Jack

You know now that you say that I'm wondering if ours are 905 instead... If one is a power alley naysayer then it doesn't matter whether the bass is coming from subs in the floor or mains on stands, you'll still get the same amount of comb filtering. Or won't. I'm on your side. Edit - Thanks btw. This band is struggling to find its feet a little, I'm not sure if I want to stay with them. Good to hear nice comments

Subs were chosen based on two factors, firstly everyone in my indie band had RCF stuff already (this was before I had my pair of QSCs) and secondly what was available for a good price within a reasonable distance? IIRC we were looking for a single 18 but when the pair of 15s came up it was a no brainer. Say what you like about power alley, the convenience of one-sub-and-one-top-per-side is great. I think we thought we'd need a pair if we were only going for 15s, but those boxes run on some seriously impressive physics and we nearly always just used one even in that indie band which was relatively loud. Now that they have carried over in to my new project we are actively making a point to be as quiet and as 'modern' as we can so I'm afraid I might not be the person to ask about the consensus. Not quiet in the absolute sense, but quiet enough to not deafen patrons trying to order drinks or annoy the tables of old folks at functions. More bands seem to be competing for fewer gigs (at least fewer good gigs) and at the same time you've got Johnny the Middle Aged Rock God blasting the windows out in a 30 seat pub with a Marshall full stack. Bad form. What I will say is that one of those subs will hang with a decent pair of 12 tops, and to me if you're doing more than that then there's almost certainly a provided/hired pa. We tend to run our 10" 910s at about 3 oclock on the gain control, and then the sub is at unity, so it's a little 'louder' than a pair of good 10s if you are listening with your eyes and looking at the gain controls. But that is the right balance when listening to recorded music. I imagine that we could probably swap a 15 for a pair of 12s if you have a specific reason to want a 12" sub. I would make an educated guess that a similar RCF 12" sub would likely not quite be enough for a lot of what we do, and we'd probably be bringing the pair more often. But I have admittedly never tried. Don't get overly hung up on speaker size though. My guitarist has a pair of Alto 18s from a previous band and the 15" RCFs easily outpace those.

I think we're slowly settling on that, although if I chock my 705ii in for a QSC sub like I think I might then we might go for that plus my K12.2 pair. We've just ended up with a motley collection of stuff that we're trying to get together. The guitarist in this band is also from my mostly defunct hard rock band, and he owns a pair of Alto subs, I have my QSCs and one of the RCF 705ii subs I bought when my indie rock band folded. The drummer bought the other one and he has a pair of 715s. The singer has a pair of 910s and a pair of Headrush 8" boxes, it's all over the place. We're trying to find the ideal combo of size/performance. Aren't we all? We're kind of settled on 2x 910 and 1x 705ii (most gigs), 2x 910 and 2x 705ii (big gigs), 2x 715 and 2x 705ii (really big gigs). Even though I was just saying that the 745s would have been way overkill for me as a bass rig for stage, to be honest a pair of them would be ideal for us for mains as it means we wouldn't need subs. There's no free lunch here. Here's a dodgy phone recording seeing as you asked, but sadly with the phone mic the whumph from the subwoofer is rather under represented and it's a little compressed. Probably useless to judge pa quality. For reference this was a medium/large function room, there's no volume on stage aside from a drum kit, and it was about 95-100dB at the chairs in the back half, more on the dancefloor. 2 RCF 910 as mains and 1 705ii as a sub. No wedges, no amps.

I posted this in the gig thread and didn't notice at the time, but the backdrop here is relevant to this thread. Nirvana, ACDC, Rolling Stones, Prince, etc, some of the biggest artists of all time. Who's that in the top right? 😁

Interesting regarding the 745s. When I downsized from my Barefaced rig I was tempted by the 745s as I kept worrying that any other pa solution wouldn't cut it as a bass amp. In the end I went with a pair of QSC k12.2s (for a variety of reasons over the RCF) and even they're overkill for my needs. I think now I'd buy the 10" model of whatever made the most sense, I've never needed that much stage volume. Funnily enough I now accidentally own a really nice RCF sub, so I'd have been better off if I'd bought the RCF tops as well in the first place. Digital mixers are where it's at man. My hard rock band uses an all Alto pa system (2x TS115 and 2x TS118a), and my pop punk band uses RCF (usually 2x 910a and 1x 705ii but we have options) and if you offered me the choice between the budget Alto speakers with my digital desk or the RCF system with an old school board I could 100% make the cheaper PA sound better.

Gig? Unimportant. Venue? Walls and roof, next question. Audience? Yeah there was an audience. Great, now that the preliminaries are out of the way let's talk about the really important things. I put LEDs on my board. Fiiiiiine, photo of everything else. Post setup, pre tidy.

Buenas. I am trying to install my preferred Dunlop Dual Design straplocks on a bass, but I have run into a snag. The Thumb seems to have threaded inserts inside the bass and the 'screws' that hold the strap buttons in are not screws at all but rather bolts. Unfortunately I can't reuse the same bolts as the heads are too big to sit inside the new strap buttons. Urgh. My first thought was just to go to a hardware store and try to find a bolt with the same thread that does fit through the strap button but it occurs to me that this may already be a solved problem. Has anyone on BC come across this problem and beaten it? Does anyone know the size and thread pattern of the threaded inserts? Can the inserts be removed? Easily? By an idiot? Just looking for any guidance from the Basschat hive mind please. Thanks! Insert Standard pins Old and new fittings Old bolt in new pin

All fine, but as ever it would be wise to remember that BC is not representative of the wider world. It's not even representative of most bass players. Me and my wife go to London most years a few weeks before Christmas. Shopping, drinking, that kind of thing. We sometimes catch a show and in 2017 we saw Metallica in about October time. A little early for us to go down but hey, Metallica. A year or two later we saw that the Muppets were doing a live orchestra show. I love the Muppets, big part of my childhood and an embarrassingly big part of my adult life, so my wife looked at getting tickets and she was shocked to see that they were more expensive than Metallica were. "For f@#@ick PUPPETS". I reminded her that, goths and rockers that we were, if you asked anyone we know personally, they would almost certainly take the Metallica tickets. But if you show the average person on the street a photo of Kermit and a photo of Hetfield and ask them to name the people in the pictures you'll get about 99/100 knowing Kermit and maybe 1 or 2 knowing Hetfield. This is a forum for bass nerds. We might prefer Claypool, Lee, Pastorious or Jackson. Most people don't have a clue who we're on about. Primus never had a Vegas residency.

The... erm... Art Tube MP preamp?

He's probably in the top ten most famous bassists on the planet, it's not surprising really. Lovely bass, needs a maple fingerboard.

Second number? First one is the series.

Yes sorry I saw that, I was commenting on the benefits of going from X12 to X32. Either way, shiny new gear is always fun.

The indie band that I was in until recently went from 712 (the drummer's) to 732 (which the guitarist bought for another project) and I was skeptical that it would make much difference but actually it was quite profound. (No, this test wasn't double blind, yes, my expectations and room will affect.) You might be surprised at the upgrade. I will say though that nothing has changed my gigging life more than getting a digital mixer 8 years ago. That's where to go first IME.

That's easy, what did your contract say? It's easy to do a pub gig on a handshake but when it gets into things like this I don't think we handle it very well as a breed. I think because for most of us this is our hobby and not our job. There's a local band who buys PAT test stickers from ebay and fills them out themselves.

But again, most things aren't auctions now anyway.

I got this today too, my first thought was that it was great but then I can't really remember the last time I sold anything on eBay anyway. It's already just another AliExpress.

We played a charity night for a good cause I'm Cullercoats on Friday. Sarah's Stars are a little charity that help people with terminal diagnoses. The singer and I are both NHS so we were happy to help. It was nice to have another good gig under our belts, this project has been struggling to find its feet since we started. Our guitarist's son recorded the medley of songs at the end of our set and edited it into a nice little video, shame there's no bass on the phone mic but rest assured it was sufficiently pumping in the room. Hey, I'm the soundman. Bass all round. Sorry about the song choice, the medley is specifically for songs that were kind of feel obliged to play as a party band, but that we don't want to do full renditions of.

Can you explain the problem with this please? Not the physics, that bit I get, but the install? When one is installing a large system such as this do you tie all the power together first and then plug the system in? I just can't see the issue if one side is on one and the other on the other.

I had an R5 2x10 combo as a stage amp for a few years, and this same R1 practice amp for many many years, Laney stuff does its job exceptionally well.

Yeah but the problem is I'm always drunk. I know my locals (not that I'm a regular) and call them direct. But after a gig or when I'm somewhere that isn't my house then Just Eat is easier.

Pretty much this. Stomp in a pinch, lt or full fat to do it properly.