Phil Starr

My wife is going to love you

From a theoretical point of view a vertical 4x10 makes much more sense than one where the drivers are side by side in pairs. There are good reasons for this, the speakers are raised to something approaching the height of your ears so you will hear yourself playing more clearly. The second is a bit more technical; speakers are more like a torch beam than a floodlight in terms of how they radiate the midrange and higher frequencies. Off axis the sound from the side of any speaker furthest from you arrives a split second later than the part of the cone nearest you. This leads to cancellation if the difference in the distance travelled is a fraction of the wavelength. In practice you lose most of the mids and have a very lumpy frequency response off axis. Putting speakers side by side halves the frequency at which the response falls off. This is all well known and so the builder of this cab has done something about it. A line of speakers like this has a broad flat radiation pattern which will be better for you and for the audience and other band members. The only thing I would comment on is that it would have been better to put the horn at the top of the cab and the tilted speaker won't make that much difference. Thje port looks a bit small for a 4x10. In the end you need to treat it like any other cab, take your own bass and amp along and have a listen to the cab. You will be getting a lot for your money and if it sounds great it sounds great. It won't be identical to the original cab but probably like a Trace Elliott but a bit brighter and cleaner. Paint the cab up with a couple of coats of Tuff Cab and find a grille and it'll be quite a cool looking cab

I hadn't seen that. Damn you, I feel a hi-fi design coming on. My current speakers; based on a 5" Focal driver and the Scan-Speak 2008 needs some attention to the crossover but that looks like a better mid/bass driver. If I hadn't seen this I wouldn't now have the itch 🤣

I'm loving the thread de-rail. Back in the 70's I built a couple of cabs with the 15" Monitor Golds for a friend, at the time my memory is that they sounded as good as anything I'd ever heard. They also did duty as disco speakers so they would go quite loud by the standards of the day. Just the bare drivers with the crossovers cost several months wages though. I also used some of the Fane Crescendos to build some two way speakers for a friend who was a sound engineer who worked on film sets. He wanted something to provide music for the dancers at Shepperton and Elstree studios, I pictured a good commission for something huge until he told me he needed a pair to fit in the boot of his Ford Cortina!. I built him some two way cabs with 12"Ccrescendos not unlike any common or garden modern PA speaker. Forgot all about them and went off to train as a teacher. I'd just started working at my first school and he came back with an order for 10 more pairs as apparently all the other freelance sound engineers wanted their own. One of those sliding doors had been crossed though and I'd given up my workshop, teaching was my life and speakers were just a hobby. I wonder what would have happened if he'd come back to me a couple of months earlier.

I'll be there, I'll certainly bring along all the various BassChat designed cabs and I'm happy to run a shootout of some sort if that is wanted.

Oh I asked for help on using reverb and delay when I was setting up my mixes and got this advice from @VTypeV4 It's now my standard set up for live vocals with the sends and returns adjusted to suit, basically quite a lot applied to my own bvs where I'm just filling out the sound and a bit less to the lead vocals. I find the delay particularly helpful for the bv's. "My personal starting points are usually a short-ish plate or hall reverb of around 1.2s - give or take - and then in addition to this a short delay with 180ms (or thereabouts) time with around 30% feedback. These are approximate settings and won't work on everything all the time (plus different fx units have their own sound too) so you'll no doubt find some vocals will lean towards sounding better with less of one / more of the other and vice-versa - adjust to suit the sends / returns to suit. Good luck. 😃" Here's the original thread

The general principle with live sound is to make sure the sound going to your mixer output is as good as you can get it and then send that sound out at every gig, then the only thing you would have to do at each gig is to set the overall level and use the graphic eq on the output to compensate for the room acoustics. Your approach is textbook so not only can you set all the levels eq and fx at rehearsals you should aim to do this. There are a couple of assumptions here. The first is that everything is miked up and that any backline is for on-stage monitoring only and the audience are hearing only the FOH though the PA. If, say, a guitarist is setting their own levels with their AC30 cranked to 'give the right tone' then you have that to compensate for. Backline bass is even more problematic as bass is very susceptible to room and stage acoustics. The second assumption is that you are mixing from on stage and don't have a sound engineer sitting permanently at the desk. You can't tweak FOH from on stage so set and forget is going to beat fiddling every time. If you have a jockey riding the board then they can potentially tweak for all sorts of reasons possibly from song to song if they really know your set. Monitors are slightly more tricky, space considerations come into play and you may not be able to measure out their placement exactly as you want and a boomy space may lead you to want to adjust the eq but in principle I'd aim for consistency set to set. Of course you can hear the monitors and poor monitoring won't affect the audience so you can fiddle with more effect, even so I will set and forget for most gigs. The sooner you get to using in-ears the sooner you lose this problem. One word of caution, I never use compression on any of the mics, that will guarantee you less gain before feedback at most venues. If you are using pre-sets on mic channels you might want to turn any compression off. You'll also want to be aware of any boosts to frequency you have applied to the vocal mics in particular as stage acoustics will vary venue to venue. If one mic in particular feeds back check it isn't at the frequency you boosted in the rehearsal room. so basically yes to both questions and when you get that perfect sound at a gig make sure you save it

Hi David, I'm sorry to hear about your dad. I hadn't crossed paths with him but he sounds like a generous spirit as are so many on BassChat. I would strongle advise you to go onto theBassChat marketplace. There's a whole community of folks there buying and selling treasured gear where you will get good advice and a fair price for almost everything bass and music related. You'll need to take up an annual subscription to sell there but you'll know everything you sell there will be going to a good home and will be treasured or at leased used to make music. You can also search for items and see what they have sold for in the past which will give you a really good idea of what they are actually fetching. There is even a 'what's it worth' sub forum where you can ask other members to price up what you have to sell https://www.basschat.co.uk/forum/121-wotzit-werth/ It might also be worth putting something about your father passing away on the General Discussion thread as people who know him might miss your post in the introductions https://www.basschat.co.uk/forum/13-general-discussion/ Its not uncommon for 'In Memorium' posts to be put up there and other friends of your father might see that and offer help. Good luck with everything and I hope one day you will find time to learn to play something on that Rickenbacker.

I'll have a go though I've just been reading Colloms (High Performance Loudspeakers ISBN 047197091) and I have to admit this will be a simplification on what I'm reading.. The conventional theory around loudspeakers treats them as being rigid pistons The original transducers used in the classic experiments on beaming were done with very small metal discs mounted on the end of long tubes which avoided diffraction further complicating the dispersal patterns. The irregular dispersion of real world speakers at high frequencies is to a large extent due to the fact that loudspeaker cones are very far from rigid. To a large extent means that there are many other factors at play which cause frequency irregularities. but I'll keep it simple and stick to the cone.. So speaker cones are flexible, at low frequencies and power they are stiff enough to move as a whole and approximate to a piston. At high frequencies and powers they will start to flexand the outer parts of the cone will lag behind the movement of the coil, some parrts of the cone may be moving backwards as other parts are moving forwards and the phase difference will cause cancellation . It's fairly easy to see this with a strobe light with concenrtic rings in the cone moving independently of each other even as the cone itself moves backwards and forwards. You can also find laser interferometry pics of this which illustrate the process.This means just calculating of axis cancellation on the basis of diameter will not describe the off axis frequency cancellation by itself. This is often described as cone break up and you'll see this in the frequency response curves of just about any cone speaker. You can see this below in a typical 12" speaker The response in red is fairly flat up to just above 1kHz and then you can see a ripple in the reponse due to the cone break up and the treble response shows a rising response between 1and 4kHz because the centre of the cone is moving faster than the outside as it becomes decoupled from the heavier outside parts of the cone. The ripple is because the cone has resonances of its own. You can also see the off axis response in Blue is falling off initially due to the off axis cancellation but then due to the resonances as the cone flexes. Designers know about all of this and many instrument speakers take advantage of that midrange peak in the kHz area. Almost any Celestion or Eminence guitar speaker will show hage peakes in this area. So will something like the Eminence used in the Barefaced one10 or indeed the Ampeg 10" speakers. A cone can be made more or less rigid by changing the fibres in the pulp, by changing the shape of the cone, introducing ridges changing the cone surround or by using a metal cone or a plastic or even a composite . Adding a hard dust cover or a whizzer cone will also allow you to adjust the treble output of the speaker and another technique is to introduce a damping material into the cone or even treating the cone after it is formed. It's worth noting that it isn't unusual to have considerable off axis output from 15" speakers and it is possible for them to exceed the off axis response from a 10" speaker. The simple explanation is that a small cone is going to be more rigid than a bigger cone made of the same material.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Trump's policies are likely to get very far in practice. We all know how powerful the lobbyists are in the US and I can only imagine how the likes Of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing and the rest of the military industrial complex are responding to this, hit by tariffs and ultimately losing sales as America becomes an unreliable military ally. My thoughts on this were to ask myself could the USA survive an isolationist/protectionist stance. In practice there are far too many powerful forces that would become losers however well thought out the restructuring might be. I'm now asking myself how Europe would look in a world of extensive trade wars. For me the hardest thing to calculate is where global capital might find a home if Trump de-stabilises the dollar as a result of his mismanagement. He does have a point that trade with China has resulted in a huge transfer of wealth from the USA to it's increasingly aggressive rival.What would be the effects of an all out trade war on currencies, investment decisions and so on. We can see disinvestment in UK manufacturing due to us being outside the trade barriers, how would that play if the USA were the other side of much higher trade barriers and even more uncertainty. Could the US face a Truss moment? Do I buy a lettuce now?

Given some previous posts I suspect your knowledge of economics is more than passable. Probably a lot better than the current administration in the USA I suspect the current tariffs are more about bullying than economics. Hit your trading partners hard and they will scurry around trying to appease you, figuring the cost will be less than trying to fight with an irrational and unpredictable but powerful neighbour. However the long term theory is quite interesting, I'm not convinced it is sound for most advanced economies but it does have plus points. In many ways the model of this sort of economy is Japan. I have a family connection in that my son leved there for 10 years and it is a fascinating place. A kind of science fiction story set in a planet that has split from out universe decades ago and has drifted from ours in ways which are perfectly reasonable but different frm the assumptions we take for granted. One of these is that in many ways Japan is a planned economy and deliberately protects itself from much of the rest of the world. Japan has a lot of tariffs and the state invests heavily into what it sees as strategic industies, recent trade agreements have eaten into this but one example is the tariff on rice. Rice has an almost spiritual significance in Japan and the Japanese believe their home grown rice is the best in the world, however thay are a long way from being self sufficient in agricultural production. To protect the farmers and to keep rice prices high they have an 800% tariff on rice imports, That's not a miss-pring 800% and I checked the figure yestrday. 800% on American rice imports brings the price up to match the cost of Japanese grown rice. Similar tariffs if less extreme protect the home market in many other goods and you see very few goods not produced in Japan in the shops or in peoples houses. There is very little of the cheap Chinese c**p we find in most of our shops. Taxes are strikingly low in Japan and employment is high and their relationship with the consumer society is very different from ours, the provision of services from the state puts us to shame most of the time. The trick of good state provision with low taxes is to insulate themselves from the rest of the world and tariffs are a part of that. The exchange rate is really volatile which is a downside. When my son first went there the exchange rate was 107Y to the £. currently it is 192Y so the cost of UK goods will have nearly doubled. This of course is of no consequence to the Japanese as they only buy things produced within the Yen economy. The downside is you need to be self sufficient as far as possible as any imported goods/raw materials are extraordinarily expensive. The USA is in a great position to become a closed economy, it is a huge country with extensive raw material wealth (including extensive rare earths btw) the realtively low population density means it can easily feed itself and the huge geographical are it covers means it can grow almost anything somewher in the country. It also has protected many strategic industries and the high levels of investment in tech companies means it is almost impregnable there too. My belief is that the US could erect trade barriers with a lot of short term issues for it's population but whch could allow it to maintain a very high standard of living. They gain a lot of benefit from the dollars position as the leading reserve currency but changes in that position would largely only affect the wealthy. The US is in a better position than almost anywhere else in the world to run an isolationist economy. I don't think they need international trade in the way that Europe or China do. I stress that this is strictly a thought experiment on my part, a break from worrying about speaker designs and the intricacies of PA systems. I honestly don't think in a million years the White House incumbency is thinking this way but I didn't think the Russians would invade Ukraine so what do I know

This is the kind of conversation you should be having. It avoids tears later on. It's fine for a singer to say they don't want to be in a blues band. I played briefly for a mate's band Strange Brew, . He is a great singer (sang for Jools Holland Big band) and front person and a good friend and the guitarist was pretty good too but it was a bit of an Eric Clapton tribute band and frankly not what I wanted to spend my evenings playing. I played along with them whilst they got their set together with the promise I'd drop out when they found another bassist which they fairly quickly did. It was fun but just not music I wanted to gig every other weekend. Equally I love a good blues band and there is absolutely no reason for you to change if it's what you know and love, you just need to find a fellow traveller. That's kind of what I mean about honesty in your advertising, maybe clarity would be a better word. Find a way of clearly describing your music and make sure you get a set list to potential singers early on and it saves time auditioning people who are looking for something different. You know your set will have to change with a new singer. You'll want to do the songs they perform really well and in turn they might want to lose a few songs that don't suit their voice but within your genre there are probably hundreds of great songs so you'd be looking to evolve your set not just trash it There's no harm in looking at a range of people to try and find your best match. There's also no harm in them looking at you and maybe mutually agreeint the fit isn't quite right. I hope you find your singer, good luck.

When I started on BassChat i used to obsess about all the technical things but over the years I've realised music making is far more about the human elements. Recruitment is about being positive of course but also about being honest. Recruiting someone who is 'wrong' for the band can be hugely disruptive and can easily loose you six months of hard won progress, equally if the band is 'wrong' for the recruitee then you are wasting their time as well as your own. First of all band dynamics; who is in charge? How do you make decisions? I've tended to be the band leader in most of my bands, a not quite democracy where I've done all the physical things like getting gigs, providing PA, organising rehearsals and puling a set list together but trying to make sure everyone has a say. One of my happiest experiences though was with a band led by a married couple where I was just the bass player. Turned up played whatever I was asked and got paid. I think a lot of friction I've seen in bands is down to misleading expectations starting with the recruitment process. That also extends to genre/repertoire If you are an originals band then you need to be sure your new singer is happy to sing what you have written. If your music is mainly Ska you probably don't want to have a singer whose taste is for power ballads. Most of my bands have been covers bands, usually with 10 or so gigs booked at any given time. Any recruit would be expected to get on top of the set within a month so we don't have to cancel gigs and let our regular venues down. That usually means that the incoming musician will have to already know a good proportion of our set or enough of the cover band standards to allow us to keep gigging. We wouldn't be looking to comletely overhaul our set to make way for another musician however good they might be. You need to get together with the rest of the band and decide exactly what you are looking for, what is essential, what is desirable and what is just nice to have. A new singer/front person is the most disruptive thing to recruit. You can't ask a singer to re-tune to drop D or capo them to convert a Tenor into a Soprano They are limited to songs that suit their voice and frankly songs they are happy to sell to an audience. What do you have to sell? If you've been together for a while you are probably quite tight musically and have good relationships within the band. That's the band we all want to join. If you have gigs booked or regular venues then that is a real selling point. There are thousands of start up bands that are going to do 'great things' but a band that played everyother week last year and intends doing the same next year is a much better bet. Is your PA sorted? Do you have rehearsal spaces organised? There is no point in lying, just be clear what you want and what you are prepared to compromise over. Be prepared to walk away from recruiting if you have reservations but be aware that you will have to make compromises too. Check the new persons ego by all means but check your own too. Remember the auditions are just the first date and a blind date too, you don't have to go all the way if it doesn't feel right

Early days, how many bands are still going two years after forming/re-forming. I'd be running with both, giviing them my all and enjoying the ride, it'll be a long ride before you get overwhelmed. If both bands are popular and successful well there are worse problems for a musician.

A snapping sound doesn't sound good, it may be the speaker coil hitting the back of the magnet assembly If you hear this you need to back off the gain/volume and maybe roll off the bass. If this is indeed what is happening then your speaker will break fairly soon. Speaker watts and amplifier watts are measured differently and I doubt that many if any 10" speakers could 'handle' 300W at low frequencies without distorting or hammering the coil to destruction on the back plate of the magnet. More watts aren't an option with this speaker I suspect. Getting a second matching 10" speaker should give you nearly 6db extra sound and help a lot. With DB you may get feedback issues though. Where is your speaker? if it is on the ground then it will be pointing at your knees or your calves and not your ears. Raising the speaker or tilting it to point at your ears with a stand will improve matters a lot. Turning the bass down a little and turning the midrange up will also help. Turning the bass down will decrease the excursion your speaker is failing to cope with and the midrange is what we need to hear any detail in the bass above the rest of the instruments. Pointing your cab at your ears and re=eq'ing will help you in the short term and give you time to think about next steps. Good Luck