Paddy Morris

I think it's a lovely, growly vibe. Personal taste, as everyone is saying, but I love it. You could reduce the high frequency element of it quite easily with a bit of EQ, but in a band context I bet it would cut through beautifully.

I've been working my way by trial and error through bass amp heads and these are the sweeping generalisations I've arrived at: TC - good, solid amps but the EQ generally positioned at the wrong frequencies for upright. Boomy and prone to feedback Warwick Gnome - excellent value, but EQ bands in the wrong spots also. Genzler Magellans 350 and 800- excellent for double bass. Even without an HPF, there's enough tone shaping to get you a decent sound in most situations. Genz-Benz streamliner - tube front end actually slightly more flattering to an upright bass than the more modern Genzlers. Great. PJB - Two Four. Couldn't get on with it really. It's very highly tuned to a single low frequency, so a real feedback hazard if you hit that particular note. Traynor YBA300 - delicious, but heavy. Far too much low end unless you use an outboard HPF. But I do use one, and I'm currently in love with the sound of it. Just about sits neatly on top of an LFSys Monaco if you lay it on it's side.

Yep. HPF is a must. God alone knows shy they are so rarely found incorporated into amp heads in the first place.

How were they for vocal mic feedback? We have a loud-ass drummer, so tend to have to crank the vocals up..

Thanks Phil. Budget limited as this is for pubs, bars and coffee houses, who won't usually go above £350/gig round our way. But it's just for 3x vocals and blues harp really. Possibly a tiny amount of mic'd guitar amp, just to sharpen it up. And trombone, when he's available to play. But the instruments are mostly all backline. It's mainly about not having a massive pair of cabs blocking everyone's sight lines. Probably we will try and keep it to less than £2K. Is that doable do you reckon?

We're looking to get a smaller PA speaker set-up. We're currently using an XR-18 into a pair of big Behringer Eurolive 1200w speakers. The speakers are great for outdoor, or a bigish indoor venue, but are much too big for a small pub. I see all the open mic / one man band looper type people using Bose L1 systems, but there are loads of cheaper alternatives out there now. Has anyone had a particularly good experience with one of these Bose-a-like products?

All of this advice is good advice. It's what I should have done, and didn't. Could have saved months, maybe years of faffing about and lots of wasted cash Buy a used double bass directly from someone who has been playing it themselves. All of thi

That's good to know. Music retailers are going bust all over the place at the moment. Good luck with the new business structure.

It will be a real shame if they do go under. Always seemed like a good, helpful friendly bunch.

Mine doesn't rattle. Deffo send it back.

Skint is a state of mind. If you still have 2 viable kidneys, you're not genuinely skint in bass-player terms.

Just tried it out. So, so clean. Better sound than your best oxygen free copper, gold plated connector, washed in unicorn tears cable. I would use it from choice even for a quiet gig with no leaping about.

NUX just arrived. This is interesting from the user manual. I can't decide whether this is a clever idea or a waste of time. At least it seems to be switch-offable. It points to a well thought through product though. It also says to stay at least 6 feet away from any dual band router. So anyone using X-Air or Midas type mixing gear with iPad control (like me, for instance) might need an exclusion zone.

I'm definitely getting one. A Gollihur recommendation is the gold standard. I had a complaint that there wasn't enough bass spinning at our last gig. Never mind that I played quite a few of the right notes, some of them in the right order! Unless there are also bass-related acrobatics involved, people don't feel they've had their money's worth FFS.

Do you ever have trouble with the Line 6 dropping out in a crowded gig with lots of people's phones on that 2.4GHz band? I read on another theead that people have been finding 5.8GHz more reliable. Thanks for posting those spectrum plots. The G10 must have a pretty chunky input impedance. Some people have been recommending the NuX wireless systems. Has anyone tried one of these on a DB?

Careful what you wish for! There are 'nuances' of my playing that I'm entirely happy for others not to hear too clearly.

For me, the BF FRFR cabs are like running a 12" cab but with an attached sub. Despite the paper specification being the same, the Barefaced have a more pronounced bottom octave compared with LFsys. So depending on what instrument you're playing, and what kind of music you're playing, and what venue you're playing, that might be a plus or a minus. For an outdoor gig a Monaco with a BB (presumably also a Big Twin?) gives you a nice focused sound, but with a big of LF thump you can feel in your chest. But in problematic small pub, or on a bare wooden floor, or a stage with difficult acoustics, that bottom octave from the Barefaced can be a bit of a liability. Whereas the Monaco low end doesn't sound subjectively as extended, but it really stays tight and punchy and well damped. They are both lovely cabs, but different in style. BF slightly louder. LFsys tighter and more controlled.

A second Monaco is very much still in the mix. I saw the Big Twin and had a rush of blood to the head. And this is why my front room looks like a bass equipment hire co. warehouse. With regard to the 'how much power is too much' question. For backline, with the luxury of an FoH soundman, yes either a single Monaco or BB is enough. But for gigs where we're lashing together our own PA coverage, I find it much better all round for most of the bass to come from the backline. It's impossible to judge what is coming out of the front, and empty rooms at sound check rarely stay the same when they are full of sound-absorbing humans. And for our set, powerful speakers driven modestly sound better than a single cab being cained to death.

Quick one for you experts. I'm tempted by a Barefaced Big Twin 2 Gen 3 that has come up, reasonably nearby to me. I already have a BB3, and the Big Twin would take up a lot of space in my car alongside an upright bass. Possibly I couldn't get both in. But in the heat of battle the BB3 alone feels like it's at it's limits. I have already blown a crossover once. In my position would you resist the Big Twin and look out for another BB3 to stack? Am I going to get the same meat from 2 BB3s as I would from a Big Twin, do you reckon? It's just easier to transport 2 smaller cabs, and I can leave one at home for smaller gigs. Cheers Patrick

I think you're probably right, but I think it would have been a more tricky excercise with the BB3. For all that that are nominally flat, they do in practice seem to have a lovely hump in the bottom octave.

I don't know if this is still a live thread, but my LFSys Monaco completely saved my bacon on Sunday night. My usual set-up now is a Barefaced BB3 with a Monaco on top. This particular venue was a bass standing-wave disaster. I was feeding back all over the place. I couldn't hear a note. I turned myself up, and the bar next door complained that glasses were rattling off the shelves. Really, really awful. We stopped the gig. I went down to just the Monaco, sited on the other side of the stage. I graphic EQ'd tons of 100 - 150Hz out, to correct for the room, and flipped the phase of my preamp. Also took every last trace of the bass out of the wedges and FoH PA. So the entire gig I was just using a very thinned-out, heavily driven, single Monaco cab. It worked. I was loud enough for me and everyone else to be able to hear what I was playing. In the crowd phone recordings I have heard I was plenty loud enough, and the tone whilst not perfect (when is it ever?) was perfectly fine. All this from one single, modestly-sized cab. I would now go so far as to say that everyone should own at least one Monaco. To get the sound you want, you will probably dial EQ in. It's not a sumptuous sound in and of itself. But the whole point of a FRFR speaker is that you can dial in a sound. And in this case the ability to dial-out the sound of a terrible room really saved my gig.

Blimey. 48 hours coiled up in a bow of oil?! Seems kinda extreme to me. But then I just had to replace a string today, because of an outdoor gig on a rainy day. Maybeq I could have saved it if I had whacked it in a bowl of oil immediately after playing.

Hi there. Anyone out there who plays on natural gut strings, I'm wondering what oil people use to keep their strings in good fettle. I've always just wiped mine down with olive oil from the kitchen every so often. Is there a 'special' oil I should have been using all this time?

Does anyone have a good hack for the standard Shadow not-quite 2.5mm jack, as used on the RB Pro preamp and pickup rig? They seem to be slightly shorter and smaller diameter than the standard 2.5mm, which means you can't plug the transducer into anything else, without taking the original plug off and re-soldering with something else. The input sockets on the preamp unit will accept standard 2.5mm plugs, like those supplied on the Zak Victor pickups, but the larger jacks are probably putting the sockets in the preamp under mechanical strain, because they are designed for the non-standard narrower / shorter Shadow plug. Is there another, sub-2.5mmm 2-pole plug standard that I don't know about?

Did a test this evening. A local sparky lives adjacent to where the stage is going to be set up. He's provided us with a feed with minimal volts drop <5% when tested with a 6kVA load on the end (2 kettles!) Just need to keep everything dry if it rains on the night.