51m0n

We rehearse at close to gig volume. Works for us 😀

Mono

Dude, did you read anything I wrote about compression at all, ever?

Or before and after. This is one of my favourite examples of this by George Massenburg, its a long watch for a single 8 bar phrase. Welcome bass peoples to the life of a mix engineer....

Mate you are missing the points of a limiter vs a compressor, I am not entirely sure this is because you don't 'get it' or because you are being deliberately obtuse I'll assume you don't get it and move on with:- Limiters vs Compressor 101 Or - why you might need BOTH a limiter and a compressor (oh crikey!) So, there are several very real differences between a device designed to primarily limit a signal and a device designed to compress a signal. They are:- Limiters are capable of far faster attack times than compressors (nano seconds) Limiters are never 'soft knee' compressors Limiters are capable of far higher ratios than compressors Limiters tend to measure instantaneous level rather than an aggregation of level over time (often RMS based) in order to achieve protection grade compression Limiters rarely have a make up gain, they are not about making things seem louder on average, they are about prevention of dangerous level spikes Dedicated limiters are almost always VCA or FET based, since these are capable of the fastest reaction to overloads Limiters set too heavy are really really obvious, and 'feel' terrible! They are things of subtlety only when used as nature intended There are similarities too:- Dedicated limiters have most of the same array of controls, threshold, attack, ratio, release Some limiters are pretty transparent, some are not, if you push any limiter too hard the artifacts become increasingly obvious, badly so Because limiters are so obvious people sometimes use them in the place of a compressor for the effect they produce, this is not necessarily a bad thing Little is better than lots almost always, unless you know what you are doing, like jazz you cant break rules if you don't know them, but if you don't try breaking them (with the knowledge of the potential issues) you never achieve anything new either Like a compressor a limiter in uneducated hands is almost always going to ruin everything.... So why would you need both a limiter and a compressor at the same time? Firstly you must really 'get' all the variables you have at your disposal when compressing. Secondly you must understand the nuances of many popular ways to use a compressor. This will lead you to understand why a limiter can also help a lot without actually causing any issues, or just ruin everything in the wrong hands. So we have threshold, attack, ratio, release and make up gain on a compressor. Setting a good obvious ratio (say 4:1) and a threshold where this is hit on almost all your notes (going for a Sledgehammer sort of effect type of sound) yeah your dynamics will be affected to an extent but you get a killer super fat tone right! Well, not necessarily, a big part of that tone is the pick attack at the start of the note, that transient spike is super cool and adds untold definition and brightness to an otherwise dark tone. The answer is to roll your attack back to at least 60ms, bingo super heavy tone, mega transient, brilliant! Nope not so fast cowboy, the compressor is catching everything after 80ms, it is crushing it to 1/4 its original volume, your make up gain then times your volume by about 4 to bring that level back up, but here's the nuance, that make up gain is not applied only when the compressor is actually compressing, it is just a general lift applied to the entire signal. So your transient is now massively uncurtailed next to the rest of the signal, it is going to hit your amp way harder than before and may even clip your preamp. You may not even hear it other than more brightness because a clipping transient tends to just sound a bit harsh or in some setting better than a not clipped transient, but that level is there and its going to end up hitting your drivers in a moment - uh oh! How do you solve for this? What you need is a really fast compressor that just prevents that transient from ever quite getting so loud as to cause an issue, but doesn't change the rest of the signal at all. A limiter does this, remember we have a fricking massive spike at the front of this signal now that we are just trying to take the edge off on the most exuberant notes, we need to measure this spike in terms of nano seconds to do this effectively so a standard compressor cant do it, it measures average level over the last n ms for a start! A real limiter will let you dial in a threshold that damps down that spike as it happens without you hearing that that is the case (super short signal bursts remember) typically the threshold will be at least 6dB higher than the threshold on the compressor, often more. The attack needs to be as close to instant as possible, the release can be quite short though, say 10ms to cover for the entire transient once the level dips below the threshold. The ratio must be at least 10:1, real limiters are more like 20:1. No make up gain at all, this is a wall not step ladder! The result is even more consistent level, the ability to get more level without damaging anything and done well, even more transparency. A limiter in this traditional setting should be after all the compression that is going on. If you are using it as a speaker protector put it after all the other fx, last in your chain before the amp and unless something is going wrong with feedback or a filter sweep or a jack being unplugged you will never see it light up at all, but if any of these things occur your drivers will be safer. So a limiter used in a traditional way does not ever truly effect the sound other than to prevent clipping/dangerous driver excursion. It doesn't matter if you dig in the part the limiter changes, if all you gain staging is set correctly, is so tiny that you are pretty unlikely to hear it, instead you wont hear your drivers melting, or your tweeters pop or some such, or even have your amps protection circuitry turn on.

I said I'd try the Trickfish without my rack compressor. That head was a disaster for me in the end. Now using an EA iAmp Classic. Fab head, huge power. Used it in anger the other day, love it. But you know what it needs? A little bit of transient shaping to bring out the attack of each note just a hair.... Compressor will be back in da rack bro, you know it makes sense 🤩

Ok so loud isn't that simple. If you are using a less forgiving preamp then having a limiter shave the loudest transients off the top can really help, also if FX go bonkers it can save your driver's....

That is exactly what a limiter is for matey 😀

Just suck all the mids and top out, instantly just like the old days, muddy blleeuuurgh all night

First full band rehearsal with it last night - the wait has been tortuous, had some very low volume writing sessions but nothing to give it a work out. I am a very happy bunny, this thing is monstrous, so much grunt, really can cope putting out a full range bass tone at serious volume. The aforementioned contour button didn't work in a full band context, ended up with hpf, eq, deep and bright in and then a boost around 1 to 2KHz to bring out the grindiness in my Roscoe tone and cut some flab at about 200Hz. This is with pretty dead strings, but even then the tone is just amazing in context, even the bridge pickup on its own feels fat, the neck pup alone (my standard go to tone in full band context) is just huge but tight at the same time. Handled filters and grindy nonsense with aplomb too. The rest of the band seemed to like it too, guitarist looked rather askance when I fired it up - it is definitely not shy...

Infamy infamy, they've all got it in for me...

All due respect Al that's a pile of horse crap. Its disengenuous to believe many of the audience are noticing the the bass on any more than a subliminal level anyway for one thing. But the one time a well set up compressor will be more noticeable in its absence all of a sudden will be on a reasonably quiet live gig. Get real loud and ears are compressing like hell too. A very badly set up compressor and people will definitely notice because the makeup gain will be wrong and the bass will either completely disappear or leap out like a howitzer. However a well set up compressor in a mix being turned off may not result in the bass going unheard, instead it may result in the kick drum bring more masked. I'd notice....

Get a BSS AR133 DI box as a minimum. It's bullet proof and effectively flat and will put out what you put into it. If you want to get really into this a lot of people love the REDDI box, rather than an amp SIM. Depends on the genre but don't forget all the Motown bass was recorded DI, Bernard Edwards did all his stuff DI, if you aren't rocking the grindy tones then stick with a DI in other words 😉

Anechoic is utterly awful for anything but measurements. Some people feel sick in there! You can also download all the BBC white papers on acoustic design, a fascinating few evenings worth of reading material 🧐

It's certainly incremental. And the worst piece of kit in the chain will hold you back to a degree.

That's a diffuser in front of an absorption layer. The gap maximises the bang for the buck because absorption is very efficient across changes in material. So you get sound hitting the diffuser, high frequency sound gets reflected and scattered by the diffusion pattern, lower frequencies go through and hit the absorption layer, that uses up some energy, it then hits the air gap, using up more energy. The lowest frequency energy goes straight through the wall, low mids bounce back off the wall: straight across the air gap, losing energy on hitting the absorption layer and again when hitting the air in the room. Lots of studies done on this to work out what frequencies are best effected by different thicknesses of absorption Vs air gaps. Gearsluts is the forum for this kind of thing, some very serious acoustic experts share their knowledge freely on there.... And yes acoustic coving, 2ft by 2ft triangular cross section acoustic absorption coving.

Word of warning an extremely good friend of mine went down the 500 route for his drum inputs in his studio; amazing sounding system, cost him 22k in the end. Not going to lie he bought best of the best throughout but it still made me think it's so easy to just keep going when you get into top end studio kit.... All the best with the will though, that's really tough.

Focusrite Compounder is a very capable clean compressor limiter that's been in my live rack for years. DBX160 is a classic on bass Then you are looking for magic boxes like a good la2a or 1176 clone. Apparently the Klark Technic ones are pretty good for the cash, warm audio wm76 is the next step up...

Well how did the rabbit hole work out?

You're not wrong about no place to hide, if you put poop in this you just get louder poop out 😂

Spent a couple of hours with the EA last night tinkering, as you do. I haven't ever found a preset 'shape/contour' mechanism I liked the sound of, until now. The EA contour 1 profile is absolutely amazing, its literally what I would do if it were just up to me and I had a fully parametric EQ. Caveat, this is definitely running at bedroom warrior levels, when this is running in full 'war mode' it may be a bit much in terms of low end, but there is a fully sweepable eq to use to tame it a tad if necessary. Still completely digging the upper mid range thing going on there, its a really lovely presence that's happening that I haven't heard in other solid state super clean amps. As for how loud is it, the blurb reckons it has a very linear volume pot, it certainly seems to be so although again I haven't been able to go flat out against a drummer yet to confirm, and I got asked to turn it down a bit when it was running at about 0.5 out of 10 - oops It gets warmer than the Trickfish did, not worryingly so, but there was definite warmth from it after the fiddling about. Just interesting, this amp has no fan at all, if I think its going to struggle to lose heat in a rack then I will get a couple of 120mm slow silent cooling fans and mount them in the back of the rack, that will do it.

Didn't get a chance to play with anything else but the Eich T1000, bad traffic meant I was pretty time limited. It's a good amp, tons of great features, maybe too many, a work of Satan compressor, no frequency control on its EQ though. All round tighter sound, more controlled bottom end, but the EA has a switchable HPF at 20Hz which I will leave in, it's like a built in thumpinator. The EA definitely seemed louder by a smidge to me. I preferred it's features and core tone. It is not a small amp, and on the upper end of the lightweight amp scale, but I don't mind that it's still very light and it will live in a rack anyway. Looking forward to trying it in anger.

Ok so I now have one of the new EA iAmp Classics. Love the feature set, 4 band sweepable eq baby, hell yeah! Nice tone, full but with a lovely upper mid presence. Best input level monitor I've seen on a bass amp, you all know I love an input monitor 😍 And 1200w. It's not remotely shy. Down to 2ohms too, I could run the BT2 and a pair of BB2 with this. Holy crap 😆

You're gonna love the noise that rig makes, seriously great tone, absolute monster volume too 😁

Well naturally I owe pints on this one. Bugger 😂 I compared the wd800 with the Glock and Trickfish and a few others last time around. I was entirely unconvinced by the flat tone of all of the compared to the Trickfish, and to date I've not heard a built in overdrive channel that I liked. Then again my idea of awesome overdrive is definitely in the SGFX Beta, a kind of deep whumphhhhfff of a drive. All that grumpy grindy drive stuff isn't for me in the main.