Phil Starr

7 hours ago, Ramirez said:

I'd rather have consistency from gig to gig

this is the other driver for me to use in ears, Floor monitors are so depenedant upon the acoustics in the pokey little 'stage areas' we often play in. As is our bass sound whe using back line. IEM's give you pretty consistendt monitoring.

56 minutes ago, gazhowe said:

Does anyone else EQ their bass differently for FOH and their IEM's?  if so, are there any tips you could share please?

Very much so. The problem stems from a few things but mainly the bass from the PA. However good your in ears are they are probably only going to reduce the ambient sound by 20db give or take 5db, maybe a little better if you have customs. the trouble is that it is often less than this for bass frequencies. The PA meanwhile is omnidirectional in the sub bass frequencies of 40-160Hz  so if you are 2m behind the PA you hear s much bass as if you were standing 2m directly in front of the PA. If your PA is banging out 110db of bass and your IEMs are trying to feed you 90db of your monitor signal then with 20db of attenuation you already have 90db of bass from your PA leaking past the IEMs and you need no bass at all. (very rough figures here but you get the point.

On top of this most venues have you hard up in the corner of the room and in spaces prone to low frequency resonances.

So, I now HPF the bass at 80 Hz  and then also shelve it down a minimum of 6db below 200Hz for my in ear channel. I also boost the mids a little and roll off the highs at 3kHz. If anything in most venues that still leaves me with a bass heavy sound so I'm considering raising the HPF even higher. I'm not claiming any expertise here though so hopefully others will come in with suggestions. The same thing is true if you are using floor monitors so maybe we should run a separeate thread.

For me the misconception is that in-ears are about replacing back line. It's actually primarily about managing the noise levels on stage down to levels where you can hear clearly without damaging your hearing. Mine is really damaged because this wasn't an option when I started out and I worked away at in-ears to preserve as much of my hearing as I have left.

The secondary benefit was a better mix with more me, that wasn't an issue with bass but it's let me do more backing vocals. Removing just some of the sound from the on-stage mix then helps the rest of the band especially the singers. The final benefit was realising I can leave floor monitors and backline behind. As you say space becomes an issue so anything less on stage helps at many venues.

I still own a bass amp and speakers and they go along to any gig where someone isn't using in-ears. You can have both but it becomes a choice.

9 hours ago, Lozz196 said:

I’d love to try IEMs out. Whilst I love the old school feel of big cabs etc I can’t say it’s my preference when in comparison to something I’ve never tried.

If you've ever been into a recording studio you probably have tried it, sort of. The drummer may have been in a booth of course but when recording almost all engineers are going to want a clean recording of each instrument/voice as a starting point so it tends to be headphones all round. If the engineer is good and takes time over your monitoring then that's the sound you'll get on stage. In-ears are just headphones, but little.

If you want to try it without hassling the rest of the band you can simply try some cheap in ears like the KZ ZS10's plugged into a recorder like the Zoom H1 Using the recorder just as a convenient mic and headphone amp. If you choose the tips for the headphones carefully they should block out most of the band sound (like ear plugs) and then you can feed in the normal band sound but at lower levels. You'll instantly find everything is a lot clearer just because you have reduced the volume.

11 hours ago, JPJ said:

For me, I need to work on my own IEM mix and as isolation, though much improved, is still an issue, custom moulded IEM’s are definitely in my future

Me too, isolation in terms of shutting out the sound is everything. Imagine using your custom ACS and then adding in the sound you get in a studio. I’m working on improving the (sound) isolation having gone all the way to the triple flange tips that are used in my most effective ear plugs.

The psychological isolation from the audience and the rest of the band I’m getting used to. I wonder if that’s partly due to comfort? If the in ears are really tight or so loose that they need constant attention I find it quite distracting. The same if they are uncomfortable. 
 

You get used to anything though, you do gradually forget they are there and the proportion of gigs where you feel engaged in the event has increased for me because the sound I’m hearing is no longer dependent upon the venue acoustics. It’s always good leaving one less variable to worry about.

I’ve been really interested in everything people are saying in the various IEM threads that are currently running. It’s become a really polarised debate with maybe a bit more heat than light. I think that there is some confusion too. People are confusing using in ears with the demise of the bass amp and then moving on to confuse that with silent stages. They are three different things.and there is a fourth thing too, putting everything through the PA and giving the audience a fully mixed sound. You can do all four of these things or most combinations of any of them. Each change will help solve some problems and maybe create others but the basic issues are simple: how do you give the audience the best sound and how do the musicians get to hear what they need to play well? In ears ae only about the musicians. 
 

So here’s the problem I experienced when I started playing. You are on stage with a drummer and as bassist you are already struggling to hear anything else, so you turn up your bass, the guitarist starts and has to hear themselves above the drums too, the poor old singer doesn’t have a volume control so has to have a floor monitor or two. The drums are producing 100db on average at your ears and peaks in excess of 120db. Meanwhile you are all going harder as the adrenaline rush kicks in, each of you edges up the volume just to pick yourselves out of the mix and you have a volume war.You also have permanent hearing loss. ironically the volume means your ears do their best to reduce the. damage by filtering out as much as they can and you can hear less than if you had all turned down.
 

If you’ve any sense then you will turn down to let the others hear and/or start to use musicians ear plugs. You still have the problem of picking yourself out of the mix, no-one can really have more-me and it is still too loud without ear protection.

So, in ears are there to protect your ears and then give you the sound you want; the sound of the band with a little more-me. They can only do this if they cut out sound as well as the best ear plugs. If you’ve had a bad experience of in ears my guess is that’s down to a poor seal. I’ve even seen people using them in one ear. Damaging levels in the unprotected ear and even louder into the other ear. Why would you do that? Why would you do as one of my guitarists does and pull his in ears out so he can hear his amp and then add in extra volume from the phones so that the overall sound is even louder than before?

On 04/05/2024 at 08:03, Babyboomer said:

I'm in a three piece covers band. We don't use in ears, but two of us are interested.

The problem that we can forsee is that without anyone FOH to check and adjust the PA, it could be very difficult to know what the audience are hearing.

 

The trick is to take your time to set up a good sound at a technical rehearsal. Once you know you have a good mix then that becomes what you take to every gig so it is then just about adjusting the volume to suit the venue. You might want to adjust the eq to match the room but something you’ve taken hours doing is going to be much better than making adjustments from behind your PA which you can’t hear.

It takes a bit of discipline not to change your instrument volumes gig to gig and I still go out front with a radio connection to have a listen but unless someone competent is sitting out front mixing it’s the best you can do. 

As above but with one extra hazard and that is that not all pure sine wave inverters are actually producing pure sine waves. The power supply in your amp may not be compatible with the sine wave they provide. There’s a long thread about this on Bass Chat somewhere.

On 06/05/2024 at 12:48, Woodinblack said:

Certainly interested here - I have just gone cab-less with my new 2x Evo 8 setup, and at the moment I am not in love with the sound, although people seem to think it sounds fine. It could be that I am just a bit separated from the sound. 

I found rather than going straight from my board (which I am not setup for as my dwarf is still away being fixed), the better sound I got was taking my TC450 as a preamp and boosting my mids in the mixer. But I have only done this for one gig and two practices so far so I am nowhere near what the actual solution is yet. 

I think most people would want some pre-shaping before taking their bass to the PA, whether that is through an emulator or a bass pre amp of some sort.

If it helps I have a 'basic sound' that I use across all three bands I play with. I set it up at home through good quality headphones and then through some simple studio monitors and then I take that to put through the PA and floor monitors if I use them. I then adjust the eq on the bass channel to get that sound through FOH and then eq the floor monitors further to get the same sound on stage. In practice I've saved the FOH settings after a couple of successful gigs and don't touch that. (if the saved eq sounds wrong (usually too bassy) that's down to room acoustics/resonances and that's adjusted globally on the graphic) Floor monitors start with a saved sound but usually get extra eq. at the sound check as the exact setting will depend upon how much bass is spilling back from the PA. If I'm using in-ears then no further eq is needed mostly. In the band where my guitarist mixes he takes the same feed and that is what he splits.

The 'basic sound' I've set up via a Zoom B1ON. I have a very similar sound set up on a Sansamp if ever I play with people who won't/don't use in-ears and I have to split the signal to go through backline which is FRFR (an LFSys Monaco with either a Warwick Gnome or a Bugera Veyron set flat)

I'm not sure enough of the details yet to answer any questions accurately. It doesn't look to be a 'crossover' set up though, more of a 'stereo' signal. I caught a quick look at the graphic of the 'high bass' looked like very like the signal I send through my floor monitors whan I'm mixing heavily filtered bass, some mid boost and the top end rolled off. He's using a Behringer XR18 so plenty of options on the eq.

In the past my favourite set up was to go through the PA and use a Hartke Kickback 10 as my monitor. The moment you put gig level bass through the PA the sound from FOH becomes an issue on stage. Mids and top are radiated 90x60deg (depending upon your PA horn) but bass at FOH is radiated 360 deg and swamps the stage. The last thing  you want is more bass on stage so you have to cut it almost completely from your monitors. The Hartke sounded great at middle volumes but had nowhere near enough power handling for bass so I turned the bass down to minimum and being a kickbback it directed all the mids and tops I needed straight to my ears. It sounded so tinny without the PA but great mid gig.

I know many bassists in the past have used a stereo set up and that goes right back to the dawn of amplified bass. A common trick was to use a guitar amp and speaker for a mid/top sound and something suitably massive for the bass sound.

Size matters, but for your speaker cables not a lot.

Cable size affects two things, how hot the cable gets and the resistance of the cable. The resistance of a speaker cable only becomes important if you have long runs of cable as you might in a large public address system in a stadium or potentially in a very large PA system at a festival. For an instrument lead of less than a couple of metres you don't need to worry about resistance.

Heating depends upon the current flowing through the wire. Supposing you had 400W going through a 4ohm speaker it would be 10Amps (it's the square root of the power divided by the impedance) That's a continuous signal and in music you won't be pushing anything like that continuously and even allowing for your signal being 25% of full power is a long way over what will happen in real life. So a speaker cable only needs to carry 2-3amps and will still have a significant safety margin.

A 1mm cable carries around 20A in free air, 1.5mm-25A, 2.5mm-37A and 4mm-50A so even a 1mm cable is overkill for your speaker lead. If ever you look at a speaker coil you can see that the wires are thinner than some people's hair and they carry the current too so the chance of your cable not coping is vanishingly small. If I was running a PA speaker 100m from the amp I'd use thicker cable. The resistance of a 2m long 1mm cable is 0.034ohms so negligable.

So I've discovered a new trick in squeezing a bit more out of the bass coming through the PA. I'll share that later in the thread as I'm still getting to grips with it and don't want to put out any misinformation. However we've a thread here about how to treat vocals in the PA and we've had some discussion of using HPF to improve the FOH sound and I thought it would be interesting to see how other people approach putting their bass through the PA. If that helps I'll maybe start something on guitar and drums.

I'm kind of making some assumptions here. This is strictly about a pub band playing a fair few venues in a year and one of the band members is mixing. You've less than an hour to set up. A 5min soundcheck is a luxury and there is little chance of anyone getting out front to listen once the gig starts in earnest. We are lucky enough here to have people who run PA for a living and I'm really interested in what they say but I'm also looking at things we could all do with a fairly basic mixer.

Oh, the trick: no details as I don't fully know what has been done yet. Our new guitarist is responsible. Basically he is duplicating the bass channel in the mixer and applying different eq to each channel. One channel is labelled 'Low Bass' and the other 'High Bass' I only noticed this when they appeared in my monitor mix. Turning up the high bass increases the articulacy of the sound and the 'Low Bass' lets you have a deep bass presence without overwhelming the rest of the mix. You'll have to wait for details. In the mean time the question is; what have you tried successfully and what problems have you found?

On 03/05/2024 at 12:57, stewblack said:

I play a regular gig where the sound engineer changes and sometimes we get one less capable than the others.

In order to make sure I can actually hear what I play I experimented last night with using a bass combo titled back in front of me, like a monitor. I figured I could increase my volume without affecting the front of house too much.

It was fine. Mostly. The only issue was if I bent forward it howled. 

Now here's my question. Would a 'proper' monitor work better? 

 

I'm really surprised at this. Feedback needs the signal fed back and amplified and the idea that acoustic feedback through the strings was louder than when you picked them is really unusual. It's emphasised by any resonances however so maybe your change of position created a new resonance and you won't get that on other stages in other venues. Odd, but it probably won't happen again.

The only other thing that I can think of is that use of high levels of compression can cause feedback. Guitarists use it for sustain which is just a kind of controlled feedback.

To answer your question a 'proper' monitor will usually have a flatter, smoother response with fewer peaks in response which will increase the chance of setting off resonance. Of course if you re-eq it to make it sound like your bass amp you will be restoring that response so that it is no longer flat. The best monitors also filter out extreme bass and treble to avoid feedback at frequencies that aren't needed for monitoring. Modern DSP PA speakers often have a 'monitor' setting to do just this.

Let us know if it happens again at other venues.

On 29/04/2024 at 22:26, HP BASS said:

Want something pretty small and light if possible. Longevity/reliability is also a high priority.. I don't want something with a lot of upkeep or that can't be fixed if needs be.

Your £1,000 is a generous budget. I'd go along with the general advice that if you want reliability with after sales then Ashdown is the first stop for an amp. so what do you do for a speaker?

Small and light and loud is an issue. If you want all three then one more word comes to mind... expensive. I don't think a single Barefaced One 10 is going to cut it if you are expecting to play alongside a full acoustic drumkit. You might want to look at the LFSys speakers, particularly the Monza if size is the issue https://www.lfsys.co.uk/bassguitarproducts  They use PA quality drivers with larger than usual voice coils in the bass drivers and better horns and crossovers than anything else on the market. Their designer worked for Kef and Yamaha so knows a bit about crossovers. He's also a Basschatter

@stevie is a friend and I might be biased but I use the 12" Monaco and it's my forever speaker. Loud enough to do anything I'll ever need, the best sounding speaker on the market if you want a clean sound and light enough to be easily carried by a 70 year old bassist. You can see reviews by other members who have bought his cabs on Bass Chat.

I'm sure I've seen someone here who bought the 2x8. Your problem with something like the Gnome is that with 130W into 8 ohms you need a decently sensitive speaker and small speakers tendto be lower efficiency than larger ones. Unless you are looking at the more 'grown up' Gnomes with a bit more power.

It all depends upon your use though. My Gnome gives me enough to act as a monitor with a fairly ordinary 1x10 but we have eDrums so on-stage sound levels aren't too bad.

Have you already bought the Gnome or is it something you are still considering?

Hi Marty. I don’t think you need to worry too much. Most active speakers have plenty of fail safe protection built in. With cheap brands it might be possible to drive them too hard but even that is unlikely. If you are selling cheap the last thing you want are any returns.

just to explain a little, gain is gain. If you start with the mic it goes into a mixer with an input gain control then a volume slider, then the mixer’s output master volume and two more volume controls on your speaker. Just for simplicity’s sake imagine that each volume control gives you a gain of x10. Turn them all up full and the total gain is 100,000. Turn any one right down and the gain is zero. You could turn the two volumes on the speaker right up and the master on the mixer right down and everything would work safely. That wouldn’t necessarily be the best way to set thing up though.

Gain structure used to be really important when electronic gear was noisy and gain was often lacking back in the day. It’s worth googling. With modern gear you can get away with more. You want controls on your mixer working in the middle of their range so you can turn up and down equally easily. I’d worry about that first, then turn the volume up on the speakers so that 12.00 on the master volume gave me a good, loud undistorted sound but not maximum volume. You can then turn it up or down from the mixer with no worries.

Yeah my 15" RCF's are also stupidly loud if we need them to be. Just a bit over the top really in most of our venues.

I'm a bit concenrned about some of the advice on sub placement though. Firstly you ideally want all your drivers time aligned especially around the crossover points so putting subs just anywhere can be less than optimal unlessyou can adjust delay to re-align the speakers. That's more in the realms of installed systems or professional sound engineers than pub bands though

I'm also concerned about wall reinforcement. Even on the floor you are getting a 6db uplift in bass and my subs are easily matching the tops and having to be trimmed back unless I'm outdoors. this is obviously dependant upon which subs you use and what tops you are matching with them so knowing your own system and matching it to circumstances at the venue seems better than adopting a blanket solution for every venue. Using walls and corners to lift the bass if you don't have enough is worth knowing about but I don't think anyone is doing it at every venue.

5 hours ago, uk_lefty said:

The drummer bought it brand new 364 days before it failed at Saturday's gig. He is trying to see if it's under any kind of warranty. I also want to take my little SWR amp for a bit of TLC to the amp repair man locally so can easily pass him the sub too at the same time for a diagnosis if it's not under warranty.

Well said @pete.young

This might be useful, it was my starting point in getting money back on a faulty car https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/what-do-i-do-if-i-have-a-faulty-product-aTTEK2g0YuEy

Which also offer online and telephone advice from their solicitors at a reasonable price if you need it. Contact your retailer and keep track of correspondance (emails are helpful here) usual tactic is delay in the hope you give up (though you may be lucky) so keep plugging away regularly and if answers are slow you can give them time limits by which they have to respond. Taking them to the claims court isn't expensive (there are set fees) and most businesses find it cheaper to settle than to go to court.

Out of curiosity who was the retailer and what make is the sub?

1 hour ago, uk_lefty said:

Exactly 364 days after purchase. Built in obsolescence is really evolving.

How old actually is the sub? If it is really just less than a year old you will still have rights.

It's frustrating in so many areas now. Modern consumer electronics is actually so much more reliable than the gear of my childhood and cheaper too but largely unrepairable. All the electronics on a single board with surface mount components means practical component level repairs are somewhere between difficult to impossible. Assembly in the far east means circuit diagrams and component availablity is almost non existent. If your amp is class D and has a switch mode supply I'd suspect the power supply. That probably means sourcing a whole new amp but you might be lucky.

I've never worried too much about subs under tops. Whilst completely accepting the phasing issues and the creation of power alleys I've found in small venues with multiple path lengths sound is reflected off nearby hard surfaces  andit isn't as much of a problem as it will be in more open spaces. On the other hand stable supports for your speakers when people are dancing only a few cm away for me is the crucial issue. It's worth mentioning also that the issue of power alleys applies equally to the bass coming from your tops. The cancellation depends only on the distance between the speakers and the frequency/wavelength so outdoors where you have more space to group your subs together there is an extra reason to opt for using subs.

2 hours ago, uk_lefty said:

Following this thread... I have very little technical knowledge but need to build some up, quick!

 

We have a large active sub which failed on us last night. Because we were using the sub I only had my SWR Working Pro 10 (100 watts, supposed to be to tilt back at me for my monitoring only) rather than my full Ashdown Rig. We lost the kick drum sound through the sub and had to put a small amount of bass into the tops which for some reason the rest of the band hate doing... But we play iPhone playlists through these which also have bass frequencies so in an emergency I think it's acceptable!

 

We are looking at possibly having to replace the sub now if this one is completely fried. 

Bad luck, if you are at all handy it's worth trying to find out whether the fault is in the amp (ouch if it is) or the speaker which is replaceable if you are at all handy. It could of course be a lead or even a fuse.

The sound from a playlist will probably be heavily compressed meaning that although it will sound louder and probably bass heavy it isn't demanding the peaks that your live set will be demanding, depending of course on how you set it up. Most active tops will take a little bass or even quite a lot. If they are active there may also be quite a lot of protection built in to protect your speakers from excessive distortion or harm. It's quite hard to really damage modern DSP controlled speakers though I have had my RCF 310's turn themselves off once when someone who should have known better re-booted a mixer that was playing up without turning the volumes down and muting averything.

Good luck with the fault finding.

OK given the way these threads sometimes go I think I need to start with a disclaimer: I'm not anti the use of subs in pubs or anywhere else. In fact I'm intending making more use of my subs where appropriate and want to share experiences and any practical tips that people may have to offer.

So I play in three 'bands' two typical four piece pub bands (singer, guitar, bass, drums) and a duo (two vox, guitar, bass, programmed drums) on an average night we play to 50 people. 100+ would be a very good night or a festival. PA is either 15's or 10's and we use in-ears for the bands and floor monitors for the duo. Recently I've tried the 10's with a single sub for one of the band gigs and have started to use this as a set up for rehearsals. In the past I have used my subs paired with 12" tops.

My first observation is that there isn't a perfect set up or a 'right' answer to the problems. As Erwin Rommel once said; "no plan survives the first contact with the enemy" and that is true of setting up PA in a strange venue. Those who insist in placing subs centrally clearly haven't been asked to set up in a typical british pub with no raised platform or indeed any defined stage area. Fully 30% of our venues have the only access to the toilets to the side of or directly behind our 'stage' Immediately any speakers on poles are a hazard as drunk customers push past the band on their way to relieve themselves and the floor monitors become a trip hazard. In my experience speaker placement is a compromise between pubilc safety, avoiding claims for damages and acoustic perfection with the former being the most important consideration.

Subs are great, the 15" drivers in mine are specialist, long throw low frequency speakers that our perfom the mid/bass 15's in my best 15" tops and bass is fuller more defined. Kick drums in particular sound great with subs. Outdoors sus are pretty much essential as you lose the reflective surfaces that rinforce the bass indoors. By taking a huge chunk of power from the tops they can be pushed harder, run cooler and the sound is less distorted. I can get away with 10" tops with subs but run out of steam without them. 15's block the view of the stage and at nearly 20kg are a significant lift. A 10" lightweight top mounted on a sub is much more stable than a 20kg 15" top on a stand and far less likely to cause anyone harm

Subs are a pita, they are necessarily massive making transport difficult, in many venues they set off room resonances so you end up filtering out the extra frequencies. Because they are omnidirectiona and you have more of the really low frequencies all the bass spills back onto the stage. That can cause havoc with bass feedback on drum mics and acoustic guitars and drowns anyone without well fitted in-ears in a thick soup of overwhelming low bass. Often there is nowhere else to put them other than under the tops and then you have to live with comb filtering problems.

So let's hear your experiences, ever tried subs? Had any problems? Positive experiences? Practical tips to offer?

That seems a good ball park price for what you could be getting. So long as it has the original driver in full working order then you have a quality piece of kit where the only drawback is cosmetic. For that price you aren't worried about re-sale value really, the most you can loose is £65 or whatever you pay and in reality the driver is probably worth £45 on its own and you can use the cab until you decide to upgrade and probably get nearly all of your money back, you might even make a profit

I've used the Zoom H4N for just this purpose and it was the experience that sent me all the way to IEM's I wish I'd done it earlier and my hearing loss would have been less. I bought the H4 as a recorder so I already had it to hand but any small recorder would work I tried my old Olympus WS-650S dictaphone thing and that works just as well, at the cost of having to record everything and then erasing it to free up the memory for next gig. I'd look at something like the Zoom H1 if I was buying something to do this now though, the H4 is bulky and over the top for this purpose and you could wear the H1 on a lanyard. Plenty of other rivals to the Zoom also, look at Tascam and Olympus too.

What was stunning and should have been obvious is that I simply plugged myself in and could instantly hear everything on stage much better than without them. That was entirely down to the reduction in sound levels. to make this work you need to concentrate on getting the best for possible for your headphones, the more of the over-loud drums and backline you can cut out the better your experience will be.

Using a personal mixer can be just as good. Think of it as a system in three parts Microphone>headphone amp>headphone. You can use an ambient mic and a mixer as your headphone amp or a mini-recorder as both mic and headphone amp. Using a recorder assumes that you have a decent monitoring sound where you stand anyway. If you want control over levels and creating your own monitor mix then a personal mixer is the way to go. I know at least one bassist with a mixer fixed to their pedal board for their own monitoring.

I wouldn't be too bothered about buying this. It would depend entirely upon price and what you are expecting to get. What you effectively have is an Ashdown ABM 15 in a home made box. A 15" driver of equivalent quality would set you back £120 new so if you pay sub £100 for it you'll probably have a perfectly serviceable working cab for rehearsals and practice. If you are handy you can probably smarten up the cab and you could even re-house the speaker in a new cab you build yourself. My first cab was a Peavey 15" Black Widow I picked up for £30 from a repair shop that was having a clear out. It did me proud in a home made cab for around four years. It still works If it's tatty but working when you've finished with it you can still sell it on when you've saved up for something better and you'll get most of your money back. Just don't spend too much.

My guitarist, also a tight wad, had a Marshall combo with the amp missing but a decent Celestion speaker in it. I got fed up with him turning up to gigs with something so scruffy so I built him a cab for that and he is still proudly using it.