Beer of the Bass

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]

[quote name='Chienmortbb' timestamp='1454506949' post='2970319'] One thought has just occurred to me, is a fretless any different? [/quote] Yes, they still happen on fretless basses in much the same way, sometimes spot-on a specific note and sometimes in between. I think a lot of basses which are presumed to have no dead spots actually have one which falls in between two pitches and only affects the fretted notes to a minimal extent - these are easier to notice on a fretless.

I might make it along to that - I keep meaning to come to the Click Clack Club nights.

In the couple of public sector jobs I've worked there has been a definite sense of the ladder having been pulled up in recent years. People who'd been there a while had had various study and professional development opportunities supported by the employer, which were no longer an option, and none of the older guard had stayed at the bottom rung of the pay scale for long, while people starting when I did tended to stay at that level for years.

[quote name='JoeEvans' timestamp='1454398390' post='2969250'] What will take the place of us gigging is other, younger bands gigging, playing music that we don't like and wearing trousers that irritate us. It's one of the miracles of human civilisation that even though you would think that there were only limited variations possible in trouser design, each subsequent generation nevertheless invents a type of trouser that the previous generation finds irritating. [/quote] Intergenerational trouser discrepancies are definitely a thing. Even wearing bootcuts when playing for an audience of skinny jeaned undergrads has gotten me some funny looks...

I've seen similar issues with a whole range of cabs, from meticulously designed and extensively braced lightweight cabs to a 30kg Peavey which nearly vibrated an 18kg valve head off the top of it mid-gig. In all cases a bit of extra friction from replacing the amp feet or using a mat has sorted it. Are there really cabs out there which are immune from this, as I'm not sure I've encountered them yet?

I realised when doing the second baffle that some of my trouble with the fly-cutter was down to me not using it correctly, rather than any problem with the tool. It uses two blades, one with the flat side outwards and the other facing inwards. Initially I had the inner blade badly adjusted, just a little too far from the line cut by the outer blade. If the inner blade is too far from the outer one, the waste doesn't chip out as easily and the drill has to work much harder. After adjusting it so that the inner blade was closer to the outer one it cut much more easily and didn't need nearly as much torque from the drill. So I guess that's a thing to watch out for with these.

I like the lounging dogs and squeaky toy in the background!

I've been bashing on with these, as I'm determined to have at least one up and running for a gig in a fortnight's time. Today I cut out holes in the baffles for the speaker and ports. I used one of these cheapy fly-cutting tools for the port holes. It made nice neat holes, but it's not a tool I could say I enjoyed using. It came with blunt blades which I had to sharpen and was a bit scary in use. It's generally advised to use them on a pillar drill at low speed but the pillar drill in the workshop doesn't have a low enough speed setting, so I used it in a handheld electric drill. This seemed to be quite taxing on the drill, which got a bit hotter than it ought to so I took a break for it to cool down before doing the second cab. I cut out the holes for the drivers with a jigsaw, which is probably the wrong way to do it! I stayed slightly shy of the line so that I could finish it up more precisely with a rasp until the drivers fit snugly. There was still a little more to come off when I took this photo but hey, it looks a bit like a cab already! Although I was talking about making the baffles removable, I might just glue them in. It seems like it would make the cab a touch more rigid and in some ways it would be simpler than faffing about with woodscrews and gasket tape. It might make lining the cab a little more tricky, but as long as I fit the lining before the ports are glued in place I should be OK.

Only three monitors though. You'll have to cancel!

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1454145938' post='2966837'] If you get a custom relic bass made like a Limelight, does the builder take your playing style into account when they do the relic'ing? After all if you bought a J-style bass with wear around the bridge pickup, but you play mostly with the neck pickup as your anchor it would fairly ridiculous to any when looking closely. [/quote] I guess it would be no different to playing an older bass which has been worn by another player. I have several older instruments which are worn differently than they would have been if I'd owned them from new, like an acoustic guitar with marks from aggressive strumming when that's not my style. I don't think that makes me look ridiculous.

I regard it as a win if a pub gig supplies any monitors at all. I've done a few that have just a 300 watt mixer amp and a couple of little speakers on stands, and you have to dig it all out of the cellar or storeroom before you can set up! We've made it work in those places, but they're not my favourite gigs.

[quote name='Yawn_Blah' timestamp='1454130940' post='2966764'] does it make sense to use a DI between the pre and rumble's return? [/quote] If you plug the preamp output into an active DI and use the XLR output via an XLR-jack cable, that may work. It would at least allow you to identify whether this is an impedance issue.

I saw a local band recently where the bassist kept failing to mute the B-string when he wasn't playing it, and the resulting low rumble was just enough to subtly mess up the whole sound of the band. That's never been a problem for me, but clearly it's one more thing to think about with a five.

Allowing for the different scale, that's not far from the modelled response. I'm aware that the output of these is limited lower down, but I've had other cabs which behave similarly and I'm pretty sure they'll work for me. If my needs change somewhere down the line there are quite a few other drivers which would work in these boxes too - not least the Beyma used in the design diary thread, though with any luck I'll be quite happy with the Betas.