my kids to operate and move around' date=' so they'll probably have to stay in the living room at all times. I really like the simplicity/ease of use of this solution, and the fact that you can fit all the instruments into a single unit.[/quote']

 

Big and Bulky? Those speaker cabs have two 4.5" speakers. Get a ruler out, they definitely aren't too big.

50W is about as low as you can go on a PA system. A Typical beginners setup is typically 100W and these are half that amount.

You have to understand the difference between watts and loudness too. Watts tells you how much power the speakers consume, not how loud the speakers are. You have to know the SPL levels of the speakers to determine loudness.

 

Also a PA typically has a much weaker preamp for instruments. Those units should do a good job doing a Karaoke jam in a living room, that's it. They probably aren't going to be very loud enough for any kind of gig and surely not loud enough to penetrate walls and bother neighbors which seems to be what you're looking for.

[Li Shenron]

Big and Bulky? Those speaker cabs have two 4.5" speakers. Get a ruler out' date=' they definitely aren't too big.[/quote']

 

Oh, they are definitely fine in general! I was just thinking from my 8yo point of view, those 7kg are not something to easily bring back and forth between the living room and the bedroom (in case the kids sometimes want to use them for their own practice). Portability would be an advantage of the amp-per-instrument solution, presumably at the cost of sound quality.

 

Good point also on the loudness. Indeed, I was looking merely at the amount of Watts in order to have a rough idea on the loudness. At home I only ever had this 15W Squier and I definitely never pumped it up louder than maybe 40% volume and 10% master (or viceversa), but I have no idea what are its SPL levels. I guess loudness is logarithmic with power i.e. measured in dB, is that right? So IN THEORY a 2W tiny practice amp should deliver slightly more than half of the dB compared to my 15W Squier, which sounds like it would be ok for us.

 

By the way, if it helps picture the situation, we'll probably want to be able to jam together with acoustic instruments, such as the piano, acoustic guitars and winds, but without amplifying those. So the electric/amplified instruments would need to be only as loud to be on par with the acoustic/non-amplified ones.

[DeepEnd]

7kg is about 15 1/2 lbs, about twice the weight of a gallon of milk. All else being equal (which it rarely is) 2 Watts is a bit less than 9 dB less than 15 Watts or roughly "half as loud." I'd suggest you check your nearest pawn shop. They have trouble getting rid of amps and sell them cheap. A couple of years ago I bought an Ibanez practice amp for bass for around $32. It was 10 Watts with a 6 1/2" speaker, loud enough for bedroom practice but not much else.

[badpenguin]

A Roland keyboard amp.

[thatsbunk]

Is the JamHub still available?

[video=youtube;I1sP6dI6BhU]

 

Our band has the jam hub "tourbus" when practice needs to be silent. It's not a substitute for traditional amplification imo, but there are times when it's better to use it than dealing with a crabby wife...

 

im pretty sure they've stopped making them but they can still be found used.

[Li Shenron]

Yes these look great, but it seems to me they are meant to be used with headphones, while we're currently looking forward to playing in the open (at a low volume). Naturally, you could first plug into this hub and then connect the hub to speakers. The hub idea is certainly still an option.