Happy Jack

I've read through this thread with great interest, but like @Al Krow I'm reluctant to spend well over £500 on a wireless system. And I can't really avoid mentioning to @peteb that the weakest link in my chain is ... erm ... well, me actually. With my rock'n'roll band every gig is a doubling gig and I need something different to be happening at the amp for double bass and electric bass. That means that wireless solutions get doubled, doubled in number of units, doubled in cost. Much as I'd like to go the Shure route, buying two of those buggers is a bridge too far. I've had easily the best results (out of the many, many solutions I've tried) with the X-vive U2 units. They're cheap enough that running two pairs of them isn't much of an issue, the rechargeable batteries are always good for a 3-hour gig plus encores with much-reduced 'green' issues, they're tiny and really simple to use, and they work just fine at 80%, maybe 90% of the gigs I play. But every now and then we get something like last night. The editing here is designed to draw the viewer's attention away from the issue so watch for me getting all distracted. At that point we were 35 minutes into the first set and there had been no issues at all. So what happened? Well we can't know for sure but I did notice that a group of half a dozen youngsters came into the Club pretty much then and sat quite close to the band, mobiles in use. An easy finger to point but I don't recall anything else changing. At the end of the set I shifted to cable leads for the rest of the gig, and this morning I put a Line 6 receiver that I had knocking about (once owned by @PaulKing) on my pedal board so that I can shift over to it mid-set if it happens again. The combined cost of both sets of X-vive stagebugs PLUS both high-quality cable leads PLUS the Line 6 wireless unit is still less than the cost of the Shure ...

How dare you stand in front of the singer? Bassists! Know your place!

Happens to me all the time. By far the most frequently-asked question is, "Is that a cello?".

Yes, but that thread runs to 13 pages, very few of which deal with serious rivals to the XR18. 🙂

No one else is asking, so I will. What about the alternatives to the Behringer XR18? As near as I can make out, the Midas MR18 is identical and one is a clone of the other. The Mackie DL16S seems curiously limited for such an expensive piece of kit (paying for the badge?). The one that catches my eye is the Soundcraft Ui24R. It ain't cheap, but it seems to tick all our boxes. Does anyone have any experience with any of these? Or any that I've missed?

@Silvia Bluejay and I bought an XR18 about five years ago and have since used it at about 250 gigs with Silvie as sound engineer sitting out front with a tablet. (It would have been more, but there was some sort of virus thingy going about for a while.) Once you have it set up and fully operational it's great, but by God! do you have to go through some hoops to get there. The built-in router is (was? five years ago?) notoriously unreliable so the first thing we needed to do was to buy a bog-standard home-use router and plumb that in to use instead. Then we needed to configure it to do what we wanted to do, and neither of us is a trained PA person, so I found some very helpful How-To videos on YouTube and did an absolute monkey see monkey do operation to get our XR18 configured EXACTLY the way the guy on the video did it. Hey ... worked for me. 😉 Bear in mind that at no stage during this operation did I have a clue what I was doing, which means that I've never since dared to fiddle with any parameters or settings at all. Then we needed to have an appropriate app to control it on the tablet. It came with an app, natch, but that is (was? five years ago?) notoriously unreliable so we immediately upgraded to X-Air Pro. The app is a perfect match for the XR18 because once you have it set up and fully operational it's great, but by God! do you have to go through some hoops to get there. 🤣 The user interface is a farce and utterly counter-intuitive ... nothing works the way you'd expect. But eventually you get there. And then come the benefits. Lots of them, including having the band on stage with backline but turned down to sensible levels, always having a perfect mix for the audience, having the right volume for the venue song by song and set by set (as the crowd grows or shrinks, changing the ambience in the room), and of course being visibly very professional and impressing the hell out of pub landlords and venue managers. Silvie now runs the XR18 with a 3-piece rock'n'roll band (two vocalists), a 3-piece covers band (three vocalists), and a 5-piece soul band (four vocalists + sax). Selecting the right Scene to use at each gig takes seconds. Heaviest use is obviously the soul band, which needs 12 channels. Only the drummers routinely have monitoring, though we sometimes do that for the lead vocalist in the soul band too. Although the XR18 is controlled by a tablet (with a smartphone as the emergency fallback) the laptop next to me on stage is always hard-wired to the XR18 too ... there is no wireless/router/hacker/EMP catastrophe that can kill our PA entirely.

Oh God ... not humour? 🤣

??? Where are you pointing at, Chris?

"The bass plays and sounds amazing and has been compared to a Wal basses." Not necessarily in a good way ... 😂

Anything by Tom Petty. Absolutely cracking songs by one of favourite artists, all guaranteed to clear a dance floor like a stink-bomb.

But mic'ing the kick is a quick'n'easy way to put a smile on the drummer's scowl. You don't actually need to plug the mic in, you understand; just so long as he sees you putting a mic there, he's your friend for the rest of the evening.

Most interesting thing there is the implication that Late Again was the intended A-side while Stuck In The Middle was going to be the B-side.

Interesting. I never had Pino down as a shrinking violet.

Understood, but if we have a "big central bass zone" then won't the punters equally gravitate according to taste? I get the thing about the side walls, but very few pubs have anything as simple as that. At the George IV for example, on the band's right there are raised seating areas in large alcoves with enormous windows at their backs, on the band's left is a large bar with dozens of people jumping up and down trying to attract the attention of the bar staff. EQ-ing for that space is a nightmare.

Yup, that was pretty much what I was wondering.

NOOOOOOOOOO!!! If you're trying to get back into playing, do not under any circumstances try to start a new band. You will be entering a world of pain, frustration, communication breakdowns, hypocrisy, and total lack of commitment. It will put you off for life. Let some other poor bugger go through all that and set up a new band. Then go and join it.

Bwahahahahahaha!!! I picked up a bass for the very first time on my 49th birthday. I don't think your life is over because you're 45 ... As others have said, get yourself down to all the Open Mics within your range, start playing with other people again, get your face and your skills known. It won't be long before things start to happen.

Don't know if I'm really careful or just lucky, but I've never ever had a bass 'fail' on me at a gig, and my only major problems with amps have tended to be for external causes. Manufacturing standards are just so high pretty much everywhere on the planet that it's quite unusual to find an instrument or an amplifier that lets you down. Pedals, now, ah well, that's an entirely different story ...

One thing we could try next time we play there with the covers band (19th August, so probably half-empty again) would be to put the subs together in the centre, and the tops on poles to each side. Both my main bands are 3-piece so having a great lump of 3'-high speakerage in the middle wouldn't be as disconcerting as it might be for a larger band.

Yup. That was the first time in nearly 10 years that we've played the George without taking the MarkAudio sub-based rig. We knew the pub would be half-empty in mid-July so probably fewer than 200 people in front of us, and the rock'n'roll band really doesn't need that much volume. As we drove home from the gig, we were discussing whether we should revert to always taking the big subs simply because they're so much harder for drunks to knock over.

Picking up on a comment by @Phil Starr it would seem sensible for a bass playing forum to have a section for PA and related equipment, equipment and operation. At least half the bands I know have their bass player either supplying or operating the PA, so it seems to go with the territory. Thoughts?

Bill, my bands play very few gigs where placing our subs 15 meters apart is an option. @Silvia Bluejay and I have accumulated a reasonable amount of PA kit over the years. Our biggest rig uses two Mark Audio subs (each a 2x10 with a 1000W amp), and pole-mounted on top of them either passive GX12s or more recently active Orion 15s by Bishopsound. We're not looking for extra sensitivity ... we have loads of headroom. Question - what 'damage' are we doing to our sound if those subs are just five or six metres apart?

Well that's a nice feather in the cap for Max Greco and [sfx], but he no longer seems to be on Basschat. ☹️

I saw The Who with Pino on bass at the O2 maybe 10 years ago. He needn't have bothered ... I didn't hear a single bass note all evening, the sound was that bad. I thought it was down to the venue (although the Stones sounded OK there) until I saw Fleetwood Mac at the O2; one of the best live bass sounds I've ever heard from Mr. McVie. He had a bloody great rolling rack unit of about 10 Orange amps next to him on stage, which I thought was a fair approach to foldback ...

All good, thanks. @Silvia Bluejay and I are obsessed with lightweight gear and these Bishopsound Orion units tick all our boxes.