paulbuzz

Ok, just for fun and discussion, here's my proposition: The last hundred years (or thereabouts) of popular musical styles have been driven and guided by developments in amplification. Disclaimer: I'm certainly not claiming that any of this is original thought; I'm just putting it together in this form here for the fun of getting other people's thoughts and input on these ideas. It's entirely likely that, to paraphrase somebody or other, anything here that's true is probably not original, and anything that's original is probably not true... 😉 So anyway...: Before amplification was widely used in popular music, singers had to be loud to be heard. Various stylised foms of singing were developed that allowed for maximum volume; music hall, light opera, blues shouters, etc. When microphones and early amplification became available, vocalists were able sing much more quietly and naturalistically whilst still being audible over the band; hence the crooners and their intimate stylings. Now it was guitarists who were struggling for audibility against the blare of the big band, so following the lead of early adopters such as Charlie Christian, the guitar amplifier became popular. This allowed for the development of 'lead guitar', and onwards to small groups using guitars as the main instrumentation. Loud singing again frequently became necessary to compete with the rising beat of rock'n'roll... Guitarists increasingly found that there was something special and exciting about the distorted sound of a guitar amplifier pushed beyond its design limits. They experimented with larger and larger amplifiers, and new music arose based on those sounds, with Jimi Hendrix as its most visible pioneer. Now it was singers who were struggling again: trying to make vocals audible over the din of massive overdriven guitar stacks was a task largely beyond the capabilities of early 1970s vocal PAs. Singers were back to howling at maximum volume in an attempt to be heard; eg Robert Plant and the behemoths of 1970s heavy rock. This spurred great developments in PA systems, allowing much greater overall volume, and crucially, with the advent of effective subs and high powered amps, previously unthinkable levels of bass frequencies. This new capability led to the rise of bass-powered dance music in its many forms, from reggae through rave, d'n'b, dubstep and the panoply of other bass-driven styles that have dominated popular music until today. So... anyone for any elaboration, correction, rebuttal or just plain contradiction...? 😁

This pedal is a clone of the Tech21 Character Series 'Blonde' pedal, and thus a close relative of their VT Bass pedal which is of course widely known and well-loved around here. As a guitar pedal it's almost miraculously good for the dirt-cheap price. I can imagine it would work perfectly well as a bass pedal, though I haven't tried it myself. I think it gets a little noisy only if the character/'voice' knob is cranked very high; though this gives much higher gain too, so is perhaps inevitable. I do feel a bit guilty about the sales that Tech21 lose to these clone products after their work in developing the excellent originals, but there's really no point in rehashing the 'ethics-of-cloning' arguments yet again...

I took a different message from the article Bill, which I found interesting rather than reactionary. I felt that the author's main gripe was that following the widespread availability and installation of super-powerful subs in mainstream venues, the freshly-discovered option of creating very low frequencies at very high levels has encouraged sound-people to do just that, regardless of whether it's appropriate or not. This applied strongly to the author's acoustic duo, but I would say that it is also very much in line with my experience of the sound at rock music shows over the last several years, a number of which have been ruined for me by massive sub-bass levels swamping the rest of the music. This seems very annoying and completely unjustifiable to me, but I hope that I'm discerning rather than reactionary!

Fair enough, although I'd be surprised if your RCF745 can bang out the same volume levels as your EBS 4x10! (I could be wrong though - I haven't tried an RCF745!)

Dunno how old you are Al, but speaking from my own position of rapidly advancing decrepitude, hearing anything above 15 kHz is just a distant memory! 🤪

For me, the most convincing argument in favour of using a FRFR speaker (either active or passive) is that it makes it much easier to be sure that you're sending the right signal to the PA soundman. If your speaker has a pretty flat response, like (hopefully!) the PA system, then you can just tap off a DI signal to send to the PA, and know that that tone, amplified through the PA, should pretty much match the sound coming out of your on-stage gear. If not (ie your bass speaker is significantly coloured, like most speakers used for bass rigs), then you will previously have adjusted your amp EQ etc to sound good through your rig's speaker, compensating for its idiosyncracies. So how are you going to get the right signal to the PA? If you take a DI signal before your speaker, then it won't include whatever colouration your speaker is bringing to the party. If, for example, you have a tweeter-free cab and are using any overdrive/distortion effects, this is likely to sound dreadful when DI'd into the PA. So perhaps you'll mike the cab? Even if the soundman is willing (and they're often not keen...) he will need to take account of the huge bass boost caused by the proximity effect of the mic jammed up against your cab. Is the soundman on top of this? And, oh, does your bass cab have a tweeter? Perhaps even a separate mid-range driver?! Mike them up separately, you say? Good luck with that! A disadvantage of the FRFR approach is that a speaker that can produce high quality, clean, full range sound at volume levels equivalent to a traditional bass rig is a probably a much more expensive item than a decent traditional bass speaker. For this reason, amongst others, I have always stuck to the traditional route of using a normal kinda bass rig, sending a DI signal off to the PA, crossing my fingers and hoping/trusting that the soundman is sufficiently on top of the task to make something useful out of it! If you've applied a bit of sense to it this approach usually works out ok - after all, it's what pretty much everybody always did until recently...

Thanks for that Bill; it's getting weirder and weirder - we've moved on from American Football metaphors to dog fighting metaphors! I had a much better idea what was going on when we were just talking about speakers... 😜

Since I don't understand a single word of this, I don't have the faintest idea whether this is a wildly off-topic digression or part of an extended metaphor being deployed in an argument about driver sizes... 😁

I used to use this kind of a setup many years ago when I was young/strong/foolish enough to want to carry it around. It sounded great, so I fully endorse and encourage your plan! My setup used a Trace Elliot GP11 Mk4 Preamp as its front end, which had a built-in crossover with outputs which split the signal at 250 Hz. The high end went to a Marshall valve head driving a 2x10", and the low end went to a solid-state power amp driving two 1x15"s. The Trace preamp was a brilliant piece of gear - great sounding and ultra-reliable. They come up for sale fairly frequently and really cheap. Alternatively there are HPF pedals available such as this one from Broughton, who seem to be well-regarded: https://www.broughtonaudio.com/product-page/high-pass-filter But I think you can feel free to have a go at just cutting out the bass from the high-end side using the tone controls on the amp. Your ears will tell you if the cab is struggling. Good luck with your rig experiments - it's sure to be lots of fun!

If you're doing gigs with a PA that just has active 10" speakers and feel that the kick drum and bass guitar could do with a bit of a lift, I'd say that was an ideal set up to which to add one or two active subs. (I wouldn't even consider putting kick drum or bass into a PA that's just a pair of 10"s.) Were you intending to mic up any of the rest of the kit? If you think it's just the kick that's getting a bit lost, in my opinion it would be fine to add a bit of reinforcement to the kick drum only, but others would argue that if you're going to mic the kick, you really ought to add overhead and snare mics too as a minimum. At this point though, you're starting to add quite a bit of extra gear and complexity to your setup and soundcheck. There are loads of models of subs that are intended for exactly your kind of setup, at widely varying price points. I'll leave the recommendation of specific models to those that are more familiar with the currently available models...

Agree absolutely. Your anecdote about Greg Lake's bass sound is distressingly familiar. I don't know what's wrong with the people responsible for these mixes. It's as if they've somehow become persuaded that the spectral balance of electronic dance music is appropriate for all other forms of music too. Or is it just complying with what they think people expect from the sound at live gigs these days? Either way, it seems to have become a very common aesthetic for live sound mixes, with hugely detrimental effects on the entire mix, and the bass guitar in particular. Apologies to Al if I'm getting a bit off-topic here.

I think that in most cases the kick drum is the primary factor in determining whether your PA needs a sub or not. - Is the band attempting to perform at a volume at which the kick drum, unmiked, would be too quiet? YES: The PA needs a sub, and both the kick drum and the bass guitar should be in the PA's FOH mix. Hence no point in a bass backline sub. NO: The PA doesn't need a sub (and neither does the bass backline). I'm not up-to-date enough with currently available PA gear to have any meaningful opinion on which are the best value subs at various price/performance points.

Most bass backline equipment is pretty poor at reproducing the lowest frequencies, certainly at higher sound levels, so I think it's perfectly reasonable to wonder, as Al is doing, whether incorporating a subwoofer into your backline might be a good idea. The way I've always viewed it, though, is that if you're in a situation where you feel the bass guitar needs some subwoofer support, then it's almost certainly true that the kick drum does too. At this point it becomes a PA issue rather than a backline issue - ie your PA system needs a subwoofer, and if it's got one, then there's no benefit in also adding one to your backline. Also, as Bill points out, excess sub-bass frequencies are frequently a huge problem in contemporary live sound mixes. WWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM! 😡

If you haven't already, I should think you almost certainly need to remove their nuts from the sides of the case...

You didn't mention the input/output sockets, but I imagine they're probably fixed to the board and attaching it to the case too...?

Another suggestion: the TC Rush Booster from their 'Smorgasbord of Tone' range. I really like the form factor of these pedals: since all the sockets are on the far end, they actually take up about the same width on your pedalboard as the usual 'mini' pedals (with right-angled jacks sticking out of each side), but are more stable because the box itself is wider. The Rush Booster is very simple: a single 'boost' control with up to 20dB of clean boost. Also very cheap: currently about £29 at all the usual big online shops. I haven't got one, but online reviews seem to be good. If what you want is purely a clean boost, there's perhaps less subjective judgement required than is the case with most other types of pedal?

Bill and Balcro: firstly, thanks very much for your carefully considered replies. Apologies for my slow response; I've been a bit tied up with other things, you know how it is...! Bill: Thanks, I did get as far as wondering what the published frequency response for drivers represented - when you say 'mounted in a wall', I guess this is what's referred to as an 'infinite baffle'? I'm imagining that this is essentially the same as an infinitely large sealed cabinet...? Re. needing sufficient amp power in order to benefit from a higher xmax: as discussed in the older part of the thread, I'm pretty certain that the currently installed (original) driver is this one: http://www.elderaudio.com/products/Loudspeakers/LowMiddle/2009/10LB075-U.html Having fiddled with this in WinISD, as far as I can tell with my sketchy understanding, this can't take the amp's full rated output (250W @ 8 ohms) at frequencies below 200Hz, and its handling falls to about 50W around 120Hz, so in this area presumably any of my three potential replacement drivers would be a significant improvement. I completely accept your point that earth-shaking bass is never going to come out of such a tiny cabinet! Balcro: Thanks again for doing all this calculating! In short, it seems that any of these three drivers would be an improvement on the original, and that the differences between the three would be comparatively minor... Re. weight: current driver is 5 kg; the potential replacements vary from 2.1kg to 2.7 kg, so potential saving of up to 2.9 kg - this could be quite worthwhile! In the end I guess whether the available improvements over the current driver are sufficient to justify the outlay is something of a moot point. So overall I'm still in two minds. Thanks again for all your input; if I finally do get a replacement I'll let you know how successful a change it is! 🙂 cheers, P

Since I have posted above criticising the common soundman's habit of "DI box first thing after the bass", here's my defence of the practice, just for balance: Modern amps/pedals etc tend to have very powerful EQ and effects which can easily produce a deeply unmusical or even unusable tone unless used judiciously and appropriately. There are plenty of bass players (as well as guitarists etc!) who have very little idea of what constitutes a good or appropriate tone in the context of the whole band. (People on this forum are probably an unrepresentative sample as simply by being here, we're self-selecting as the ones who care enough about such matters to want to discuss them with each other and hopefully get better informed!) Additionally, the sound coming out of the (most likely very coloured) bass cab may be completely unlike the DI signal from the amp/pedals which we are proposing to feed into the soundman's (hopefully quite flat & full range) PA system. So, for the busy soundman, the "DI box straight after the bass" strategy is an insurance policy against being fed an unusable sound from further down the bass-players signal chain; there's only so much that gormless bassplayers can do to screw it up with the controls on the bass itself! This is still really annoying though if, as a bassplayer, you have spent time and effort making sure that your DI signal does actually have a carefully considered and sensibly-sculpted tone!

Sounds like you need to head over to the 'Amps for sale' section to score a better amp! 😉 Alternatively, what on earth are you doing to them??!! 😮 The only time I've ever had an amp pack up mid-gig is when one of the new breed of supa-lite class D amps vibrated itself off the the top of the cab and crashed to the floor, snapping the input socket. When my old-skool Trace preamp did the same thing, it just kept on working (though admittedly it dented the floor pretty badly!)

I think the argument that "doing it this way it'll keep working even if the bass amp packs in" is a spurious one used by soundmen as an excuse to justify the way they wanted to do it anyway. There are loads of things on the stage that could potentially stop working and thereby screw up the show: the guitar amp, the keyboards, the drumkit (or drummer) might fall over, a mic lead might come unplugged - the list is endless - why worry about the bass amp in particular?

Firstly, apologies for resurrecting this old thread of mine a year later! 😬 As a brief recap, I was looking to upgrade the driver in my Harley Benton combo, which is identical to the Red Sub branded version and similar to the original Ibanez Promethean. My goals were a reduction in weight, extended headroom and ideally some extension of the bass response. The tricky part is that the cab is very small - it has an internal volume of about 17.5 litres (after allowing for driver displacement) and a port with dimensions of 25mm x 360mm which is 125mm long, leading to a cab tuning of about 85Hz. In the thread I got some great advice and options to consider, but in the end, a combination of inertia, penury and the 'leave it alone' suggestions meant that I didn't get a new driver. However, I'm now readdressing the issue, and so am back asking for further advice. I'm still considering the drivers I was looking at before: Eminence Deltalite II ( http://www.loudspeakerdatabase.com/Eminence/DELTALITE_II_2510 ) Celestion NTR10-2520D ( http://www.loudspeakerdatabase.com/Celestion/NTR10-2520D ) ... but the reason I'm asking for advice again is that my attention has now been drawn to this driver: Eighteen Sound 10NW50 ( http://www.loudspeakerdatabase.com/18Sound/10NW650 ) ...which is about the same price as my other options ( £129.95 from Lean ) but has a considerably higher Xmax (7mm) , and judging by its frequency plot, a significantly better bass response. I've tried having a fiddle in WinISD with this stuff, but my very sketchy grasp on these matters makes me very wary of any conclusions I might reach! So, my questions are: - would this Eighteen Sound driver be suitable for my purpose, or am I missing some significant feature that would make it unsuitable? - am I right in thinking that it would give me a more extended bass response than either of my previously favoured options? - any other suggestions for better driver options? In an attempt to make answering my questions less of an effort, I've attached WinISD profiles for the three drivers I've been looking at. Thanks in advance to any of the local speaker experts who might care to chip in! 🙂 18Sound 10NW650.wdr Celestion NTR10-2520D.wdr Eminence DELTALITE_II_2510.wdr