paulbuzz

Most mini-mixers have too low an input impedance to work well with a bass guitar plugged directly into them (especially passive basses). You really need something with a high impedance input. You could use something like the little Behringer mixer mentioned above, as long as you used another pedal as a buffer between the bass and the mixer. Alternatively: The Palmer Duetto is designed for pretty much your exact requirements, but is maybe a bit pricey, and you'd be unlikely to find one second hand. Or the venerable Boss LS-2 could certainly be pressed into service for your purpose, and you might pick up a second-hand one pretty cheap here on the forum.

Aha, this is an interesting opinion! Could this apply to other string brands/types too? I recently bought a set of La Bella nylon tapewounds for my Harley Benton violin bass. Overall I really like the sound, but dithered over whether I should request a replacement set, as the E string seemed to be a bit dead compared to the others, as you describe. In the end uncertainty (and inertia!) won out and I just kept the strings and didn't contact the seller, but have continued to wonder whether I should have. Your comment makes me wonder whether this is a thing with some types of strings...? I'll be interested to see whether they balance up as the strings get broken in...

Worse things happen at sea! Like I said, I understand that it's not my call. Still have an opinion though! Sorry for the thread derail; I'll stop now!

Since you ask: no, I do not love the swear filter; I think it's stupid and pathetic. But then again, this is not my website.

That Phoebe Bridgers track is a bit ordinary, but still more enjoyable than anything EC has done in the last 50 years. Don't think she's ever likely to match up to his work in the decade before that, though.

Yes, I think you are probably making this too complicated for yourself! I take it you are familiar with waveform 'graphs', as seen in audio editing programs, DAWs etc? These are displaying the way the voltage of the signal changes with time. A single simple continuous note is displayed as a nice neat sine-wave kind of graph, whereas a complicated sound (or an entire song) consisting of many frequencies simultaneously looks like a messy, scribbly kind of line. These graphs showing the electrical signal rising and falling over time correspond directly to the in-and-out movements of the cone of a speaker reproducing these sounds - you can think of the graph as also representing forwards-and-backwards movement of the speaker cone over time. So a speaker reproducing a single continuous note is going in and out in a fairly simple and obvious manner, whereas a speaker reproducing complicated 'multi-frequency' sounds goes in and out in a much more complicated set of movements, like the 'scribbly' waveform graph.

Hmm, maybe you're right! Is the "tops-producing" driver actually a proper dual-concentric with a crossover then? I had been assuming it was just a passive parasitic-cone arrangement without a crossover.

Ok, except then wiring the drivers in parallel would give you 2.75 ohms rather than 4 .....?

I have wondered about this before, but never got around to asking: how does this work? Surely, if it's a 4 ohm cab it contains two 8 ohm drivers wired in parallel? In which case, you could wire them in series to get 16 ohm; but where does 12 ohm comes from?

My two penn'orth: The most important, but trickiest, element you need to duplicate is the very sharp response dropoff at the top of the speaker's range. You can see this on the response graph posted above: you need to be aiming for a cutoff of at least 18dB per octave above about 5kHz. Very few desk or outboard EQs can achieve this without cascading more than one channel. The next most important element is a rolloff of the low bass. This needn't be as steep as the top-end roll-off I mentioned previously though, so is easier to achieve with normal EQs. With these elements in place you can fiddle about a bit in the middle: maybe a bit of a boost around 2kHz and a bit of cut around 500Hz? Again, see the response graph above, but I would argue that these aspects are a bit more 'tweak-to-taste'. One cheap way to address your issue would be the Behringer Ultra-G DI box. This has a built in (switchable) analogue cab-sim. It's supposed to model a 4x12 rather than an 8x10, but I've found it to have a good and useful sound, and to be a reliable item, despite a few inevitable anti-Behringer sneers. A more accurate and flexible way to get what you asked for would be to use a cab-sim which can make use of impulse reponses, and find an IR that exactly matches your preferences. There are many of these now, but probably most of them exceed the cost you want to pay, and have a lot of additional features that would be redundant or unhelpful for your purposes. I've been impressed by the Mooer Radar, which is relatively cheap. It has built-in IRs, including an 8x10, but you can also load your own IRs into it if you found one you preferred. And although its output is only on a 1/4" jack socket, it is in fact balanced (TRS), so a simple jack-to-xlr cable would presumably provide a suitable feed to your FOH desk. It does require a horrible wall-wart power supply though! Good luck with your quest!

Pretty sure the 'bathing suit' story is nonsense; as others have pointed out, there seem to be no references to this supposed French word on the web, except in the context of this tale. Also, I recall long ago reading an interview with Hugh Cornwell where he was making his excuses for the weird pronunciation of the word in the song by saying that he just didn't know the correct pronunciation at the time. [ Edit: found it: it's in his book "The Stranglers Song By Song". ] Perhaps the line in the song was originally written as 'bikini', as in the radio-play version, which obviously makes much more sense, and the change to 'clitoris' was just typically Stranglers-style provocation? Fantastic song though, questionable sexual politics notwithstanding. Pretty much responsible for me playing bass.

Oh lord, Warwick... just went to their website to check whether I was being unfair, but no, almost every single one of their designs looks like it was templated from a five-year-old's first attempt to draw a bass... The wonky tuners... the dildo top horns... the nubbiny bottom horns... that one that looks like a melted Thunderbird... But also - their website...! That little window, lost in the middle of the screen! It's like travelling 20 years back in time...

Alongside the trivial personal foibles we've been discussing here, that is genuinely dreadful.

Or indeed the MM 3+1. Make yer damn mind up! Are we going double-sided or not?

I'm not sure I've ever seen a wronger post on this forum, though I admit that being nearly crushed to death in a sea of gob whilst standing directly in front of the first P-bass I'd ever seen (The Damned, 1979) probably qualifies as a formative erotic experience, so I may not be entirely objective on the matter! 😁

I'm fully onboard with many of the suggestions above: lumpy singlecuts Stingray scratchplate MM Bongo pointy headstocks I disagree strongly with any argument against the shape of the Fender P: what an absolutely fantastic design it is; introduced in 1954 and still dominant today, though several of its familiar design elements (headstock shape, scratchplate shape, body contouring) were really first introduced by the Strat in 1956. Man, that must have looked like a spaceship from the future when it appeared! Utter genius! As a general rule, I think symmetrical body shapes need symmetrical headstocks, and conversely for asymmetrical ones, though I accept that there are notable exceptions that look great.

Thanks - another interesting-looking option, though as a confirmed skinflint, I am slightly averse to paying for stuff! Also, from their testimonials section, it appears that they have the endorsement of the protagonist of the Die Hard movies, who I thought was a maverick cop but seems to have an additional career as a sound designer in Las Vegas...

Was that just advice, or would it not even let you continue on a WiFi connection?

Thanks for the replies, folks. JamKazam looks interesting and nicely thought out. Lowlandtrees' experience of the amount of fiddling and grief involved is somewhat offputting but not unexpected. Reaper's Ninjam also sounds interesting if a bit mysterious! I'll investigate further. I imagine that loads of people would like to be able to jam online like this, so the fact that so few people actually seem to be doing it may be a fair indication of how hard it is to get it to work satisfactorily! In general there seems to be a consensus that you're always likely to be struggling against lag, and everyone involved had better be using a decent computer; with a decent audio interface; ethernet rather than wireless connection to the router; and a good internet connection. I'll try some practical testing when I've got lots of spare patience and time for the tweaking. And have managed to acquire a giant ethernet cable...! Any further suggestions or experiences are more than welcome!

Apologies in advance if this topic has already been well covered somewhere here. In our current socially-isolated conditions, I've been wondering about the prospects of playing music online together with others. I've really only got as far as realising that the most obvious options (using a webcam with Zoom, Skype etc) seem to be out of the question, as there's far too much lag to make it possible. (Seems to be usually about a third or half a second, as far as I can tell - I'm not sure how you would measure it accurately.) Not sure where the delay might originate (cam, browser, internet connection...?) , or whether it could be reduced to an acceptable amount. So... has anybody here managed to do this successfully without a whole load of grief? What do I/we need to do?

YOU CAN'T REFER TO MY GRANDMA LIKE THAT!!! 😲 Oh wait I might have got the wrong end of the stick...

And here's one of the major problems: Most bass cab manufacturers rate their cabinets by simply quoting the thermal limit of the bass driver - ie how much power (in watts) it can take before the voice-coil is damaged by heat. BUT: For most uses of most bass drivers in most bass cabinets, the effective usage is limited WAY before the thermal limit by the excursion limits of the driver - ie how far the cone can travel back and forth before bad things start happening. Because of this limit, in reality most bass cabs can't make use of anything like the power suggested by the manufacturer's given (thermal) power handling spec figure. The excursion limits of any particular driver are given by the driver specs Xmax and Xlim (in mm), but how much power (in watts) it will take for the driver to reach these limits varies depending on the cab design and the frequencies being reproduced. All of this is sufficiently complicated that most cab manufacturers don't even attempt to explain about this stuff. Barefaced, by contrast, have loads of information about this stuff on their site. They make a point of using drivers with high excursion limits, which means their cabs can go unusually loud before things start sounding bad. These high-spec drivers are one of the things you pay a premium price for. But most manufacturers AND players don't want to have to get into a conversation about all this, so instead we tend to get stuck with unhelpful and misleading cab specs. This kind of stuff is very much the area of expertise of Bill, Phil, Stevie and a few others on this site, so I'm sure they'll jump in if I've explained any of this wrong! 😁

I think their point is that there just isn't any simple number that can give an unambiguous and definitive representation of the power handling of a given cab, so instead they have chosen to restrict themselves to an (admittedly vague) suggestion of what size of amp is likely to make a suitable match for their cabs. As to why the cab with the same bass driver, but in a bigger box with an added mid/high driver should be more suitable for a more powerful amp, I haven't got an answer. (Though of course the practical difference between 600W and 800W amps is minimal anyway; certainly less than the difference between identically rated amps from various different manufacturers. ) If I seem to be coming over as something of a Barefaced apologist here, I should perhaps make clear that I've never owned, played through, or even heard one of their cabs! 😁