Cool little bass amp for the studio

I happened to go to my local music store, Kaye's Music Scene, the other day, to purchase bass strings. And as an afterthought, I asked the friendly owner if he knew of a bass amp that was very small but sounded really full and warm and could also sound really great with keyboards, explaining that I wanted this primarily for my recording studio.

I had posted this question before, and Where had said to look into an Ampeg (which seem very popular for this kind of thing).

"Ken, I've got just the thing." He pointed to a Roland Bass Cube 30. It modeled 7 different bass amps and had an Aux In for keyboards and other stuff, and had effects and a Recording Out. I ended up purchasing his demo model.

I've played around with it for several days, and absolutely love the thing! It's very small but seems very rugged. And dang, my bass sounds *great* through the thing. It sounds very good in the room or miced up, and is very versatile with sounds.

And the Recording Out actually sounds good!

And keyboards sound quite good through it as well. The amp has a tweeter. Cool.

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There are only two things that I don't like about it:

One is that on the physical model #1, which produces a note an octave below the original, you cannot control the ratio between the two.

And the second thing is that there is some hiss while I play bass, although it's extremely quiet when you are not playing (I forgot to see whether it does this with keyboards or not).

The effects are pretty good, although not amazing. The compression seems to sound good so far.

That's about it. For some reason, I'm just really excited about having this fun little thing and figgered I'd tell people.

Thanks Ken. I'm going to be in the market for a small bass amp. Nice to get a good report on that little amp. I'll put it on the list.

Where mentioned an Ampeg amp that is apparently also quite small, so check into that. He said that keyboards sound good through it as well. I was gonna look around on eBay for it, but when the guy at the store pointed this out and it sounded that good, I figured I'd just go for it instead of hunting around and placing bids. It's really quite good. And yes, one of the models on this Roland is an Ampeg!

Ampeg B-15-N. The older ones are great... all tube, with an excellent warm tone, the newer ones I think are solid state. You can find them pretty readily on e-bay and such. They are great for clean guitar tones and things like Rhodes also.

However the Roland mentioned is a nice little amp as well, and very useful.

I've got a huge problem with space. Each place I've lived in since '97 has gotten progressively smaller. Having this really tiny amp is great.

Even the Ampeg that the bass player has at the studio, an Ampeg B-100-R RocketBass (I think that's the model #) is too large - and that's considered a small bass amp already.

The little Bass Cube is indeed useful, and the various models...well, I really have no clue how accurate they are, but I don't care. It's versatile and useful and sounds really good, even sounding good going direct.

Just in case anyone's interested. This one on eBay is up to US$405 so far.

Ampeg amp on eBay