Dan Dare

10 hours ago, Woodinblack said:

I got a £10 voucher from Thomman for doing a review - does that count?

I hope you spent it wisely

So right, George. I have a friend who is a highly rated violin maker (people in some of the big London orchestras play his instruments). He has to "antique" them when he makes them, because nobody will be seen playing a new instrument.

On ‎03‎/‎03‎/‎2019 at 22:32, Storky said:

Thanks for the comments and advice. Budget is not fixed, but hundreds rather than thousands; I would hope to get something suitable for between £200 and £600. I’d spend more if I needed to though as I’ve had mixers in the past that have been cheap and only lasted a few years. Or I start again from scratch and buy a complete system for a couple of grand or so.

At £200-£600, you're going to struggle to buy a decent complete system (especially new) that is any good. Personally, I'd steer clear of used PA speakers unless you know their provenance. They can be abused (usually by people trying to put kick drum, etc through them and often driving them into clipping with inadequate amplification). Used mixers and power amps are usually fine if you buy sensibly. At £200-£600, active speakers are probably out of the question. I note you refer to starting from scratch. Do you have some stuff already? If so, what is it? Might be that you can augment it.

Nice. My 72 was originally a very battered sunburst, but I stripped and oiled it in the 80s well before 'relic' was the thing to have. Wish I hadn't now, but there it is. Fortunately, the body has a reasonable grain, so it doesn't look too bad. Plays wonderfully, as I've no doubt yours does.

I like La Bella on my P bass and Chromes on my Jazz. Tomastik flats are lovely sounding with one caveat. The A string is too thin (.070). It was too slack and I ran out of adjustment on the bridge saddle to get the intonation right. I changed it to a Chrome .075 and it was much better.

Another vote for Babicz on a Fender style instrument. Have one on my Jazz. Gotoh are decent and well priced.

Behringer DIs are fine for the money, but there are better. At the budget end of things, I like the passive Palmers. If you want active, Orchid (made in sunny Devon) are excellent, well-priced and get good reviews. If you want to go mad/treat yourself, Radial are as good as any.

12 minutes ago, foxy1 said:

I bought a PJB C4 cab a few years ago, initially for home use, and have since used it for rehearsals, then small gigs, then larger gigs and have been more  and more impressed with it’s capability.

A very well made cab, easily portable,  tiny footprint, excellent sound dispersal. Have used it usually with 5 string basses, various amp heads, they all sound good, very big sound for such a small cab. I would have thought that you could do a lot worse than trying one for yourself. I have been considering getting another one for a small but powerful rig.

 

 

I bought one for that purpose, too and ended up getting two more and selling my old heavy cabs. Go for it. They sound wonderful in multiples. You'll need juicy amplification, though. They take a bit of driving.

If I had £3k to improve my bass life, I'd put it towards better amplification and some lessons from someone good.

3 hours ago, bubinga5 said:

I think we might all agree there is no one defining thing that gives you a clear defined B string. Nothing to do with any amp imo. Its a combination of bass, pickups, neck construction, scale length, string choice. I will say that a stock Lakland 55-02 has the best B string that I've ever played/heard. LH3 pickups/preamp DR Fat Beams were used on the instrument. The B note was fantastic. 

Afraid it is pretty well all to do with the amp/speakers. As someone else points out, even Barefaced only claim a lower frequency extreme of 37 hz, whilst low B comes out at 31. It may sound good on headphones or at practice levels, but reproducing those kinds of frequencies at any kind of volume is a big ask.

3 hours ago, Hellzero said:

Urm, I mentioned it at the beginning of the thread. 😉

 

I know you did. But quite a few started pitching in, suggesting buying this or that bass, strings, etc, so I thought it would do no harm to re-iterate it.

Quite a few classic country hits in the 60s and 70s featured a 6 string bass lead. Apart from that, lead bass is something of a crime against nature (ducks and runs for cover 😁)

Nowt out of the ordinary. Life continues on its merry way.

Just keep the input gain right down on the small combo if you're running a line level signal into it. As Jack says above, an extra 25w isn't going to make a lot of (if any) difference.

In addition to Yamaha and Mackie, have a look at RCF, EV and JBL. All make decent mid-price stuff. Performance is pretty comparable between them all. 

The point made by Bill and others about putting too much low frequency energy into a room reminds me of a wedding I played last year. It was in an old stately home, in a large oak panelled banqueting hall. The room was pretty live as a result and I kept the PA subs well down. When Mr Disco took over after we'd finished, it was like being beaten with wooden clubs. Horrendous. He had a large Bose rig and he cranked the subs. All the guests were complaining and most deserted the dance floor. I suggested (politely) to him that he might cut the bass a little, but he didn't want to know. We packed as quickly as possible, collected our money and left him to it.

I like:

1. The fact that the listing has ended.

2 I didn't buy it.

This thread sums up the difference between what we, as bass nerds (oh, all right, aficionados), hear and like and what actually does the job in the 'real world'. As Nathan says, out in the room on the night, in a band context, everyone sounded good. I've done my share of playing about with gear in shops and spending considerable sums in search of 'that' sound, but in reality, the stuff I own and use (which I do enjoy playing through) is most likely satisfying only to me. Granted, someone who spends their entire time in a studio environment could make a stronger case for having the latest/best (if such a thing exists), but the rest of us would probably be just as well off with that old TE combo Nathan refers to. Schlepping it would be less easy, of course.

5 minutes ago, Al Krow said:

Cheers Dan - and don't get me wrong. PJB are an awesome brand!

Are you needing to use all three PJB 4s to get a full sound from your AG700 or do you typically use two?

I use two or three. Two is fine for smaller venues. Sometimes the drummer even asks me to turn down 😁. Three is mighty. One is fine for rehearsals at sensible levels. The beauty of them is that each weighs less than 30lb, which is a lot for such small boxes (each is about a one ft cube), but they are very solidly made. Having reached pensionable age, I would rather carry several small loads separately from/to the car than one large one. The thing I have noticed, when listening to others playing through my rig, is how well they project into the room, even when they don't sound that loud on stage. Tonally, I find them excellent. I don't like tweeters in bass cabs - find them too clicky/clanky. The PJBs give sufficient brightness and clarity without sounding harsh. I'm pretty happy with them. Haven't felt the urge to change for several years.

1 hour ago, Al Krow said:

Not in dispute.

But how many 5" speakers have you got in your PJB cab, how much does it weigh, what total watts can they handle and what is their frequency response range?

For reference my VK 210LNT

• two 10" speakers
• 44 lbs
• 1200W AES (= approx. similar RMS)
• 40Hz to 16KHz

Four 5" drivers in each (I have three PJB C4s), so 12 in total. Each cab weighs 29lb. Cabs are claimed to take 400w apiece, but I think that's a bit fanciful. 300 seems about the practical maximum. Stated freq. response is 35-15000 - again, maybe a touch optimistic, but a clean bottom E at respectable volume is no problem. I run an AG700 with them and that gives plenty of poke for any reasonably sized venue. Anything larger than that and I DI to the PA.

Trade for a 62 stack knob Jazz or SVT with cash your way? Are you sure? GSS Baby Sumo is £260 new...

Given that it's one of a pair of which the other broke and that both will have had similar use/wear, hardly a sensible purchase. I suspect it will have been made by Gotoh. They probably offer a similar or identical model, minus Ibanez branding and you could buy dozens for the price he's asking.

On ‎28‎/‎02‎/‎2019 at 23:08, Bill Fitzmaurice said:

It does apply. The midrange dispersion angle is the only factor where cone size alone affects the result. Where all the driver size baloney comes from is those who assume that larger drivers go lower, and smaller drivers go higher. They can, but not because of the cone size. It's from the other dozen or so factors that determine response, all of which can be jockeyed about so that there are many tens that go lower than the average fifteen, and many fifteens that go higher than the average ten.

Dead right. My Phil Jones cabs go plenty low with 5" drivers.

Interesting, that Barefaced cutaway pic. Looks quite similar to the B&W Nautilus cab design.

The bass/pickups/strings are only part of the picture. If you want a clear fundamental with a low B, you are pretty close to the lower limit of what most drivers and cabs are capable of reproducing, certainly at any volume. Low B is around 31 hz. Have a look at the spec sheets. Most cab designers get round it with clever porting and rely on harmonics and overtones that fool us into thinking we hear low B, but there are limits to this. You need power and enough drive unit surface area, too. You won't get a clean, powerful low B from a 200w combo. It's the laws of physics, Jim.