P-T-P

Yeah, loads of bass to be had for £600, especially if second hand is an option. Bet there's loads of choice in the way of US jazz and p-bass for a start. Possibly MMan and Warwick Streamer BO models. Definitely Warwick Corvette's second hand, in fact I think could get a new Corvette for £600. Could have a new Yamaha TRB from Thomann for that kinda cash too. And if he's after an Aerodyne, why is he spending £600 when you can get one of the Jap imports from somewhere like Guitar Emporium for about £400? Thinking about it, don't tell him that last bit, go an buy one yourself, sell it to him for £600 and give me half the profit

I use Musicguard. Had a claim earlier this year which they processed but it took them a bloody long time to get it done. 7 weeks from incident to approval of claim and a further two for delivery of replacement. I was glad we had the cover but was pissed off that it took so long to sort out, particularly as I had provided a repair note within a few days stating it was beyond economical repair and also sourced quotes for replacement. They insisted on having the mixer which I was claiming for collected and taken to their repair guy who after a week finally got around to looking at it and writing it off. But it then took a further two weeks before anyone got around to following up on my constant phonecalls and obtain a written confirmation of this from them. Then there was a further couple of weeks obtaining a quoteon replacement from their supplier (Sound Control) which in the end saved them £30. In the meantime, we were stuffed so I had to buy a replacement anyway. I sold the replacement they sent and in the end it basically cost us £60 to be back in the position we were before the accident. If I relied on playing for a living I'd have been well pissed off at the length of time it took to get us back up to playing speed. There may have been provision for hire in the policy, but after 9 weeks, hiring would have come out well over and above the cost of the damaged mixer I'll bet. Insurance due for renewal this month and the premium has gone down which is good, but I may well look elsewhere.

I use a BOSS GT6B and it is great if you have the kind of mind that will get off on the amount of work you have to put in to learning how to use it. It is far more versatile £ for £ than pedals because you'll get at least one of each of the main FX (more with the modelling) and you can play around quite happily with the FX chain and to so on to create your own wild and wonderful sounds. It's not really plug and play though. Sure, you can plug it in and play with the pre-sets which is fun for a while, but you don't want to sound like anyone else who buys the same unit so you have to dig into the manual and create some patches of your own. It's not too hard to do if you follow the instruction manual. The biggest downside for me with multi-FX is that you need an encyclopedic knowledge of the unit's workings in order to be able to use it well live. You can go through and program patches to your heart's content before you head off for the gig, but I've found that tweaking on the fly is not so easy. For some it will be, but I just don't have enough room in my head to remember exactly which series of button pushes I need to press before I can twiddle the depth on my chorus. I did a gig recently where simply because of the size and shape of the stage/room, two or three of my patches were wholly unusable because they had eq-ing which removed a little bit of the bottom end, but the venue was already taking a lot of that away. First song great, second song, "Where's all me bottom gone?" For me, I'm going back to pedals for live use, just because snags like that can be sorted in about two seconds with pedals. However I am cringing at the costs involved compared to the multi-fx. GT6B was £150 second hand, gonna cost the best part of £500 to get pedals and board of sufficient quality to replace the effects I've been using from the GT6B, and even then I'll still be missing a lot more that could/would be usable down the line. I will probably keep the GT6B just for home/rehearsal/recording use as given the time to make adjustments while having the manual on your lap, there's so much to play with. On the TC Electronics G-Major... It's an eipc bit of kit. I had a weekend of playing about with one on appro a few years ago and loved the moises I was getting. Again though, manual referral needed to get the most out of it.

My thoughts would be, if it puts your nose out of joint that much and there's not loads of wonga coming in, either find another guitarist or find another band. However be aware that most bass playing gigs require us bass players to let our ego take a bit of a back seat, it kinda goes with the territory. I'm fortunate that the guitarist in my band is a total egomaniac in a performing sense but a self-confessed musical luddite in another. If he gets to big for his boots he's a pretty easy target and will take a gentle put down squarely on the chin and shut up!

This is why we have two kidneys.

I have owned the following jazz basses: MIM Standard Jazz V MIM Deluxe Active Jazz Geddy Lee MIA Deluxe Jazz V MIA Deluxe QMT MIA '75 RI Jazz (maple, black blocks) MIA Ltd. Ed. '75 RI (rosewood, pearly blocks) Lakland Skyline JO5 Lakland Skyline JO4 I still own these: Lakland Skyline DJ5 (maple, active) Lakland Skyline DJ5 (rosewood, passive) Of the ones I owned, I'd only have back the Fender QMT (because it looked gogeous) and the Lakland JO5 and JO4. I can't ever see me getting another Fender unless it's a vintage one and then it would be most likely for investment as much as anything else. If you can manage to hold on, save up the extra couple of hundred quid and buy a second hand Lakland while keeping my eyes peeled on eBay as they sometimes slip through the net there and go for a bargain. In fact, I'd go for a Lakland 44-01 ahead of most Fenders. If you can't wait, go for the Geddy Lee because it will be easier to sell on once you've had your fill however, if you really like it but fancy upgrading the electronics, a J-Retro will drop right in without fuss.

[quote name='The Funk' post='37243' date='Jul 26 2007, 11:24 AM']Well, I'll just explain the comment about upgrading the speakers/power amp as required. I don't have strong views on the rest and I hadn't considered the difficulty in getting a plug from your active speakers to an outlet. What I meant was that if you get a good quality unpowered mixer now you will be able to use that in venues of all sizes. If you're starting out now in smaller venues and expect to move onto playing bigger venues, then your power requirements may change as you progress. If that happens and you end up in a situation in which your powered mixer is not pumping out enough power, you would need to upgrade your mixer.[/quote] I see what you mean now. Yeah there is that to it, although how big are these venues gonna get? 1000w of FOH sound should be plenty for most pubs and clubs. My feelings would be that if we ever get to be playing venues where it's not enough, needing new gear would be a nice problem to have as the bigger venue would hopefully correspond with bigger pay!

[quote name='The Funk' post='37219' date='Jul 26 2007, 10:36 AM']No, it's not powered. I don't know about the Behringer - try the Behringer site. Powered mixers are more expensive than unpowered mixers and on the whole you tend to get more active PA speakers than passive these days. The advantage of an unpowered mixer over a powered mixer is that you can keep the same mixer but upgrade the speakers as required for different sized venues. Another advantage is the 'panning' facility on unpowered mixers - for some reason, most of the powered mixers I've seen don't have this (could just be I've come across the wrong ones). Then you can position the different instruments into more or less the same place in the stereo spectrum as they are on stage.[/quote] More active speakers than passive? Not sure that's true is it? Certainly there are more active speakers on the market but I am not convinced. I don't understand the "keep the same mixer and upgrade the speakers as required" commet. A powered or unpowered mixer has nothing at all to do with what speakers you use. If what you mean is you can add more powered speakers then what's to stop you adding more power amps and passive cabs? I won't say there are no powered mixers that don't have pan controls, but the kind of thing we're talking about here will have panning on board. Basically if it has two power amp stages, eg 2 x 400w, it's going to be stereo. I have to disagree on the active speaker front personally. In about 75% of the places we play, it would be a total pain in the arse to get outlet power to them.

[quote name='Timface' post='37197' date='Jul 26 2007, 10:10 AM']hey sorry to barge in but can someone explain these points to a novice? what is the advantage with double micing? And does anyone have advice on these speakers for pa?.... [url="http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Class-D-CD215-1000watt-Rms-speakers-dj-audio-PA_W0QQitemZ190134598149QQihZ009QQcategoryZ69967QQtcZphotoQQcmdZViewItem"]here[/url][/quote] Class D speakers look great on paper and sound sweet but they are really underpowered when it comes to pumping out copious amounts of volume. Check out the SPl ratings. Our drummer had a set of 15s for his electronic kit but compared to the Yamaha 15s we had there was no contest. Class-Ds were something like 91db while the Yamahas 99db and Yamahas were delivering nearly twice the volume it seemed.

[quote name='bassboy115' post='37190' date='Jul 26 2007, 10:00 AM']LOL Im the singer and the bass player! Iv already got an SM58! Thanks for all the great advice! Ive seen a mixer on another forum for sale and just thought id ask just to get an i dea about things: Behringer SL2442FX for £200 Is this a good price? Is this a powered mixer? Is this a good powered mixer? Thanks again[/quote] Behringer SL2442FX at £200 is not a bad price but make sure it's all working the way it should. It is not a powered mixer so you would need power amps to use this in a live set-up. The Behringer powered mixers all start with PM, eg PMH5000 or PMP518M. As for good or not, opinion is divided on Behringer in general. I can only speak from experience and say that the PMH5000 we used for the past couple of years and the PMP5000 we use now (like one I just sold) have been brilliant and exactly what we needed at a fab price. There's still a bit of a worry that one day it will let us down, just because it's a Behringer, but 150 gigs in and no sign of that yet. Our attitude now is that it cost us about £330 and if it did only 100 gigs and died, it cost £3.30 a gig so more than earned it's keep.

+1 on mic-ing the kit Done about 150 gigs with current band and never once felt the need to mic the kit. The kick-drum occasionally but never the whole kit. If your budget won't stretch to SM58s then those Behringer people have made a halfway decent facsimile called, IIRC the XM8500. We bought one as a back-up and now use three of them. Our singer used one instead of his SM58 a few gigs back and tonally it was very close to his SM58, just have to get a bit closer to the mic for them to deliver than you do with the Shure.

Oh yeah, and get the best speakers you can afford. Nothing will put a crimp in your FOH sound like cheap PA cabs. Second hand is ideally the way to go to get the best value for money 'cause new or old, speaker cabs, generally speaking, either work or they don't. There's not an awful lot to gain from buying new as long as you do your homework and buy wisely. I picked up our current FOH cabs off eBay just a few weeks ago. Got Laney bins, JBL 15" EON tops, the poles to connect 'em and the littel PA head we use now to drive wedge all for under £300. Wouldn've been a bargain at £450! If you have to buy new cabs, see if you can find a set of quality full range tops that can handle some bass through them and worry about bins later. Also it's worth looking at the weight of the cabs as PA cabs can be hefty buggers.

If you're going to put drums (as in mic'd kit) through you're going to need a total of around 8 channels: 2 x vox 1 x bass 1 x guitar 1 x snare 1 x kick 2 x toms/overhead You might as well get something with a fe more inputs than that, just because you might not need them now, but maybe someone else will fancy singing down the line, or you might want to double mic the guitar amp, add a bit of acoustic guitar etc. The difference in price between the PMP5000 (20 channels and PMP3000 (12 channels) for example, is only about £30 or so. There's also the benefit of a little redundancy should a mixer channel conk out by being overdriven or a having dodgy lead going into it. As for power, you'd think 300 to 500w would be sufficient, and just for vocals it can be if you have efficient cabs out front and the rest of you can keep your volume in check That having been said, it's always better to have an amplifier with an output greater than the cabs as the number one killer of PA cabs is an amp that is working to the max and as a result permenantly clipping. The clipping is cancer for cabs. Better to have more headroom and turn down, especially as you'll only possibly go past the cabs' capabilities for brief peaks of volume. Best front of house sound you can achieve will come from putting as much of the backline through the PA and being really disciplined about keeping on stage volumes to a minimum. Bassists are usually good with this, guitarists not so much!