caitlin

Yeh one thing the book's good for is showing how mistakes can invalidate a LOT of effort and expense.

Done right the effects are astonishing, but one slip and you've coupled 40Hz straight into the kitchen

It breaks my heart how loud the bathroom fan is in my music room (glorified third bedroom)

14 minutes ago, Jakester said:

"Relatively" inexpensive is battening the inner walls and ceiling, adding resilient bars, and then doubling up with acoustic plasterboard sheets. Seal up any gaps with caulk and at least you've got more mass which is at least partially decoupled. By no means perfect, but a relatively easy solution which would reduce the sound transmission to outside the room. 

 

Yeh, I forgot that one, there are Z shaped metal doodles you can use to hang the drywall on.

A really good book to discourage yourself with is "Home Recording Studio, Build It Like the Pros" by Rod Gervais. It's full of awesome info you can use to crush your dreams or I suppose find something acceptable.

Ultimately my plans died in local zoning meaning that after 8pm or something if any neighbour could hear a cat fart in their lounge then I was antisocial and drums are ideal for creating a full spectrum of annoying noises from sub bass to tinnitus cymbals. Victory.

I got jealous so copied people and there's now less to trip over cluttering up the floor. Bonus!

I spent AGES looking into this for my drums since I bought a house. The solution I ultimately went for was a pretty high end electric kit and headphones.

As others have said this is wave physics and the only solutions are either decoupling with a low transmissive medium, or MASS.

Ultimately one form of energy needs to be converted into another to make it go away.

This is compression waves in air turned into heat.

Room in a room is SUPER heavy (mass) so you can only do it on ground floors, few buildings would be constructed to support a sound proof room without significant reinforcement.

The usual 'cheap' way to do it is room in room supported on dense foam rubber pucks with a dual layer of plasterboard panels 'glued together' with green glue on each surface of the cube and a mixed density rubber floor.

The Green Glue is stuff that's sticky but never actually goes off and solidify so it allows the gummed together panels to flex converting the sound into friction and therefore heat.

Treatment, much simpler (and harder, lol) figure out where your listening points are in the room and run frequency sweeps to find the room resonances and put traps around the place till the resonances go away.

21 minutes ago, Bassassin said:

Genuine question - what would you consider to be a good lyric?

Whatever fits the purpose? Sells a record, transmits an emotion, tells a joke, rhymes, adds irony?

1 minute ago, drTStingray said:

Well indeed, a bit like checking batteries, but nonetheless soldering at a gig seems a little more problematic than flipping a lid and replacing a battery.

I'm sure people with such vintage equipment take a spare instrument just in case something 'falls off the old girl', to quote vintage Bentley owners. I wonder if a day will come when on a par with vintage cars, a vintage P Bass will de rigeur require it's operator to wear period clothing - perhaps a dapper 1960 style suit, shoes, shirt and tie a la Shadows and other beat combos of the era 😀 😏

True enough, but I guess that's the difference between preventive maintenance every few years and waiting till stuff breaks to fix it.

I mean, I change my drum heads before any big events rather than waiting till they tear to switch one out in the middle of a show. Oh, big events , how I miss them.

23 minutes ago, drTStingray said:

a sudden dry joint in the nearly 60 yr old original wiring on your passive 62 P bass!! 

Why wouldn't one re-flow the joints with *some* regularity, this is just *maintenance*

Me? I *love* a backing track, proves to those other buggers that it IS them that can't keep time

Isn't this some PRS thingy, that you need two people for it to be an 'act' or something and the licencing changes? I don't recall, ianal etc. [citation needed]

8 minutes ago, Twigman said:

WRONG THREAD

Get out, there's nothing wrong with this thread.

4 minutes ago, Lebowsky said:

Damn, I'm not on facebook but I guess I might have to break with my ethics if it's to find people to play with! I'll let you know in pm once I'm setup, thanks!

Eurgh. I think I'd rather be bandless.

Good luck.

I'm actually a bit scared of playing here, Scottish lads are *good*

I feel I should have posted this in the first instance since it would have saved a lot of words.

White/black fender cable in the DI goes basswards, cables at the back right wander off to the power amp.

the RCA pair closer to the master volume are the line in from laptop/whatever (tape input)

The stripey cable wanders off to my music stand taking the 'control out' signal to my tuner.

Bonus points: I can plug my vdrums into channel 3/4 and put them in the amp.

The mp3 file I linked to up there ^^ knows nothing of this, because that went into a saffire firewire doodle into logic and had a compressor and an amp sim added to it. You've all been very kind by ignoring it tactfully rather than telling me to go back to the drums where I can do less harm

3 minutes ago, EliasMooseblaster said:

Depends if you go valve or solid-state. Valve amps require a load; I *think* I'm right in saying that solid-states do not.

Yeh, if there's an output transformer than it'll drop all the heat into the coil and burn it out without a load.

I'm unsure what mosfets do, but I guess they saturate and the current stops flowing.

I thinky I should read some manuals probably since every amp is going to 'depend'

Yeh, my guitar stuff is a 5W tube amp through a 10 inch speaker and it's stunning. Certainly shocked some people who've been round for a go on it.

I think you're right about waiting till I know more before buying an amp, I'm just not sure how I'm going to get exposure and learn this stuff. This I suppose is the nature of being a noob, I'll acquire what I need without noticing it happening, I imagine.

I had a brief pop at being pro, I wanted to be a musician when I was tiny but my idiot parents made me do school and become *successful* or something. The sheer amount of *work* to do music compared with other jobs makes it a vocation, or an addiction if you ask me. If you can't do anything else then it's pretty easy to stay 1000% committed to it.

I've certainly had slumps where I feel like chucking it all in, but I am addicted. I'm just getting old enough where most bands wouldn't want me and I've really had to refocus what I want music to mean to me. I couldn't be *bothered* to practise drums because without a band to practise for I didn't have a reason to. I went back and got some 'lessons' which turned more into hanging out with another drummer and talking rubbish, but it revitalised my love for drums and playing them for sake of it, learning things because they're hard and they sound great and being able to just sit down and enjoy grooving for half an hour.

Learning a new instrument is certainly revitalising my love of music, I am terrified of the prospect of future auditions with an instrument I can't play 1% as well as I drum.

The other thing I feel is tough is that thing where the better you get at an instrument the more aware you are of how bad you suck at it. As time's gone on, the only thing I've got is more critical of my playing, getting through that and enjoying my own ability a bit more has been lovely.

Work is always horrid, if it was super fun they wouldn't need to pay you

On 12/03/2019 at 17:54, Frank Blank said:

 I’m putting the Samsara video up (again) but only because I’m not sure what bass he’s playing..?

 

Oof, thanks for linking this, I am stuck listening to this EP on a loop.

9 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Inspired me to order a pair of USB-rechargeable PP3 batteries off eBay.

 

LINK PLS! are they the same actulol volts though? An alkaline PP3 is 6 AAA batteries or sutin, so the chemistry is 1.5V * 6 = 9V

The boring rechargies are usually a 1.2V chemistry so you'd need 7.5 batteries to hit a real 9V

Lipos are 3.9V are they? so anyway, they all fall out at different nominal numbers of voltsies and I don't know how much guitars really care... "insert all the stuff about batteries affecting the tones in pedals or whatever"

Yeh, I think this is kind of the point, I don't think I have a desire or need for a 'practise amp' some 30W farty cardboard cone, 8" car stereo speaker isn't going to give me any warm fuzzies.

Do the REAL heads always require a load for the main outs, or can you run them with just the DI into a desk?

I mean in my tiny music hole I have a 'PA' in the samson amp and the hi-fi speakers with a wee desk plugged in, so I'm DIing into a model rig. Were I to have a 'real' amp, i could mess with the tone of it in my grotto, take it with me to a pub with a PA or drag my cab out of the garage if I feel a desire to go play in a field with a generator.

For the sake of the argument and please be kind, like I said I've been doing this 3 weeks: since my last post I did this out of one of the Hal Leonard books: http://cat.scot/111.mp3

MIND YOUR EARS, I think it came out a bit hot.

39 minutes ago, paul_c2 said:

Is this a live setup? Or practice at home? Rehearsals? I'm confused what the context is.

Practise at home, but aiming high, like I might want to assuming one day I might like to make some *friends* and assault a pub.

My music room is a bit cramped, but I can stash a cab in a garage were I actually ever in a band.

I'm a music school failure level drummer and have been in a few bands. Narrowly missed out on playing at Glastonbury that one time, but the band were *horrible*, just odious people so no regrets. (The lies we tell ourselves?)

I'm about 3 weeks in to learning bass, but can surely get to amateur level in a year or two if I work?

Cheers! I knew the magic bits in the bass were 'eq' but i hadn't really equated that to 'pre-amp' like making it louder.

I'd assumed there was *some* kind of contract between the derrière end of a bass and the in hole of the amps, collectively, in terms of impedance and volt level but that's naivety in the extreme

I think mostly I'm lacking space for a real speaker, so this is what I have to live with, at least for now. I'm wondering if I would *enjoy* a real amp head which I could DI for now but allow me to connect to a real cab if the need ever arose (deity forbid I actually try playing live ever )

I shall distract myself from GAS and get on with learning where all the notes are.

Now I want to build a wireless doodle that ALSO powers the bass through the socket, half the batteries half the failure modes.

pinching someone else's picture but i hope that's ok because they get their advert out of it:

you can see that if you trace from the body of the jack, up to the volume pot chassis, the right side pin is grounded that goes into the pot and connects to one end of the resist.

there's 'some distance of resist' before you reach the 'wiper' which is connected to the middle pin. you can then trace from the middle pin back down to the tip of the output jack... I think this is the resistance you're seeing.

We're dealing with AC current, not DC and 'leaking to ground' is what all these systems do deliberately to attenuate whatever frequencies they want to act on.

in your second picture the top pin on the left hand pot (which is the one i think is the volume) is connected to the case of the pot (ground)

so you're measuring from the middle pin (wiper) through the resist out of that upper pin and through the case.

I *expect* that if you measure the value of that resistance and wiggle the pot, the value will change.

Enjoy your weekend too.

I think not!

Got a spare you could swap in? we may have it!

There are ways to test them but they're complicated and magic, mr carlson's lab on youtube goes into lots and lots of detail about 'how this stuff works' but you need a magic tester to test them properly and i don't even know anyone who has one of those.

If you had a wiring diagram you could try bypassing parts of the circuit to narrow down where the broken bit is, perhaps?

Here's something i don't know: can one connect a pickup directly to the output of the guitar? bypassing the volume and tone circuitry entirely, I can't think of any reason why not... that would allow us to see if we can get any life from it at all.