Fender Bandmaster cabinet

[noggindrill]

I am an amateur guitarist and bassist. I essentially only practice in my basement, and jam to rock and blues on vinyl. I have an early '60s reconditioned Fender Bandmaster, but lost the original speaker bottom cabinet in a basement flood years ago. It was a 2 X 12 cabinet, and was the old "tilt-back" type with those metal legs on the sides. I have a crazy idea to construct a cabinet of approximately the same external dimensions, but with a guitar speaker for one 12 in. speaker, and a 10 in. or 12 in. bass guitar speaker for the other driver, each in its own separate chamber within the cabinet. The bass speaker would likely need to be ported, that's why it may have to be a 10 in., and maybe the 12 in. guitar speaker would have an open back chamber in the cabinet. Each chamber would have its own 1/4 in. jack, and I'd simply plug in the speaker out from the amp into the appropriate guitar or bass chamber of the cabinet.

I'm an old retired guy, is the Alzheimer's kicking in?

[billfitzmaurice]

It could be done, but I don't see the point. Separate 1x12, one for guitar and one for bass would be better.

[noggindrill]

Mr. Fitzmaurice, I am honored!

The Bandmaster head is 24 inches wide, and likely 28 inches when the tabs are pulled out that secure the head to the original 2 X 12 bottom cabinet (so the head doesn't fall off when the bottom cabinet is tilted back).

My thought was to construct a single cabinet that was similar in dimensions and look of the original Fender 2 X 12 bottom, but served a dual purpose for playing bass or six string electric guitar.

[billfitzmaurice]

I understand the purpose, but from an engineering standpoint it's backwards. You don't want the bass driver to be smaller than the guitar driver, if anything it should be larger. By the same token the bass enclosure should be considerably larger than the guitar enclosure. The last thing you want to do is to emulate the original cab, other than cosmetically. As a guitar cab the Bandmaster was fair, but larger than it needed to be. As a bass cabinet the essentially identical Bassman was horrid, being much too small. One of the most disappointing days I ever had was when I first fired up my new '65 Bassman rig and couldn't get a clean note below 'A'.