NEWS

Venture VB-88: A Heavy Story About Light Weight

By: Dino Monoxelos

Okay… I get it! If you’re an Ampeg fan like me, we all love driving the “big rigs.” There’s nothing like an SVT pumping through a big ol’ 810 cabinet. But if you’re also like me, the thought of having to move that monster, even with the easiest of load-ins makes my back, and few other assorted body parts hurt. How many times have we seen that meme of the 810 at the bottom of a staircase with the caption “name a more iconic duo”?

Unless you’re one of the very fortunate to have your own roadie, or you’re playing a festival where the SVT and 810 is already back-lined, the chances of you taking an 810 to every gig is increasingly diminished because of the thought of having to move it. Or just the logistics of having the means of transportation to bring the 810 to a gig just isn’t possible. Although I do remember my early days of gigging, I actually removed the passenger seat of my 1969 VW Beetle so I could lay my 810 cab on its side and lay it front to back on the passenger side, and lay my SVT in the back seat along with my basses. Yeah… I was that obsessed back then, and whole lot younger and could recover from injuries quicker.

In more recent years, I actually did an instructional video on how to load and unload an 810 cab into your vehicle without hurting your back for this very reason.

Fast forward to today… Bass players are increasingly downsizing their rigs, or replacing them altogether with IEMs and pedal board preamps. But, the need to move some air on stage still remains. Or again if you’re like me, you long to have your 810 on the gig, whether it be a visual thing, or just need to move some air. For many reasons, the SVT and 810 continue to remain the industry standard for many touring and gigging professionals. But let’s face it, it is big and cumbersome to move every night on your own.

Enter the VB-88. As we jokingly say around here at Ampeg… “we took the 810 and put it on a diet” while also “cleaning” it up a bit. At roughly two-thirds the size of an 810 cab and, less than half the weight (140lbs versus 67lbs), the VB-88 is the answer to wanting that big format, big stage presence, big air movement cabinet without that big chiropractor bill!

So how’d we do it?

Like all Venture cabinets we did a ton (no pun intended) of research and development to find the lightest yet durable cabinet construction materials available. Combine that with precision internal bracing, front-shelf porting and a birch baffle board and you’ve got the foundation of a great sounding, lightweight and amazingly loud cabinet. But what good would all this research and design be if we just slapped eight heavy ceramic speakers in there. So we enlisted LaVoce^® to design a neo driver to our exacting specs that would bring this cabinet to life.

Oh… here’s that “clean” part I mentioned earlier, because of the nature of neodymium speakers as well as a LaVoce HF driver, the VB-88 has a bit of an inherently cleaner sound to it than the 810. But don’t be fooled, the VB-88 can also give you a nasty bark like you would expect from any Ampeg cabinet, especially the 810. The other part of cleaning it up meant giving it the same carbon fiber style tolex as all the Venture cabs combined with a new blacked out grille and re-designed logo plate.

And if moving this cabinet wasn’t easy enough, we kept the towel bar and dolly style casters, same as the 810, as well as adding side handles. This way, even your guitar player or better yet, singer, would be able to move it for you if you ask them nicely.

So next time you say you’ll never move an 810 again… well that may be true but now you have no excuse to not be able to still bring the thunder with a VB-88.

Dino has spent over 25 years in the Ampeg world conducting seminars and clinics all over the globe. He’s also the author of four instructional bass books by Mel Bay and his own publishing company, MonoTunes Music.  His favorite bass to play is his MTD 534-24.