Muzz

Mine was exactly that model, bought new in '75...I loved it at the time, but in retrospect it was bloody awful...traded it for a Satellite P-Copy, which was leagues better...

Yep, and Schroeder cabs (especially the angled-speaker ones) are heavy in the mids and low-mids: it was this cab I was thinking of specifically when I mentioned boosting mids onstage...not the prettiest-sounding cab soloed, but very useful in a band context...

At the cheapest end of the spectrum, I'd second the suggestion to have a play with your EQ in a band context - the mids is where you could have a look: a pleasantly scooped sound might be nice soloed at home, but might not work in a band context. Have a listen to some soloed bass tracks on YouTube to hear how different the big boys (Geddy Lee, tho he may not be your bag tone or music-wise, is a good example of this) sound without the band playing - it's always harsher on its own, but sits in the mix* much better. On the power/speakers front, I'm in a similar position, playing in a busy function/covers band, and a Rawk band. We've gone in-ears/DI with the busier band (less humping and shifting backline down fire escapes at 1:30am), but even in the Old School Rawk band, I use a 300w head and an efficient 2x12, and I can more than compete with 2 100w Marshalls/4x12 playing at being Guitar Heroes, and the Gorilla from the Cadburys advert on drums. My criteria for backline is the unmiked kit: if I can compete/be heard with the unmiked kit (maybe some kick in the PA), then I have enough backline - if the kit starts to go through the PA, then I will, too. Guitars/keyboards should level to this, I should never get into a contest with them, because nobody ever thinks to attenuate, it's always 'turn up', and we'll be too loud for most venues and certainly my ears. I have the t-shirt (tinnitus) from years of doing this wrong. HTH... 🙂 * It might be just me, but this 'cutting through the mix' thing always confuses me - it's supposed to be a band sound, the mix is supposed to be that: a mix. I digress...

He's doing something wrong...I've done hundreds of gigs with BF gear (maybe not all the same cab, but...) and I've never damaged one yet...

You do know you said that out loud, right? 😐

Put a John East pre into pretty much any bass, and you'll get +15 on a sweepable mid...that'll do it. Ping it through a GK MB and a Schroeder angled cab and you'll have the ability to sound as aggressively middy as you could need...

Just to interrupt the sadly-missed DA* lurve, I rarely watch the drummers hands - it's the feet for me... I'm lucky to have played with a fantastic drummer for a few years now, we rarely have to make eye contact, because I know what he's gonna do, and vice versa. When we have a dep for one night, it can be very hard work readjusting... * Can you imagine what he'd have to say about the current POTUS? 🙂

There was an awkward silence, and the party-goers paused their revelry to stare. It was only then I realised the heart in my mouth wasn't mine...

Well, the yurt was a double tipi (twopi?), boiling hot as the sun was still on it...still, we were done for half seven, and paid. To the important bit; turns out my FOH sound wasn't as bad as I'd feared - the Presonus/Mainstage had been picking up the slack - so in the ten minutes we had*, we flattened it, EQ'd for the room (tipi) and it sounded much better. We're having a rehearsal this week with it all when we should get a lot closer. Still no closer to trying out a single Art as backline, tho... * Hey, that's an age for a bass soundcheck, right?...

Overplaying drummers...it's usually deps trying to show how great they are. It's the same with any musicians who aren't actually as good as they think they are, Over-widdling guitards are almost par for the course, over-widdling bassists are deeply annoying, but overplaying drummers can wreck a song more thoroughly than all the above.

Never bought any Laney gear, but a good mate in a band whom we shared a rehearsal room with back in the day had a DP300 stack - 15 and 10s? I forget. What I do remember is he offered to leave his stack in the rooms and let me use it, so I didn't have to hump my Ampeg stack around (and some folk wonder why those of us of a certain vintage are weight-obsessed? 😃) . I used it for a couple of rehearsals, but it never delivered any heft*, so I ended up bringing my own stack...and an SVT stack was not humped around to twice-weekly rehearsals lightly (SWIDT?), so you can gauge how little I thought of the Laney. On the other hand, I was near enough to the front of a BCC gig to be able to hear Glenn Hughes' Laney (a Nexus Tube? It was all lit up and blue, anyway) a couple of years ago, and that was lovely. I believe he has roadies, tho... 😃 * And this was in the days before The Great Heft Hoohah...

Just as an off-topic aside, I replaced the four-position switch in my ABZ4 with a John East U-Retro preamp. Works a treat, but then I'm a big fan of East preamps... 🙂

This one could be useful for me - I'm struggling to find the Zoom +rhythm guitar patch on my B3 (or in fact any reference to it anywhere), is it only on the B3n? Advthanksance... 😁

Anyone who's getting excited about the n-bomb in Oliver's Army is taking offence completely out of context in an anti-war, anti-racist song.

Just a quick interim update, as I had a quiet house and a spare hour yesterday, too, so I had another run around the presets/setup, just in case I'd made a terrible mistake the other day. I dunno about anybody else, but there's a kind of inertia sets in after I've spent more than a couple of hours tweaking sounds - I feel I lose the ability to judge, and they start to converge the more I tweak...kinda like that thing where you try aftershaves, and after you've sniffed half a dozen, you get a bit overwhelmed by it all and can't remember what was good and what wasn't... I digress...anyway, point being after twenty minutes I realised I was listening to the presets and the dynamics of the bass, and I'd completely forgotten I was playing through a PA speaker: it sounded like a bass amp, reacted like a bass amp. It was a bass amp. Satdy's gig, I've just been informed, is in a yurt*, so it might not be the best place to judge FOH sounds for bass, but we'll see. * Is there any real need for this? We're having to go on at five, finish for seven (normally a Very Good Thing, but it's a loooonnng drive anyway, so it'll still be most of the day), presumably because of noise concerns. A yurt. I ask you...our drummer, who's Italian, asked me what a yurt was...the best I could do was 'It's like a tent, but more expensive...' 😕😏

Ummmm, 10 right now - I have three 'main' basses I play all the time, an acoustic bass, and half a dozen I've bought in fits of GAS, or for projects that haven't worked out, and that I really must get round to selling...

The closest we get to this is when/if we play Killing In The Name, the singist will introduce it with "It's a bit sweary, this one...brace yourselves..."

^ This. Wheels...they're the way forward... :0)

The Magellan 800 will do clean and some drive (dunno how much you're looking for) very nicely, and is switchable. That'd be my fave...

Oooo, Nordstrand...I have a single Bigman pickup in one of my Shukers, it's basically two Big Singles, and I have it three-position-switched for single coil (front coil), parallel and rear coil (series was just wayyyy too mental) - it's a great pickup in a MM shell. Now then...a nice light P with two of these and the switching/controls of that MTD (two 3-way switches, plus blend)? Bwahahahaaaaa.... 😀

That's the Bongo you're thinking of... 🙂 I've never played a bad (US) Stingray (I presume that's what the OP is thinking of when he says 'Musicman'), and the US Subs are pretty good, too. I love the look of them (especially the black and maple...oh, and that new Starry Night), and they play very very well, I just don't find myself using them once I own them. So I sell on, then a few months later, I find myself looking at them again... I've had (I think) five now, on exactly this basis...they're getting a bit too expensive to keep doing that, though... 😕🙂 The two Bongos I've played have been even better, if anything, but I'm terribly shallow - see my first comment above 😕 I'd like to try a Sabre or a Cutlass (the graphite Ray one, not the new one), but see 'getting a bit too expensive' above... 😕 Ooo, Steve's just reminded me - a SLO Special Ray, with the slimmer neck...that'd be nice... 😁

Yep, we do this already: as I say, my in-ears mix is (was) pretty good, I just wasn't aware the FOH bass sounded quite as bad as it apparently does. I know I wasn't happy with it, on those gigs when I've had to monitor from the FOH... As I say, I may have improved things considerably for my feed to the FOH, but then again I may have completely ballsed things up - that's the danger EQing in isolation... 😕🙂 I'll know more Satdy...

That's rather the point: my in-ears mix is pretty damn good, but is separate from the FOH mix, and I've never been totally happy with that, and now I'm seeing why...I'm sure I'll need to rework my in-ears mix (and so will the other guys) now I've modded my B3 presets, but that shouldn't be the end of the world, and we can do that as a band round at someone's house one evening. I'll have to re-EQ the 'real' bass rig (Walkabout and BF Super Twin) to cope with the B3 changes, too, but I'm happy doing that: I play far more with the in-ears and DI than anything else, so that should be right first and dictate changes elsewhere...

You've only got to look at the number of Jazz copies offered by pretty much every manufacturer, from small luthiers to huge companies to see how ubiquitous the design is. Sadly, it's one that's never appealed to me - tho I've owned a few, and for the record, one of the best was a Lakland DJ4 - I'd go so far as to say the number of Jazz lookylikeys out there outnumber all the other designs put together...which would indicate that far from there being anything wrong with them, for most bassists, there's everything right with them, there's just an overwhelming amount of choice...

Ok, so, after having a bit of a lightbulb moment whilst typing in another thread, I realised yesterday I have the band's PA under my stairs, and an empty house for a few hours, soooo.... I pulled one of the RCF Art 732s out, plugged my B3 into it, stuck it on the floor in 'wedge position', annnnndddd...crikey blimey... 😯 First off, it sounded godawful: no punch, no heft*, it just didn't sound much like a bass amp at all. My first thought was 'Gawd, is this what I sound like FOH?', and it wasn't a reassuring thought. I stomped through my B3 preset sounds - I have nine which cover all the different genres/songs we have in the function band; I've mentioned (at length) previously the range of stuff we do, so I won't bore anyone, but as a three piece my tones do need to be ballpark at the least, so...nine it is. None of them really went anywhere, so I did a bit of digging into the presets: I'd created these tones using in-ears, which is a completely different scenario to FOH. While I was (I'll be honest, a bit listlessly) trying to rescue the tones, I noticed I hadn't used any cab sims on any presets. I switched them in, and boom, suddenly the RCF began to sound like a bass rig. Next salute was to roll off the low bass, and after an hour or so of twiddling (see 'nine presets', above), I've got a very very good 'bass rig' sound from the RCF, and hopefully as a bonus, I've tightened up and improved my FOH sound, too. I know this is all in splendid isolation in my kitchen without the rest of the band and at, erm, kitchen volumes, but I've a gig Satdy, so I'll report back on the in-ears/FOH results then. It's just a shame I can't try an RCF735/745 in a backline scenario at the moment, that'd be the clincher for me (the wedge thing is a bonus, too). My other Rawk band (no in-ears, just attenuators and backline**) is on a bit of a hiatus at the moment, and it'd be interesting to see if the 12" 732 would cope with two Marshall half-stacks and that gorilla from the Cadburys/In The Air Tonight advert on drums... So, the TLDR bit: yep, you can make a single RCF sound like a 'real' bass rig...and I'm very interested to investigate further. Depending how Satdy's gig goes, I might even persuade the band to do a Technical Rehearsal (normally a once-in-blue-moon event) at a big rehearsal room with the full PA and tweak from there. We'll see. I shall report back... * Noooo, don't click away, it's not one of THOSE posts... 😉 ** Someone's got to try and keep rock'n roll alive if everyone else around here is busy killing it... 😁