I have a friend who plays violin, and we are trying to encourage her to play in a band. She has an electric violin, but no amp. What could we get. I would think a keyboard amp would work, but I'm unsure if a bass amp would. Anyone know? Thanks.
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There are quite a few people who play guitar through a bass amp.
However, I would think that it is a bass amp because it is optimised for lower frequencies, which would possibly mean that the high frequencies of a violin would not be reproduced well.
If you take an electric guitar with 22 frets, it has a range of E (82.4Hz) through to D (1244.6Hz). A violin starts at the open G (3rd string) of a guitar, which I calculate as 196Hz and has a range of 4 octaves, giving 3136Hz.
I don't know the tuning of a bass guitar, but I would imagine that it's highest registers are in the region of where a violin has it's lowest.
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The bass highest note is quite a bit lower than open g. Bass is tuned two octave ( I think) lower then guitar.
Bass is one octave lower than guitar.
A bass amp will certainly work fine. The speakers may not produce the high end of the violin's requency range well, but it may work fine for her purposes. What you'll be cutting out are some of the higher harmonics, no fundamental tones.
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i recommend that she try the carvin ag100d .. it is small, lightweight, loud and clean with digital effects too (nice for a little reverb and chorus to sweeten things up)
it has a small tweeter to reproduce the high frequencies nicely, a 12" for the majority of the sound, and a bass port to add some tight warmth
she'd likely use input 1 which allows nice tweeking of the tone ( i use this input for my piezo output, which is probably the same type of pickup on her violin) and helps with feedback rejection if she gets insane with the volume
other than this, any small P.A. would be good for her ... if she wants to go 'out there', she could use a marshall stack :-) .. dont laugh, a girl i dated in high school did exactly that and got a recording contract doing it!!
have fun
good luck
