Dan Dare

Fellow owners of musical instruments, more like.

Double Fours are nice, but I don't think one go loud enough in a place much larger than your lounge. If you already have a lightweight head, I'd use that with a 1x10 (you should be able to get something decent for not too much used). I use one of my C4s, which is equivalent to a 1x10, with a class D head for small/acoustic gigs and it does a good job and is portable enough.

Much in the above comments. Many pub guvnors are not the brightest and/or lazy. They expect to simply open the doors and have the place rammed every night without doing anything. A band I dep' for occasionally played a pub in North London recently. I turned up first and my heart sank - a dozen or so morose locals sitting about, a few guys playing pool and zero atmosphere. The landlady, all teeth and t1ts, was holding court to a couple of her mates at one end of the bar. The band arrived, we set up and started playing. A few more people came in and some listened/stayed, but most punters ignored us. No biggie. The band is decent - plays classic soul, R&B and similar - and goes down well in most places. We're all well past the first flush of youth and know what we're doing. When we took our break, the landlady approached. "Where's your following?", she enquired. "I expected you to bring an audience". "Did you advertise or put the word out that there would be live music?", we asked. She pointed to a chalkboard on the pavement outside and then started talking about reducing the fee. A frank discussion ensued. It was obvious she expected a band to magically bring hundreds of people to her glum establishment without her making any effort. We got paid in the end, but I doubt the band will be asked back.

DBRs are very decent budget PA cabs. No point in selling them and making a sideways move to something like Altos. They're not excessively large/heavy, so you'll save little carrying effort by replacing them with smaller tops. You're on a budget, so you want to get the most bang for your buck. You never get back much selling used PA gear, so stick with what you have and augment it. I'd look at adding a quality sub to your DBRs. With the need to deal with LF removed from them by the sub, you can drive the DBRs harder and they should give a good account of themselves and be quite adequate for the use you describe. In your shoes, I'd get a sub plus an active crossover (unless your mixer or existing speakers already have the facility to do the job). Buy the best sub you can afford. A single quality sub beats a pair of cheapos. The Yamaha DXR PA speakers (the next step up from the DBRs) are very good. The DXS15 sub is around £850 and is well-reviewed. Edited to add. If you are tight on storage space, offload your RCF 715 and stash the sub in its place. A decent sub will make it redundant.

Bottom line is: 1) If you want to play for free, do so. 2) If you don't, don't. 3) Whichever you choose, don't attempt to shame others if they make a different choice.

Bill's advice is good. If money's really tight, a Celestion Vintage 30 is a decent choice (they are what is used in the Harley Benton cabs tauzero refers to above). A bit brighter and slightly less full/mature sounding than the Greenback, but a good driver.

This. Pickups are the electric guitar/bass world's equivalent of hi-fi's magic cables.

Oh, you know, humour. If it traumatised you, go and lie down in a darkened room for a bit and I'm sure you'll be fine.

You'll have to try it and see. A lot of preamp pedals do not produce enough output to drive a power amp directly. With that said, many PA speakers have mic-level inputs, so it could be fine.

Much has been said about playing for payment vs. playing for the love of music. I get that, but there is an important distinction to be drawn. If I can play whatever I like at times of my choosing in convivial surroundings to nice people, I am happy not to earn money from it. However, if I have to play stuff I don't care for (or even actively dislike), wear a DJ, watch the clock, put up with grief, etc, etc, I expect to be paid. The amount I expect to be paid will be directly proportional to the amount of grief I have to endure. Doesn't seem unreasonable.

It's tragic, isn't it? Even people who have enough nous to acquire some wealth don't seem immune to being fleeced. I have no doubt that PubCos have ensured their contracts are legally watertight, even if they don't conform to any standards of decency. To be fair to my village, there is little of the distrust towards new pub tenants to which you refer. The pub in question is the most popular. It's a nice enough place and people use it. It's better than the other two, one of which is the local four ale, where the lads go to play pool and have a scrap on Saturday night, whilst the other flies the flag of St George and is patronised by those who don't like foreigners - i.e. anyone from more than 10 miles away.

Fair points. I'd add another, which is the emergence of PubCos, which sprang up when breweries were required to sell their pubs. PubCos lease the pubs and tie tenants into contracts that force them to pay huge rents and buy all their food and drink through the PubCo at grossly inflated prices. At the same time, tenants must pay for maintenance, repairs and improvements out of their own pockets. One of the three pubs in my village is owned by a PubCo. In the three years I've lived here, it has had three tenants. Each year, the pub will go dark and signs will appear outside the building, saying "Business opportunity. Low cost of entry", etc and another gullible couple, with little to no knowledge of business, thinks "We've always dreamed of running a pub. It's a licence to print money". So they sink their savings into it, re-decorate, fix the leaking roof, install a big screen telly with round the clock sports, yada, yada. A year later, the rent (which was pitched low to attract them in the first place) suddenly gores through the roof and they have to throw in the towel. They leave to lick their wounds and stack shelves in the local Lidl, getting back none of the money they sank into the place and the PubCo advertises for a new victim. Not really a thread derail, because it's one of the reasons pubs have little budget to spend on music, etc.

True in some cases, but there are more originals bands than there are decent venues to play, so supply and demand has an effect. A band with little to no following that wants to get its music in front of people has little choice a lot of the time.

If you want a very compact head, that means a small case (little metal to conduct away/dissipate heat and certainly no heat-sink), components packed tightly together (little to no air around them to dissipate heat), it's going to need a fan. If the fan has to be very small to fit in a tiny amp, it will need to run at high speed to move sufficient air, which will make it noisier than a larger fan running at lower speed. Class D may run cooler than AB, etc, but it will still build up heat over time and that heat needs to be got rid of. I played through an Elf for the first time the other week at a jam night. It was paired with a couple of BF 1x10s. It was competent and did a decent job for its size, but I wasn't hugely impressed. Given that "normal" class D heads are pretty small and light, I don't see the benefit of going really tiny.

This is pretty much how it is for me. I have had brief periods of playing for a living, but most of the time, I've had a reasonable day job. Now I'm comfortably retired, I don't need to earn from playing. On some occasions (a friend's wedding, birthday bash or similar), I will turn out for nothing and offer my sound system for the disco to save them hiring someone in, but I expect the other members of my band, who don't know the people, to be paid, obviously. For the rest, it depends on circumstances. If I can play whatever I like in a nice place to people I like who treat me well/feed and water me, I will play for little money. If I am expected to play what people want, dress formally, put up with drunks hassling me, etc. the price goes up. Like Chris, if someone is making money from an event, I expect a share of that. That applies to "charity" gigs, too, which we get asked to do sometimes. If it's something I believe in, I may do it for little or no fee, but I don't expect to make an actual loss and will insist on petrol/expenses at minimum. If they want my PA, however, I want paying (it cost me well into 5 figures and I don't schlepp it for nowt).

You aren't really running a pre/power rig if you're expecting your bass to drive a power amp directly. I've not come across a bass that will do that. Onboard active pre's do not deliver enough poke to do the job, in my experience.

Dirty Poops

The M (MOSFET) version is about £70 cheaper than the T and there is little difference (basically a 12AX7/ECC83 valve on the input stage of the T). I had the M and could hear virtually no tonal variation between it and a pal's T. Great value amp.

If it's a backup and you don't want to spend big bucks, lemmy's suggestion above of a Veyron is hard to beat, imho. They can be had for between £200 and £300 new. I had one as a backup and it was very good. Mine was the M version, which is less expensive than the T (it doesn't have the 12AX7 preamp valve of the T), but still very competent.

"If you find another seller for the same item, please contact us so we can lower the price". Another bleddy drop-shipper. eBay is stuffed with them these days.

This is what I do. Our singer likes Eb. I've never broken a string (thus far, at any rate) or needed a back-up instrument on a gig.

Today's SM58 is the same mic', to all intents and purposes, as it has always been. It's interesting to read Stub's post above, which reads as if copied straight from Shure's publicity material. Of particular note is the line "The SM58 is based on the Unidyne III microphone element developed in the late 1950s by Shure engineer Ernie Seeler", which indicates that the SM was a refinement of an earlier model. Nothing in the post speaks of any major change in the design. Sure, components may have been updated, but the fundamental design is exactly the same as it was in the 1960s. I have a Unisphere from the 1960s, which was the first mic' I ever bought. It's a nice old mic' that has served me faithfully. It still gets an outing occasionally, usually for speech/announcements, when its on/off switch comes in handy. I still use a SM57 for guitar cabs, snare, etc and carry a SM58 because it suits some voices (and because some singers insist on one). However, I have more modern dynamics - EV n/dyms, AKG D5 and 7, Sennheiser 838 - that easily out-perform the SMs. They have better clarity, more resistance to feedback and a more extended frequency response. Even Shure acknowledges that the 58 and 57 can be improved upon. Why else did they introduce the Beta versions of them? As I said in my original post, the 58 was great in its day and still has a place now, but it is no longer the best game in town.

Substitute "Fender P bass" for SM58 in the above and would you still agree? The 58 was a great mic' in its day and it's still serviceable, but the model was first introduced in 1966. At the time, it was pretty well the only show in town (as was the P bass in its heyday) at its price, but technology has moved on. A lot.

Having found cabs I like the sound of, I've bought several, so I can take out as few or as many as the job demands and know the result will be consistent.