Can I use a bass with a guitar amp?

yeah, it's the speaker that is in danger, not the amp. think about how you can actually see a big 'ol woofer move, but you are unlikely to see a little tweeter vibrating. bass frequencies are much longer and demand a more dramatic movement from the cone. play at low volumes and you'll be fine. play loud and it's a waiting game...

It really won't make much of a difference if it is a shitty $100 transistor box. It is the speaker that will take the heat and get fucked up, and a bass guitar speaker is made to pump out the low end much more than a guitar's speaker. Just take it easy on the EPIC SLAP BASS solos and you should be fine.

A guitar and bass amp of equal quality will sound better with their respective instruments, because they're tuned to the correct register. I suspect you are using a better-quality guitar amp than bass amp. I've never heard that conventional wisdom. In fact, I had a highly-skilled bassist friend who had separate outputs for the two pickups on one of his basses, and he always played one of them through a smallish guitar amp. Come to think of it, he would often play through that amp around the house because it was smaller than his bass amp. I highly doubt it'll hurt the amp unless you're trying to perform with it and outplay drums, etc.

You're wrong to plug your bass into that crappy Crate amp, so play on it as much as possible. Screw conventional wisdom.

Go easy on really slapping the strings with your thumb. It's not just how loud you play but how severe the transients are. In other words, if you really make the woofer move a fair distance by whacking the strings it's more likely to go kaput. If it's not too loud but relatively smooth it should be fine.

Use the one that sounds better to practice. As long as you don't overload the input and overdrive the output, you won't hurt it. Don't turn it up to eleven. If you need to perform, a guitar amp won't have the low-end frequency response (and power delivery at those frequencies) to fill a space like you'd want.

Use the one that sounds better to practice. As long as you don't overload the input and overdrive the output, you won't hurt it. Don't turn it up to eleven. If you need to perform, a guitar amp won't have the low-end frequency response (and power delivery at those frequencies) to fill a space like you'd want. Exactly. It won't do what it can't do. If a guitar amp can ruin its own speaker, it was a piece of shit to begin with. It shouldn't be able to put out what the speaker can't handle. Just watch out for clipping, because that means you are going to melt your speaker.

It takes a lot more energy to pump out bass than it does to pump out guitar, because of the lower frequencies. You risk blowing both the speaker and who knows what on a guitar amp if you play a bass through it loud. For example, when we plug in our band to a generator, it is the bass that will cause the circuit breakers to trip.

Stanley Clarke has been using guitar amps and cabs forever. A lot of other bassists do too. Your best option if you'd like to be "safe" is run a high pass filter at 100hz. Some of the other information in here isn't technically correct. Like the actual amp has plenty of power to drive the bass. A long time ago all basses were pretty much played through guitar gear but just with LOWER wattage heads. The biggest "problem" you'll have using guitar speakers is they aren't meant to physically move as much as bass speakers. This isn't a concern for what you're talking about doing though. Anyway, the option is totally valid and you really won't have any problems as long as you aren't going for a dub sound.