JPJ

I did once, and the cables were clamped in place mechanically, two prongs bent over the exposed cable ends which themselves had an aluminium sleeve over the copper wire. Looked like it had been done in a press.

Check out the TC Electronic BG250 combos. Great for home practice but loud enough to jam with mates and even gig. They come in 2x8”, 2x10”, and 1x15” formats. I’ve got the 2x8” version and I love it, and yes I’ve gigged it albeit in an acoustic gig. They seem to go for about £120-£150 secondhand and will be more future proof than a 30-50 watt practice amp.

Congratulations and welcome to the (addictive) club. The best advice I can offer is get help with hand / body position before you start to bake in problems that can even result in permanent injury. If there’s no tutors near you, then there’s some great advice for free from Discover Double Bass on YouTube. That said, I’m sure your cello experience will come in useful 😎

Not quite, but typical of what you can face on the UK pub scene. It sort of brings the whole speaker placement discussion into sharp focus.

Every now and then you get a gig that completely defies logic. This was the “stage” area we were presented with last night. We were basically in a corner with a 1 metre (3ft 3”) partition in front of us with the main ‘audience’ watching through the window, and a small bunch of music lovers off to our right. Solution, one top pole mounted on a bin facing right and running at about half power, and one top facing through the window running flat out. The problems were compounded by ceiling beams and a low ceiling. Did we get a great sound - er no, did we get an acceptable sound at an acceptable level for what was a small’ish villiage pub, then yes. Sometimes life gives you lemons and you just have to get creative.

Not in theXR18, but I use a dBX DriveRack that can auto eq the PA in a room using pink noise, however you can’t really do this at your average pub gig as I don’t think many landlords would be happy with you pinking their bar full of punters whilst you move a reference mic around the three positions the DriveRack requests. I’ve used it to set up a user presets (one with subs either side, one with centre subs, one with no subs) that cover our usual setups, then select the correct one as a starting point, and correct for any room imbalances using the main eq and my ears.

They are quite simple once you get to grips with them. The difference is that you can’t get the extremes you can with a two or three-band active eq, which is probably a good thing. One thing I can say is that the Overwater filter pre does not do the Wal sound, or at least I can’t make mine sound like a Wal.

Well it took a while to get an appointment but yesterday I had the customer impressions taken at Boots in Newcastle; the wait begins.

I do this all the time. Our channel settings have been dialled in on the XR18 for a few years now, so I use the six band semi-parametric eq on the mains to eq to the room. I also save scenes for each venue so I have the last gig at that venue as a starting point. My only other comment is subtractive eq is much more preferable to additive.

Took a quick lunchtime trip up into beautiful Northumberland to see local electronics wizard Dave Coates who diagnosed and fixed the issue in about five minutes. As suspected, one of the four legs of the volume pot board was loose in the main board. A quick whizz over with the soldering iron and she’s as good as new.

Most of the oils I’ve used have the effect of darkening the wood (tung oil, tru-oil, gunstock oil), would shellac not be a better option?

My first recollection of seeing an ‘Original’ Overwater was as a teenager, pressing my nose up against the window of Chris & Andy’s on High Bridge in Newcastle in the early eighties. One image that sticks in my mind was a window display containing an Original series fretless four string displayed alongside a JayDee Supernatural - that image caused unnatural stirrings in the trouser department.

Ah a journey I have been on recently but in the other direction. At one time, most of my basses were five string actives, which over a period of time I ‘upgraded’ to John East J-Retro or Unibass preamps. I had my sound. Then a tribute sort of gig came along which required a P bass, so in came a very nice early passive Lakland Skyline P with the Lindy Fralin pickups, quickly followed by a Fender Tony Franklin fretless P bass (again passive) for an electric Americana project, and that was it, I was hooked on passive tone, so much so that I built (assembled) a passive five string PJ. Passive basses became my main gigging instruments of choice. After about two years, I was feeling guilty leaving my John East equipped Overwater five string J series, my previous workhorse bass, unloved in its case. So I whipped it out for a gig and boom - I was back in love with active basses. For me, I think passives record better, but there is no substitute for the oomph of an active bass when you are playing live. What has changed is that I am now cutting the bass back much more and really dialling in the middle to get a really nice, almost passive, tone but with more balls. It’s funny how your tastes change over time isn’t it?

Replacing a 924 or 940 neck is going to be a challenge given that they are one of the best proportioned necks I’ve ever played. I’ve owned my factory fretless RS940TV since 1982 and it will have to be prised out of my cold dead hands.

Here’s a “guts shot” of mine. I’ve identified the issue as being a problem with the mounting of the volume control which is on a separate PCB to the main PCB. Looks like it might just need resoldering but that’s above my plumber grade soldering skills, so it’ll be off to a local electronics guru.

My Overwater Original 5 string used to belong to @BigRedX and is indeed fitted with the filter preamp although sadly this is a bit temperamental at the moment - probably due to me removing it to fit a John East Uni-Pre then reinstalling it when all the chat started on here about Wal’alikes and filter pres. It’s also a 36” five string with an almost piano-like B string. The pickups are the later Kent Armstrongs under wood covers.

Sorry, no photos but a good friend of mine used old solid wood chests of drawers and cupboards he got from a local charity shop for under bench storage. They worked out about a third of the cost of building his own and were a robust solution. I’ll be doing the same when I build my new workshop (shed) next spring.

As I understand it, Yes analogue should always be lower latency as there is no analogue to digital followed by digital to analogue conversion, but there’s then the issue of legal frequency and the old picking up the passing taxi if you’re on the same wavelength.

The only one I’ve had any experience with is the Xvive U3, which worked perfectly and played nicely with two Xvive IEM systems but is £170 so might be considered pricey.

Cheers John, I’ll certainly take you up on that coffee, but I’ve spoken with the venue and they can provide either a split or individual IEM mixes from their desk with personal control so immediate problem solved 😎

Hi Phil, In answer to your questions, insert leads won’t work with the Behringer XR18, or at least not to the best of my knowledge. Based on our usual setup, I’ll need to split 12 channels so I was going for 16 simply because it seems to be a popular format and would work with two of those MS8000’s for a passive split. Because the venue hosts up and coming touring bands I will check with them to see if they can provide a split from their stage box before investing but I think the MS8000 route is the way we’ll go.

Wow these look great. Any idea of finished weight and recommended crossover frequency, or is that covered in the download?

So, as we’re all using IEM’s and we have a gig coming up at a venue that has in-house PA and engineer, we were thinking of adding a 16-channel splitter so we could run our IEM’s from our XR18 leaving the house engineer free to do his thing with the FOH sound. But these things are bloody expensive in the UK with most we can find coming from the USA. Yes we have considered the MIDAS unit but that leaves control of the analogue gain with us, potentially getting in the way of the in-house guy. We’re now thinking of a couple of Behringer MS8000’s and a short loom to hook these to our XR18 for a full analogue split. My question, is anyone here doing the same or have a source for a reasonably priced splitter here in the UK?

Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever had a better sound than this combination gives me. I’m a huge fan of gentle compression when playing live and the Empress just gets the job done. The nerve centre of tone is the Jad Freer Capo which is just lush to play through, and then the Phil Mann with bass in mind version of the SushiboxFX Finally DI pushes out a lovely fat warm valve DI to FoH. The Thumpinator is there to protect my amp (I love this little box of tricks) but as I’m now almost always using IEM’s the amp is almost becoming redundant.