Jack

I often use the Markbass Amp Wedge.

It wasn't meant to be condescending, sorry if you took it that way. Yes, the head is only safely rated down to 4R (as far as I know) so giving it a 2R load is outside of its rated safety specs and potentially dangerous. Like any safety spec, there may well be no long term consequences to running the head at 2R. Most safety specs have a margin of error and the amp will have safety features, so it might be fine. Just like if you put 510kg on a crane rated for 500kg you might well be safe, however that spec is what it is for a reason. Best case, all is fine. Worst case, amp fails catastrophically and explodes in a fireball. There are a lot of very possible scenarios in between those two examples, most of which aren't much fun.

Yes, daisy chaining 2 4R cabs is a 2R load whether they're both linked to the head or whether it's one cab into the other. Either way they're still wired in parallel. There are some misconceptions in your post though, the amp is still 600W, so split between the two cabs they're only getting around 300W each, the amp doesn't magically double in power to 1200W just 'cos there are more cabinets on it, it's still a 600W amp. The cabs couldn't care less, the cabs are and will always be 4R each, the problem is your amp which I don't think is supposed to go down to 2R. It's the amp that stands to be damaged by this, not the cabs.

Yeah. We went from an 8-channel Yamaha board that only ran vocals into two tops (5 xlr cables), to the XR18 that has everything through it with tops and subs (16 xlr). Going digital and wireless gave us...more wires.

It can and to be honest it's cheap enough but there are simpler devices that can do the same job. What's the ethernet only device? If it's a PC then there are USB adaptors or PCI card adaptors. If it's a dumber device like say a media player then you might need something like the hap to fake a 'proper' ethernet connection.

You're sorted now, but for the future those really tasty Sire basses come in identical fretted and fretless.

Totally. I'd still use a router anyway so you've got seamless tablet or laptop use, whichever is best for the gig. That's why my router is wired in backwards, so that there's easy access to the ports when we use a laptop. I have a 50cm ethernet extension on my helix, I really should get one for the router. If you're buying a router just for this then I can't recommend the mikrotik stuff enough, one of my other hobbies is computing and those routers really are the business. There's rack mount options too. Thanks, I'm a real cabling nerd! You should see my other rack... One of the advantages of going digital was to have an easier setup, so I didn't see much point plugging everything in every gig. Unfortunately the rack ears don't have a hole in as standard, you can still see evidence of my cack-handed attempt at cutting the hole before I wimped out and asked our guitarist to do it as he's a machinist in his day job. There are now cad files online of xr18 rack ears with either holes or proper neutrik punch sockets if you can be bothered to find a 3d printer.

You can control it via the ethernet port, so if your tablet (unlikely) or laptop (very likely) has an ethernet port then you don't need the wireless. I have the XR18 and it's beautiful piece of kit. Digital mixers are as much of a revolution in gigs as class D amps or neodymium cabinets IME. They save time at soundcheck (as 90% of the levels and eq are the same, there's just tweaking for the room to do), they are smaller than most analogue mixers, not to mention they can replace about 50 rack units worth of outboard gear aside from the mixer itself. I use mine in two bands, each band is saved as a scene so when I get to a gig I just pick which band it is and everything is just as it was left last time. I have the mixer in a 4-space shallow rack with a media player and it's wired into a Mikrotik hap mini. I'd like a 5GHz router as 2.4GHz gets increasingly congested, but honestly I've never in hundreds of gigs had a dropout with the Miktotik and (perhaps crucially) I already had it sitting around the house. The mixer can also be a wireless router itself but then I did experience dropouts. An extra side benefit of the mixer having it's own wifi is that, when at home, you can switch the mixer using the front panel switch to being a wifi client and then it automatically connects to the home wifi. In one band we have a soundman. The drummer met her boyfriend at music college and he's damned fine soundman, so that's that. He tends to bring his laptop and then runs a very long ethernet cord from the router in the mixer rack (which is always beside the drums as that's where the most mics are) to where he sits on a table in the venue. Sometimes that's a proper FOH position, sometimes it's just a pub table where the audience are. The other band we don't have a soundman. I walk the room with the tablet during soundcheck (whilst sporadically playing bass, which isn't ideal). For changes after that during the set, the guitarist's gf has the app on her phone and she's only allowed to move faders if someone is far too loud or too quiet. Control: tablet control works very well. With both bands we set everything up in a room for the first time and sat with a laptop for ages as typing and controlling will always be easier on a laptop but we only did that once. You can do everything on a tablet and they're fine for quick tweaks at every gig. Having said that, if someone is static at a camera position then maybe laptop would be better? They have bigger batteries, bigger screens and ethernet ports compared to tablets. If you go for a tablet then any second hand Android tablet would do, and I do believe there's a third party (unofficial, no idea how good it is) on the Amazon store so you could use it on a £30 Kindle Fire. I have (because I already had) a Samsung Galaxy 10 that I use. The one thing to note is that, for the Behringer mixers, there's Android phone and tablet apps, and an ipad app, but crucially there's no iphone app. An example brand new XR18 setup like mine costs: XR18 £340 (they've come down SO MUCH, I paid £450 for mine second hand when they were £550+ new!) Kindle Fire £30 Rack £50 Mikrotik router £15 Power strip £20 So that's around £450 give or take for a full setup. I think if I was buying again I'd have the A&H Q-USB as it records proper multi track to a USB memory stick, but I'm in no hurry. Being a Behringer I keep expecting the XR18 to crap out on me, but it hasn't happened yet...

Nee botha hin. I don't know how big (for lack of a better word) your band is. If those venues are too large or too expensive then I can name about a million pubs and clubs that have live bands on.

Listening to your kind of music, I'd suggest The Cluny, Wylam Brewery (the brewery proper is in Wylam, the venue is Newcastle City Centre) or The Head of Steam. They host that kind of music and are 'proper' venues as opposed to 'pubs that have bands'. Slightly more left field, but By The River Brew Co will occasionally take bands, especially to brighten up a dull Monday evening. The same for The Stack.

I know at least the B3 has a global blend between clean and effected, I'd be surprised if they dropped that for the b3n (although they dropped the DI, so who knows...).

Buenos, You know when a company is just really, really good at a certain thing? Well, I never miss the chance to recommend Bright Onion Pedals to anyone who wants any kind of pedal that isn't a pedal. They do amazing work with buffers, loopers, AB switches, killswitches, amp footswitches, all of that kind of stuff. I've had a few of their products over the years, including two micro buffers and an ab switch. Anyway, I wanted the AB Pedal with Loop, Buffer and Tuner Mute as I thought it was about 90% of what I wanted in a pedalboard hub/brain/router thing. Don't get me wrong, it would've been great as was, but I would have preferred it slightly differently. Just before I ordered, I got in touch with James and asked if was possible to make some changes to the pedal. I wanted the switches rearranged, I wanted the tuner output always active, and I didn't see the point in turning the buffer off. Just personal preference stuff. After a few emails we came up with this. Please excuse my shocking photography. The bottom right switch controls the A/B input, then the signal goes to a buffer, then the top right switch controls an effects loop on the top. After that the signal is split, with both the output on the side and the one on the top being turned on or off by a switch each. I'm using this to have an always-on tuner, all I have to do is turn 'Output A' off and I can tune silently but obviously there's all sort of cool setups like dual amps or whatever. And the extra cost of my custom options? £0. That's right, James redesigned the labels, changed the internal layout and everything, all for free. So that's a grand total of £85 for a central pedalboard router that's hand made in England with customisable LED colours all round, all as standard. Please, I can't recommend BrightOnion enough, go buy something cool from them! (Standard disclaimers, not an employee, no financial gain, etc etc.)

I have to put one on for 'Come Together' by The Beatles as the open strings ring a lot at stage volume. They work well. I bought an off brand on ebay for a few pounds.

High pass filter at either 30 or 35Hz. I don't mean it's selectable I just mean I can't remember. Great little boxes, I had one for years.

Yes it occurs to me that I currently own 8. And I bet I'm not the only one on basschat with more than I'll ever need. They are stupidly convenient though, and very versatile. And, like it or not, amps are getting less and less relevant so I'm sure preamp use will increase.

I like the way they quote that the maximum power is "independent of limiters and driver protection circuits". I wonder why they feel the need? That looks like an epic head. For the price, size and weight of a decent DI box you can get a DI box with a free 3 band eq and >=200W amp. Thats a win.

Over the course of many years I've developed a fool proof system. What you do is: you turn all of the knobs until they sound good. To be slightly more specific, that looks like it's quite a lot of bass boost going on between the ODB and eq pedal. I'd be surprised if you really needed that much. Try starting with the EQ in a sad face and set the eq on the other two flat and tweak from there.

Thanks man, but any chance you could add this to the thread in my signature? Thanks! Do you have a thread?

Where are you? A local basschatter might be able to hook you up.

If you just want to record bass guitar well, use Helix native. It'll blow your mind on guitar too. If it has to be an actual amp then I'd be hunting down an Ampeg B100R, or, with more money, a B15.