Jack

You can get the Bill Fitzmaurice SLA with two 4" drivers I think. But, I mean, Presonus Eris.

Let me guess, 1 penny more?

New from Didier... 50w, 12ax7, 6l6wgb. DI from the transformer. "Sounds somewhat like an early 50s Portaflex, but one of the two inputs has a more balanced / neutral sound." Edit- link now appears broken...

My favourite rig ever was a rack helix into (one, sometimes two) FR800, which is essentially a BB2 with an inbuilt power amp. Your rig must sound similarly immense. Keep a hold of it! Of course, the helix (including the stomp) have the option for line level, balanced output, making them slightly more appropriate for this than most pedal preamps which tend to have a choice of either balanced/mic level or unbalanced/instrument, neither of which are ideal for a proper pa power amp, although both can work just fine.

So the original is a little over half the price, looks better and has the advantage of being made by robots? Seems like he's ruined at least one perfectly good bass to make that monstrosity.

My first attempt at frfr, long before that term was coined, was my pedalboard (topped with an MXR preamp) into a rack and then a Dr Bass cab. I didn't have quite enough juice to push the QSC without a little help and so I used a Presonus channel strip. 1600W, 2x12" subs, a 6" mid and 1" tweeter. Sounded immense. Please excuse the photo quality, this was the good old days.

The ebs are the smallest I've ever found.

Quite a nice outing for us last night. New venue for my indie rock band, The White Line. We played Dirty Habit in Whitley Bay which is quite a fun, high-energy bar. It was quiet during set up but soon filled out nicely with dancers. The photos are from before and the video is a quick one from the set break. We rocked a pretty good crowd all night, aside from one major disaster. Resident drug and alcohol dancing guy (you know the one, he goes to LOTS of gigs) decided to put his pint down on the subwoofer. I shouted and shouted but he didn't have a clue what I was asking for, so the singer went to grab the drink instead. About 2 seconds too late. Off it went, onto the power reel that was powering that side of the PA and the singer's pedal board. How nothing went kafautz I don't know but we politely stopped the show to request a bartender to come and sweep up the glass after the song finished. Dancing man wasn't going to, he was too busy dancing on the broken glass... I also had a nice young lady intently staring at me all night long. Unfortunately too young, but the attention was nice nonetheless. However, after the gig she approached me with her mate and her mate's dad who'd arrived to pick them up. She was a new bass player and looking for some advice on stage amps. I'm clearly getting old. Nevertheless I dutifully pointed her to Basschat. Hi Claire! Can I please draw your attention to the difference in cable management between my spot and the singer's? Amateur. The rig was my G&L L2000 into a Shure wireless, TC Mojomojo, Paradriver. Using a QSC wedge in front of me partly because the weird shape of the stage would render a traditional backline useless and partly because I'm still not quite 100% after covid round 2, so my already-ropey backing vocals needed a little extra monitoring just to be sure I was on key. I wasn't. You'll notice there isn't a stage amp. Sorry Claire! PXL_20221015_205850451.mp4

One of my friends in my biology lectures was doing marine biology. Now she's an exotic tour guide and her Facebook is just her riding through the desert on horseback, climbing mountains and going whale watching. So it works for some. Edit sorry not the post I planned on quoting but it seems stuck there now...

Funnily enough my careers adviser told me to be a blended learning manager for a multi academy trust. Oh, wait, no. Lab technician, he said lab technician.

All of my cables are 5m now (incidentally, Thomann cannot count to 5 as some of them are nearer 6...) so I'd vote for that.

Well firstly I think the emphasised bit (my emphasis) is an incredibly big assumption, given the nature of most Basschatters who are in working pub bands. Granted, someone in the higher echelons of touring or something might not have those worries. My first PA was a pair of Maplin 15" tops, I then added home-made subs. Ah, the good old days. Odd-shaped rooms, boomy rooms, echoey stages. having to set up in an acoustically-stupid place, a local restaurant around me is nearly all glass and metal. Then there's things like room and stage sizes and shapes being 'not right' so you can't place your amps where you'd like or having to live with a power alley as you can only really have one sub per side. My tops are lovely, but they're only 75 degrees dispersion so I can struggle in wide rooms, maybe that comes under the 'adequate for the job' statement above. Imposed volume requirements. The last obvious one I can think of is sort of an excuse, but also just a reality: we (I) run sound from the stage. A wireless unit for my bass, a trick digital mixer and working on a tabley all help, but realistically I'm not quite the sound man I should/could be if I was sitting in the right place. I could continue but I think we've dragged this on long enough. I don't think bad sound is inherently somebody's fault. At least not always. Not in the same way where if I heard someone playing an instrument badly I would probably just assume that they couldn't play it right (I mean they could be injured or whatever I suppose). If I hear a bad sounding bad one night my automatic assumption isn't that they're incompetent. Although that is certainly one possibility I would entertain others. I've seen Iron Maiden at the local arena 3 times now. They sounded great twice and pretty bad once. Was it because I was in a different place in the venue? Different rental PA? Some imposed noise limits? Architectural changes? (it was the most recent that sounded bad). Or, possibly, they may have hired an incompetent sound crew.

Yes the emphasis on often was mine, I'm aware that you said that it is always user error ("bad sound doesn't just happen") but I was saying I disagree. I just see two posts now that read (to me at least) as saying roughly "if you have bad sound at a gig then you should learn to use your gear properly" and I think that's both wrong and condescending.

I think that you're right when you say that often bad sound is user error (god knows that's been me once or twice in the early days of my sound career!) but wrong when you say that it doesn't just happen as well. Perhaps I should have said "nothing that can be done" rather than "nobody's fault". There are posts in this very thread about hearing aid induction loops or wifi widgets and ok yes they may technically have been somebody's fault, but not anybody in the band and there was nothing that could be done to fix it no matter one's level of soundman ability. I've had a gig where we've been told there's house PA, then I double checked a few days before on facebook to be told there's a "full yamaha and rcf system that bands use all the time" then we get there to find there is indeed a full system, minus the mixer. Which we should have brought. Obviously. Maybe that's the venue's fault for not explaining, maybe it's ours for not bringing a backup anyway, but either way there was nothing that could be done to get great sound at that time. We plugged the main vocal mic directly into one top speaker, turned the stage amps up to match the drum kit, and played. I can also think of a gig where any time anything was plugged into any other socket apart from one there was horrific buzz. My singer had a socket tester and we carried a line transformer/isolator but nothing could be done to fix it. There were serious compromises to get the whole band into one socket, resulting in a less-than-perfect sound. I could go on, as could practically everyone else here who's ever gigged.

I'm not the op, which was about 2 Yamaha basses and sounds not looks. However, I did say that I was asked. I believe op was told.

Well it's been six years so hopefully the op got sorted.

Well I'm not sure how one defines 'serious' but they/we put a lot of effort into the look and I'm the only non-mod in real life in the group. There's a big backdrop with a Vespa and a few union jacks on the stage. I don't have the sideburns or the t shirt with the bullseye on it so I do try and make the effort. For reference the other guitars are a Paisley telecaster and a 335, both into vintage appropriate fender and vox amps. A bongo into a helix DID stand out a bit.

As a trained scientist I would point out that one anomalous result doesn't point to a trend. As a very untrained bassist and frankly laughable sound guy I've learned that often bad sound isn't anybodys fault. As an aside, I've once been asked not to bring a particular bass again. My drummer politely suggested that my electric blue musicman bongo didn't fit the look of our indie rock covers band. He was right.

Ah, people reading the title but not the op, classic internet. 😁 Proper proper touring is done with either road cases or production cases depending on the size of the greeble that needs storing. If I was doing van touring I'd probably use one of the Flyht pelican case 'homages' 😉 with the divider. Would that work? Like everyone else who has answered though I don't use any of those solutions though. I use a Stanley Fatmax.

I own and love a pair of QSC K12.2s and they are amazing as either main pa tops or for bass monitoring on stage. However, whilst I have used them as a full pa before without subs, I wouldn't be keen to do it again for a loud rock band. There's a big difference between a wedge sitting on the floor (so half space and with most of the low lows cut out anyway) for stage monitoring and relying on it to do everything to the audience. There are mains that will do that. At one of our schools we have a pair of Yamaha 315s and the other school has a pair of QSC 153s, both of which will go all the way into sub territory no problem (as I'm told does the big boy RCF 15" model, the 745?) but they are very very big and very expensive. Probably less cost and weight than a tops+subs total rig though.

They call it AeroSilk.

Thanks both. I don't actually have the bass in hand so can't test but nice to know it's doesn't need the really high input impedance of a piezo-specialist preamp. I have plenty of great gear that would work regardless, all the way up to the 10Mohm that my Countryman DI is, but I'd like to use my existing wireless > helix rig.

Not the most amazing one for us last night. The White Line (for you 'tell us your band' folks) played a pub on the beach. To practically nobody. Oh well. The rig was my trusty G&L L2000 into a Shure Wireless>TC MojoMojo>Sansamp Paradriver V2. I was right by the pa in a tiny room so I put a tiny amount of 120Hz up (as that's where our sub crosses over so it kind of felt like a decent guess) in the singer's wedge and left my stage stuff in the car.

Hi all, I'm trying to get my hands on an Ibanez SRH500 that has a piezo pickup in the bridge, then some sort of preamp. Specifically it is what Ibanez call their AeroSilk system. With it being active, do I still need to worry about the input impedance of what it's plugged in to? The input of my wireless is only 900kohm.

And yet, somehow, people get by.