Beer of the Bass

What is this new bit of twuntery linked to in the OP? I'm just getting a "content unavailable" message when I click on it.

It took me a while to work out that Briwax have two different lines of wax polish in almost identical looking tins. "Briwax Original" contains Toluene, which is really unpleasant if used in a poorly ventilated area and will strip a Tru-Oil finish right off (which confused me as several people had recommended using Briwax with Tru-Oil), while "Briwax" uses less unpleasant solvents. The only visible difference seems to be the word Original on the tin, and many shops will sell the two interchangeably.

I reckon "heft" is one of these rather nebulous concepts like "growl", where we might be referring to at least three different things by it and end up speaking at cross-purposes most of the time! I'm not even sure that the tonal characteristics that come from a valve power amp can usefully be described by a single term, as one might have under-rated transformers and filtering with minimal feedback, while another might have conservatively rated transformers, lots of filtering and extensive feedback, and the two would respond very differently. If you're getting a sound that you like with that preamp into a class-D power amp, that's got to be worth exploring further.

I wonder if LaBella could be approached about making a set? I've heard of people ordering other custom length sets from them, so they might be open to the idea.

It's crying out for matching yellow and black leggings, vest top and wristbands. Not sure I could pull off that look myself, but I take my hat off to anyone who wants to attempt it!

[quote name='SubsonicSimpleton' timestamp='1455540510' post='2979967'] Have you tried them with your upright yet? [/quote] I haven't tried it yet, though I should give it a go when I have the opportunity. I don't ever amplify the double bass at home as I live in a flat, so it would have to wait for the next louder gig or rehearsal with a drummer. My gut feeling is that the strong upper mid response of these drivers might take a bit of EQ to avoid sounding too "electric", but it'll be interesting to try it out.

That does look like someone who works with guitar finishes would be able to drop-fill it, and it wouldn't be a huge job. It might be worth finding out from Fender what type of finish was used (lacquer or poly) so that you when you phone round repairers you have the information to hand.

[quote name='EssentialTension' timestamp='1455525333' post='2979721'] I know, I was hoping for a discussion of the article linked rather than the same old rubbish again. But that was yesterday ... [/quote] Yes, I found the article interesting. Most tourist-focussed cities have a broader range of reasons for people to visit, so it puts Liverpool in a fairly unique situation. There must be other notable things about the history and culture of the city, but the Beatles are the first thing we all think of.

[quote name='blue' timestamp='1455502000' post='2979671'] You missed the biggest part of rock & roll history there is. And the band that laid the foundation for all subsequent bands. You have to understand The Beatles were a way of life. I feel so sorry for folks that are too young to understand The Beatles and that time period. Blue [/quote] Yes, it must be time for this thread again. It's been at least a week...

Nowadays I'm living slightly further out of town and we have a car, but living in the city centre with no car I used a combination of an endpin wheel, shoulder strap, buses (outside of the rush hour) and the occasional black cab. While some people worry about damaging the instrument with an endpin wheel, my wheel has done so many miles that the tread is wearing off the tyre yet I have never damaged my 100-year old bass using it. If you choose one with a pneumatic tyre, keep the tyre fairly soft and take care with kerbs then it's not a big issue IMO. A shoulder strap is a very useful thing, especially as the wheel makes the bass too tall to easily get in and out of buses or taxis. Rather than relying on the sewn-on straps on a case, I have one which fastens around the bass neck outside of the case and has a loop for the endpin at the bottom, similar to this one: [url="http://www.bassbags.co.uk/product/double-bass-carrying-strap-black/"]http://www.bassbags.co.uk/product/double-bass-carrying-strap-black/[/url]

Yeah, I find it tricky describing sounds. What I mean is that they bring out midrange detail well, so that if I want to emphasise a line and bring out the bark and growl a little with my right hand it comes through nicely with these cabs. Some rigs I've played before don't respond so well to that. I'm playing a bass I built; ash body, maple neck and fingerboard, passive Jazz pickups, standard Jazz wiring. The bass can be quite bright and aggressive sounding but then I use Sadowsky flatwounds which balance that out, so it's a flatwound sound but less dark than the Motown style. I usually keep both pickups on but back one off a little (either bridge or neck depending on the tune), tone control right up and played mostly with fingers, and occasional pick/palm muting. The amp is currently a GK MB200, contour switch turned off and nothing extreme going on with the EQ. I don't like to have highs in the tweeter range, but I like to hear plenty of content at the top end of what a tweeterless cab can do. I guess that gets across what I'm going for a little better.

Some of the seemingly flawed designs from previoud decades live on in the guitar world. Tweed era Fender combos used an unbraced baffle made of thin softwood ply which was only attached at a few points around the edge, not solidly glued in. And that was true even of the 4x10" models. Some people insist that they just wouldn't sound the same with a stiffer baffle.

The cabs' inaugural gig went well. It was in a hall that was a larger space than the venues I usually play, and I wasn't through the PA though the drums were lightly mic'ed, so I was glad I'd brought the pair. I can only describe the band as not-quite-jazz quartet; sax, keys, drums and bass, we get quite noisy and riffy but probably less loud than most rock genres. I had my GK MB200 turned up halfway, and I get the impression that they would cheerfully take a slightly more powerful amp if I needed to (within reason). The MB200 was just starting to compress a little on the attack of hard played notes at that point though there were no noises of complaint from the cabs. I liked the tone; they feel quite lively somehow, sproingy even. I'm not the best at verbalising such things without sounding silly!

I should also say thanks to Stevie and Phil for their useful input, both here and on the 1x12" design diary thread which had a lot of good info. Also, cheers to everyone else who has commented on this thread.

Well, after a morning of frantic activity I have cabs. I'm now celebrating with a pint of good coffee and some fancy pastries (no beer, I'm driving later). First of all I sorted out my grilles. I made the frames for these earlier in the week and painted them black. There is a bit of a knack to fitting the cloth straight and reasonably taut, and having done it a few times on other cabs and my guitar combo I feel like I'm getting a little better at it. After that I stapled my fancy gold piping around the edge, which serves no practical purpose apart from adding a bit of bling. Here's my frame: With cloth; And piping; The grilles are held in place with self adhesive velcro on the back. This always seems like it would be flimsy, but holds up well in use. I didn't take any pictures while lining or wiring up the cabs, I'm afraid. They're lined with polyester wadding which my wife bought a few years ago for an upholstery project which never quite happened, so I thought I might as well make some use of it. I soldered the connections, as I'm always a bit uncertain about using crimp connectors on gigging gear. So, without further procrastination, here they are: I'll have some further thoughts on the the sound after tonights gig, but first impressions are positive. They're not super-bright, but seem to have plenty going on in the upper mids (~2K ish) which brings out some articulation from my flatwound-strung bass. Playing at low volume, they feel like they have plenty of bass though I suspect it's more midbass than fundamental, and I've got used to playing with 1x10" cabs so my perspective may be a little skewed. I'll probably only really need one of them for the gig tonight, but I might as well use both. I've put a fair bit of time into building these, but I reckon they'll be good cabs for my purposes and they've worked out about as cheap as the very cheapest secondhand 1x12" cabs that I've seen on the BC classifieds. I haven't tried weighing one yet - they're easy to move around but not feather-light. I'm looking forward to trying them with the old Dynacord 80 watt valve head which I've recently picked up to refurbish.

[quote name='deksawyer' timestamp='1455322645' post='2978263'] This is a great build diary. Ready for the gig next week....? D. [/quote] The gig is tomorrow night, and I'm tantalisingly close. I've put wadding inside both cabs and fitted the corners, feet and handles. I've made up both grille frames and stapled the cloth to one. I need to do the other cloth grille, glue the ports in and solder the wiring. I'm sure I'll have one ready for the gig, but whether I do both depends on how early I get up in the morning.

[quote name='stevie' timestamp='1455133377' post='2976345'] The first coat of paint is when it really starts looking like a cab. [/quote] Here we go: This was taken after two coats, and I've just done a third. I'm using Turbo Blue Tuff Cab paint. After a bit of experimentation I found that I much prefer the smoother foam rollers that came with my pound shop paint tray to the honeycomb textured ones which Blue Aran sell with the paint. The cheap foam rollers produce a nice fine texture, while the texture from the Blue Aran rollers reminds me a little too much of Artexed ceilings! The paint is quite pleasant to work with - it dries within an hour or two but gives you enough time to roll it to the texture you want, it doesn't have an objectionable smell and it cleans up with water. It looks a bit more blue than this in decent light, but I'm painting in a dingy store room under a couple of fluorescent strips. I was almost tempted to go for a brighter colour, but I hope to be using these for quite a few years to come and I didn't want something I would have second thoughts about.

I'm not totally sure I know what I'm talking about myself, TBH! I'm probably picking up quite a lot as I go along. I'm going to give them the first coat of paint later, hoping they come out looking OK...

I really liked the sound of the LH500 when I tried one, so if this sounds similar but smaller and with more control over the mids it might do quite well. I'm not wild about the cosmetics though - it puts me in mind of a CB radio set... Anyone seen an RRP yet?

The lower diagram on this page would work, although I haven't tried it myself. http://www.tube-town.net/cms/?DIY/Needful_Things/Di_%26amp%3B_Line

I decided that before I bash on with painting and grilles, I should pop a driver and port tubes in one just to check that it's a functional cab. I haven't glued the ports in yet, they're just pushed into the holes with a little tape around them to ensure a seal. First I ran a test signal (from a function generator app on my tablet, plugged into my GK MB200 head) through it to determine if my port tuning was as expected. One low-tech way of checking port tuning is to place a few grains of sugar on the cone with the speaker lying on its back, sweep the frequency of the test signal across the expected range and look out for the point where the sugar dances about the least, which should correspond to the port tuning. This makes sense when you look at the cone excursion graph on the last page, as the excursion is smallest at the port tuning frequency. The process was a bit less precise than I anticipated as there is a certain amount of guesswork as to exactly where the minimum is. With three ports 21cm long, the tuning is certainly very close to the expected 50Hz, though I think the minimum may actually be in the upper 40s. The sugar starts dancing around more strongly below the mid 40s and when you get above 52Hz or so. I'm calling that close enough! Here's my improvised test setup: I then tried playing some bass through it. I haven't spent long enough with it to evaluate the sound in a detailed way, but it works! I wasn't getting any rattles, buzzes or windy noises so I guess my cabinet construction is OK. I also tried plugging one port to lower the tuning and as Stevie predicted, the difference in sound is so small as to be almost undetectable in practice. However, there is visibly more cone movement in certain parts of the range with the 40Hz tuning. I think I'll keep all three ports open.

I rounded over the corners this morning. After trying a couple of times on scrap, I figured out that out of the bits I have available, a 1/4" roundover bit was the closest match for the chrome corner protectors I'm using. I used the router table in the workshop - I haven't spent a lot of time using table mounted routers, and I was so focussed on retaining the correct number of fingers that not only did I forget to take any pictures of the process but my tea went cold too! I've just realised that the gig I want to use them for is a week today, which seems like a scenario from one of those cheesy home improvement challenge programs on TV. Will I make it in time? Who knows...

[quote name='Jakester' timestamp='1454612972' post='2971377'] At the risk of exposing my naivety, why would you remove the screws? [/quote] Recessing the screws and using filler in the holes would be a viable option. But the paint I'm going to use doesn't stick to filler very well, so I'm trying to avoid using too much. If I fill the holes with wood and PVA, the paint should adhere to that just fine.

Further plywood news! I cut out the holes in the back for the connector plates; I drilled the driver mounting holes and fitted the T-nuts by pressing them into place with a G-clamp. Having found T-nuts irritating in the past, I reckoned this would be easier than doing them when I fit the drivers. You can see that my driver cutout is not the neatest, but everything is hidden by the front edge of the driver. I should really have made up a circle cutting jig for the router to cut these - maybe next time. Then I glued the baffles in place using woodscrews to keep everything in place. When the glue is set I'll take these out and fill in all the holes with dowels. I'll round the corners off at the weekend, then it'll be on to cutting the port tubes to length and checking the tuning, then painting, lining and making the grille frames.

I've heard of "bumped" strings (i.e. moved over one position for lower tension, using an ADGC set tuned to EADG) as something that was popular with rockabilly and psychobilly players who wanted to stick with steel strings but have a low-tension setup for slap playing. I haven't come across anyone outside of those styles doing it, and perhaps its not really necessary now that there are so many dedicated slap strings available. This page explains it quite clearly: [url="https://www.gollihurmusic.com/product/2660-STRINGS_BUMPED_STRING_SETS_FOR_ROCKABILLY.html"]https://www.gollihurmusic.com/product/2660-STRINGS_BUMPED_STRING_SETS_FOR_ROCKABILLY.html[/url]