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Post subject: Fender Venue - Using a Bass Guitar
Posted: Mon Mar 06, 2017 6:52 am
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Hobbyist
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Can I use a bass guitar with my Fender Passport Venue? I don't want to damage the speakers by trying.


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Post subject: Re: Fender Venue - Using a Bass Guitar
Posted: Thu Mar 09, 2017 7:48 am
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Aspiring Musician
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It won't damage the system to plug an electric bass directly into the Passport Venu's mixer. You may or may not be happy with the tone quality.

An acoustic bass makes sound that is carried by the air. A Passport will do a reasonably good job of recreating that sound. It basically takes "natural" sounds and makes them louder. That's what it is set up to do. It can also amplify and play electronic sounds, though the farther they go from being like acoustic sound sources, the less likely the Passport will play a sound you might expect.

Electric bass guitars are usually played through a dedicated amplifier that is built, from the ground up, to create a kind of sound that doesn't exist in nature. In particular, the EQ balance is heavily stoked toward amplifying the lower frequencies much more than the harmonics, so you get a more pure and powerful bass sound than any acoustic instrument could produce.

In particular, a typical bass amp provides a lot of wattage to that low frequency signal in order to take a large (typically 15" to 21" diameter speaker) diaphragm and shove it in and out, moving more air farther than any acoustic instrument can mimic. Since the Passport Venue wasn't specifically built to provide that kind of wattage to the low end, it won't sound like a bass amp. You will hear bass. It will simply sound different than it would if you were going through a dedicated bass amp.

So, yes, you can plug a bass guitar directly into a Passport. Likely, the bass sound will be less powerful and more colored by higher harmonics than if you ran it through a bass amp. You could play the bass through a bass amp and point a microphone at the bass amp and run THAT through the Passport. Especially if you use a mic designed for a kick drum or other bass-heavy sound source, you'd get closer to the tone color, but still less proportionally powerful bass sound.

Likely, if you have a bass amp of sufficient power for the crowd, you'd be better off just playing through the bass amp and bypassing the Passport. Most bass amps I've seen can handle providing all the bass sound for venues of about the same size as the Passport Venue without further amplification. Just work with the sound guy to balance the bass level with the rest of the band, which will benefit far more from the Passport than the bass player.

Yes, you can add a subwoofer to get more bass out of the Passport, but without going through an electric bass amp, you won't get the EQ balance you probably expect out of the instrument.

All this is my opinion. By all means, experiment for yourself. The electronic signal from the bass won't hurt the Passport, unless you do something I can't foresee to crank the signal far higher than it normally would be.


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