A Solid Practice Amp

I am a hobbyist who would like to play out live one day. I have not done that since the mid-90s and remember having a great time doing it.

I bought this because my Ampeg BA-210v2 was a bit "much" for quiet practice and Fender makes excellent amplifiers.

The Good:

Reasonably priced @ $230 on Guitar Center's website with an additional 10% in-cart discount, $221.50 out-the-door. Well built. Versatile tone-shaping with both "Low Mid" and "High Mid" potentiometers. The preset buttons work well.

The Bad Nothing at all.

From Gear Setup

Love it

This is the definitive bass amp for me in my home studio, very dinamic eq to experiment with your bass tone, very cool overdrive and amps configurations and can handle multiple music genres, easy to use, very intuitive and do very good in small venues, solid quality for the price and very lightweight.

From Gear Setup

Excellent bass amp for practice, rehearsal, and small gigs

As noted on my other bass-guitar product reviews, I'm not a dedicated pro bassist by any stretch of the imagination; I'm a guitarist who likes playing bass so I can lay down demo tracks, fill in when there's no bassist, and have a decent bass rig handy when friends stop by to jam. But I have been doing all this for almost 30 years, so I have some experience with different bass gear, and I've always found Fender amps to be some of the best you can get.

As an apartment dweller, I can't get away with turning my 100W bass head/1x15 cabinet up to 0.5 before the neighbors call the cops, so I needed something much smaller - but still beefy enough to reproduce the low "B" string on my bass. After reading up on the available options, I went for something I knew wouldn't disappoint, and I'm very pleased with the results. This amp has a single 10" speaker and 40W of power, so while it won't be a great choice for a stadium gig, it's plenty loud enough for practice, basement or back-porch jam sessions, and small gigs (do people still do "coffeehouse gigs"?). It's actually loud enough that I still can't turn it up past about 3 without rattling the windows, and the 10" speaker puts out the low notes with clarity, definition, and a lot of BASS! Really impressed with the volume and headroom available.

And it's LIGHT! At 18lbs, it's about the same load as 2 gallons of milk, but it feels like even less. That's incredibly light, especially for a bass amp that puts out this kind of low end. Like, disarmingly so. Every time I pick it up, I just about fall over backwards because it looks and sounds like it should weigh 2 - 3 times as much as it does. With that said, it doesn't feel (or sound) like it's made of balsa wood, either - appears to be standard Fender construction, so I'm guessing that they've achieved this with reduction to the weight of the speaker magnet more than the cabinet.

The control layout is straightforward - Input gain, switchable distortion with gain and volume knobs, 4-band EQ, and master volume, plus three "character" switches for Bright, Contour, and Vintage voicings. The controls are all highly interactive, and the "character" switches make a BIG difference in how the amp sounds. These can modify the sound from vintage Bassman/Portaflex, to jazz, R&B/funk, modern metal, and just about anywhere else you want, and different switch combinations yield some great tones. The distortion isn't super-fuzzy; it tops out at a grindy overdrive, but with a bass that's more than OK. If you want more, you can always plug in a pedal (see my review of the EHX Battalion for more about this - now THAT thing has some gain!)

The rear panel has a few nifty features, too. There's the requisite headphone out for silent practice, a 1/8" stereo mini ("aux") input so you can play along with anything that has a headphone output, an XLR DI output for running to a PA or recording device, and a 1/4" input for the (not included) footswitch. The footswitch just turns the distortion channel off and on, but I don't need it since I have the aforementioned Battalion preamp/DI for distortion. There's no separate output for an external speaker cab, but with only 40W of power, that wouldn't be a great idea anyway.

All in all, Fender amps have never disappointed me, and the Rumble 40 won't be the first. Very versatile, lightweight, loud, clear, responsive - this amp is stellar for anything up to small gigs, and if you need more power, you can always run the DI output to the PA. Love it.

Great 40 watt

One of the things I realized like any good amp is how explosive this amp is in a smaller room. Another thing that was a good addition to the amp was the overdrive effect. It really is a good amp effect sounds like a built in siren.

Great amp for the price

This amp is only 200 bucks, and it delivers. It has a very beefy midrange and can get really loud. It's only 19lbs, making perfectly light.