TimR

[quote name='JayPH' post='1232967' date='May 16 2011, 12:55 PM']Thanks for the input chaps. The Vox amps were loud enough really but very distorted. They have lots of presets and I think there's too many variables on them and I also think you are all right about the levels being too high. Not sure what the PA is Tim. I'll get more involved next week and see exactly what we're working with. Having a separate bass amp can only help. The best way I can describe it was disorienting. I was finding it very difficult to keep the rhythm and it just sounded very muddy, distorted and confused. Hopefully once the drummer gets on board we can iron out these problems. Cheers[/quote] Missed the bit that you had no drummer. You're probably hearing the sound of the bass reflecting off the walls rather than direct which will disorientate you and sound muddy. The guitars will be trying to keep in time with (the delayed) sound that they are hearing and you will try to pull back to stay in time with the guitars. Result timing all over the place. If you have to play like this again you need to be close to the PA speaker as possible. Drummer will sort. Assuming he is solid

[quote name='Vibrating G String' post='1232651' date='May 16 2011, 01:37 AM']I think it would take decades to take down a reputation like Harvard's.[/quote] I agree whch is why later I posted an ammendment. Maybe this is an Arts and Humanities thing. In Maths, Engineering and most Sciences you have only right and wrong answers. Maybe that is why students are studing less of those types of subjects?

Where the Vox guitar amps loud enough? What was 'all over the place?' What PA are you using? Once you get an amp you'll get a better idea of what it sounds like out front. I'm guessing you had the bass through a 'band in a box' PA. Something like this: [url="http://www.imuso.co.uk/PA-Systems/Power-Mixers-and-Amps/Powered-Mixers"]Powered mixers[/url] in which case the Bass will be 'all over the place' and possibly the Vocals will suffer too as a result of the mixer trying to do Bass and vocals at too great a volume.

In my case I've gone for both. Each has a different influence on the sound. I could consider the amp to be the most influential as it has a fair amount of adjustments that can be made in order to get the end result sounding what I want. Especially since the cab is fixed unless I buy another one. or the cab could be the most influential. I listened to a few before I bought it. So I know a different cab will sound um.. different. I wouldn't get the sound I'm after with a different cab even adjusting the amp controls. If you are using a cheap amp and a hand built cab designed and produced by a bass player, who felt that the most important result of building his cabinet was to ensure the best quality sound he could get (not just to ensure he lined his pockets), then I am not suprised that the cab is going to be the greatest influence. Chicken and egg. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The sum is greater than the parts. etc etc..... I think for most of us changing any one item would affect what we hear. Maybe you could get even better results from a different amp. Depends what your version of better is.

[quote name='LawrenceH' post='1232056' date='May 15 2011, 02:59 PM']None of this actually matters that much when we're talking about music though, career success in music doesn't come from degree qualifications. If people learn something when studying you hear it in their playing, not on a piece of paper.[/quote] It's the same in all subjects. The paperwork will get you the interview/audition. You still have to demonstrate you can do the job. People turn up to interviews/auditions with qualifications as long as there arm and don't have the knowledge or skills to back up the paperwork.

Maybe instead of the word soon I should have used eventually. It's becoming fairly evident now that you need a 1st Class Hons degree to stack supermarket shelves. Not because more people are better educated but because more people have degrees. There will come a time when it will all change. I believe we're already rapidly approaching a time where the number of university places is dropping and then the number of students will drop. This will make it even more important that standards are upheld. If universities continue to under-perform compared to the people who are getting vocational qualifications, people will stop paying the huge fees.

Interesting sound bite. I wonder what the rest of it was like. If Harvard gave everyone Bs pretty soon the employers would stop employing people from Harvard and word would get round and their reputation would suffer. It's always been true that the best teachers are those that give words of support and encouragement. Is that blowing smoke up people's Ars*s? This is why examinations should always be externally set and marked. Then it doesn't matter what the student thinks or how lenient the teacher is. He is talking about Americans though.

The floor should also be on a 4x2 or 2x2 frame otherwise the bass will just transmit straight through whatever you use into the concrete and this will transmit into the walls and instead of having a soundproof room you will have a big garage shaped bass speaker.

[quote name='lojo' post='1230184' date='May 13 2011, 05:29 PM']... hang DPM down the walls and tuck wall side of floor DPM coming up , create 2x2 studwalls (use larger if your not worried about losing inches) to create a small cavity off the external skin ...[/quote] This has triggered something in my dim memory. I think we may have hung roofing felt from the frame in the air gap.

I fell down there as well. The plaster board sizes were quoted as 2.4x1.2 m but when they arrived were actually 8x4 ft. or the other way round. They did fit the frame but with gaps. It was 20 years ago but check whether the plaster board is imperial or metric before you build the frame 24inches(600mm) stud to stud sounds fine. We used single layer. The garage is stand alone you are not trying to sound insulate it from an adjoining property. The distance and neighbours walls will do that. They should be able to put up with a [b]small[/b] amount of noise in the summer with their windows open. They'll complain more about the noise you make when you come outside for a break. Yes 2.7x5.0 would probably mean inside dimensions of 2.4x4.8 to make it all slot together nicely. Cool!

If you make the walls 8ft high and the frame has studding at 4ft intervals you only need to cut the plasterboard at the ends and posibly the actual ceiling pieces. Cuts down on a lot of work if the space you build is 12ft by 8ft. Plan the frame well.

'Ours' wasn't sound proof. The fact that its isolated from the walls and floor is important or the concrete garage will just turn into a huge transmitter. The underlay will be good to reduce the reflections. A plastic damp sheet between the insulation and the concrete wall sounds like a good idea. The air gap between the insulation and the concrete wall was important for a few reasons. Thermal and acoustic but I can't remember all the physics at the moment. Electric points: As many outlets as you can afford around the walls. Avoid pendulum lights as they will be too low and avoid recessed down-lighters as the sound will just go through the holes and you need to provide to let the heat escape from them. If it's an outside building you'll probably need to be on an RCD. If in doubt get a sparks in.

We did something similar with a prefab garage in the 80's. I'm guessing materials have come along a bit. We made a frame out of 4"x2". This was effectively a box within the garage. Left a gap of about 2" between the frame and the garage walls. Then filled between the uprights with loft insulation (I'm guessing that the panels that you can get now are better). Then plasterboard over the top for walls and ceiling. The floor was just ordinary ply. I suppose chip board flooring is best now. It got very hot and humid in the summer end they guy ended up buying an industrial dehumidifier that he ran after the practices and a couple of hours each day in the winter to stop his drum kit rotting. The door was a bit of a nightmare as it had to be insulated and ended up about 5" thick. We had a friend block the 'garage door' end with block work. It may be better to find some way of making huge soundproof doors that open instead. Loading drums through the insulated door was quite tricky. It worked really well. Bear in mind with all this internal frame you will lose about 6" off each side of the garage so a 6' wide garage will end up being only 5' wide. We moved the garage in the back of my car. We did many trips as we could only get about 4 slabs in the car before the wheel arches started rubbing. I think there were about 50 slabs in all.

It's all to do with confidence. If you're not confident with your ability to play the song you will probably be staring at your music, fretboard or feet. If you are not confident that your singer/band or song choice is going to entertain the crowd you will be worriedly looking at the band or crowd. You won't be able to help this, your body language will show it. If you and your band are confident and relaxed you will all naturally move with the music in an unforced way without thinking about it. The moves will be determined by the style of music. The more times you play music in front of a crowd the more relaxed and confident you will become. You don't need to practice your moves, you need to practice playing in front of an audience.

The instruments that usually take solos are the instruments that usually play melody. The bass is traditionally a harmonic (or even bass) instrument so traditionally it doesn't have that quality. When you switch to playing a solo or melody do you need someone to cover the bass or harmony parts? There is a difference between bass solo and solo bass. If you listen to Marcus Millers albums he has two bass parts. The bass playing the bass and the bass playing the melody. I think if you don't support the solo with harmony or bass, a solo can lose direction.

[quote name='stingrayPete1977' post='1225553' date='May 9 2011, 08:56 PM']Tim you claim to have good ears in your sig yet have strapped a box to the back of the headstock to stop the tuners moving a quarter turn at most [/quote] Well he asked if anyone had a solution. I'm never one to resist a challenge. No one spotted the deliberate irony that it was the tuner box then? I play with a guitarist who will play for 20mins while the drummer sets up. We'll play the first song and at the end of the song I ask him if he has checked his tuning. Every week without fail he is out. It seems alien to me not to tune up as soon as you have put on your strap. As I said, I was just surprised at how far out the bass goes when it's in a bag compared to a hard case but now I've experimented and seen how much you have to turn the machine head to raise a semitone, I'm not so surprised. I suppose I'd never noticed how much I turn them. Just do it unconsciously really. I wonder how many people here could have said how many turns it takes to raise the pitch a semitone?

[quote name='ZMech' post='1225527' date='May 9 2011, 08:31 PM']I think this is the most that people have ever agreed on a forum. 70 posts all agreeing that tuning is vital immediately before/during a gig (discounting the OP), plus a few about some van.[/quote] The OP wasn't complaining about the fine tuning he was complaining about how wildly out the tuning goes.

It probably also depends on the ratio of your machine heads. Mine are 1:12. I think Fenders are 1:20. A quarter turn on my machine head results in an increase of a semitone on my E string on a Fender I would expect this to be around than half of that. Which may explain some of the ridicule that is going on here. Also you should only ever have one layer of string wound on the post this will affect your tuning. Here is my 5 minute solution using my tuner (inside it's box) and one of my daughter's scrunchies. When I have more time I will construct something using some wood and the correct size elastic band. Or I may not [attachment=79452:IMG_0353.JPG]

This really bugs me too. I used to use a hard case and my bass basically stayed in tune forever. It's not that you have to re-tune it's that it goes so far out of tune. Tuning up a few cents is not the same as having to tune down a semitone or even a tone. I think it's probably worse because I had been playing for so long with a hard case and I'm just used to not having to make huge adjustments when I tune up. I've been thinking of making a cardboard sleeve that fits over the headstock to protect it.

[quote name='Lozz196' post='1224203' date='May 8 2011, 03:46 PM']That`s what I meant, but didn`t put in in technical terms, as to be honest, don`t know them.[/quote] It's easier to explain if you think of it as the speakers being torches. The high frequencies have narrow beams and the low frequencies wide ones. If you stand in the strong light you get lit up more than if you stand in the shadows by the edges. If you have four torches you have areas of light and dark where the beams overlap. As we walk across the stage we walk through these areas of light and dark so the two speakers next to each other give us problems. The speakers on top each other only give us problems if we are going up and down. Hopefully that's a fairly non technical explanation of what's going on and makes the "sounds louder" as you move away argument less counter intuitive and easier to explain to your guitarist. Although unfortunately, in my experience, singers and guitarists just want you to make it work, they're not interested in how it works, which makes it a lot harder.

I would avoid it because you will get problems from the sound bouncing off the back wall. Which is probably part of the problem with the monitors as well. Unfortunately unless you're using IEMs with dedicated channels for everyone, monitoring is always a compromise.

The comment is only aimed at Vocals in the MONITORS. The front of house PA is fine for what you are doing. If you only have 12" Yamaha monitors you [b]may [/b] struggle adding the guitars into the monitor mix. Get the monitor speakers aiming in the right direction. Use the guitar amps as stage monitoring for the guitarists. Everyone can turn down and it'll be more coherent. Also try cutting a bit of the bass frequencies from the monitors. The singers may not like the sound of their voices soloed but they'll sound fine and cut through better when the whole band is playing.

[quote name='JTUK' post='1223689' date='May 7 2011, 09:42 PM']Unless you have monitor mixes..which most basic P.A can't really do unless you have more than one aux send/dedicated monitor mixer, you are better off with vocals only in the monitors. ...[/quote] That is what I was going to suggest. What are you using for monitors speaker size and power? There are ways of setting up monitors to optimise stage coverage. Again monitors are directional and need to be aimed at the singers ears. Even wedge shaped monitors are no good if they are right at the singers feet. Packing under the monitors to tilt them up really helps. You may then find that one monitor will cover the whole of one half of the stage area.

[quote name='JTUK' post='1223587' date='May 7 2011, 07:42 PM']Make sure everyone has a decent compatable sound EQ'd to the band..and then play at levels where you can hear everyone. That way you make it simple and less likely you have to pull off miracles with a mix. And you probably only have a mon mix anyway.[/quote] This is an often overlooked point. Quite a few guitarists think that they have to cover the same bass frequencies when playing in a band as the they do when playing at home. You're the bassist so they need to roll off the bass frequencies. This means you don't have to be so loud to be heard and they don't have to try to be louder than you and compete in the loudness wars. What other instruments do you have in the band? Maybe look at arrangements. If you have two guitarists doubling the same parts this can lead to problems. What are you putting through the monitors?

[quote name='Lozz196' post='1223515' date='May 7 2011, 06:25 PM']I`d suspect that the guitarist in question has a nice rig (4x12?), and is simply standing very close to it. Guitar amps project sound very well, but if standing very close, they don`t sound loud enough, hence this problem that happens in bands all over the world. Get the guy to move right out front at a soundcheck/rehearsal, and let him hear this for himself. It sounds daft, that an amp gets louder as you move away from it, so most people don`t believe it until its proved to them - and you can`t blame them really, its very contradictory. It`s especially a problem with 4x12s - our old guitarist always moaned about not being able to hear himself when using his 4x12, but never had any problems with his 2x12.[/quote] This is due to the directionality of 12"s not the distance from them. As you get further away you get into the "beam" of sound so it sounds louder. If you get the amp up to close to his ears (as other have suggested) there is no way in the world it will get louder as you get further away. With a 2x12" I would bet he put it on a stand, or as you walk away from the stage you never get into the "beam".