Bass Amp Question

[Petemari]

I've been playing bass for several years now, and have honestly never bought my own bass amp. I have my 50 watt 1x12 that my parents bought me for Christmas and then everywhere I've wanted to play pretty much has their own amp systems that I use. So this has never been an issue.
Currently I'm playing at my church and they want to look into buying a new amp. Its a small setting and mostly all I need is a good direct out, however my music pastor wants an amplifier that does not defeat the internal speaker when using the direct out to the board. This however doesn't match up with pretty much everything he's looked at.
Looking for some pointers or ideas for what to look at. Again the main issues are we want to run direct to the board but still have a little "stage volume" as there are no real monitors avaliable where I play from.
Thanks in advance for any input.

[garfy]

Hi Petemari and welcome to the forums.

There are two possible ways of doing this. Firstly, most modern bass amps of a decent size (so not practice amps) include a DI output on the amp head section, generally presented as a 3-pin XLR. You can plug in a standard XLR cable and send the signal down the multi-core or direct in, to the mixer board. These type of outputs will not defeat the bass amp speaker (a headphone out probably will).

Alternatively, if you can't find a bass amp with an on-board DI out, you can buy a DI box for relatively little money. These go between your bass and the amp, tapping a signal out that can then go to the board via XLR.

Hope that helps.