Phil Starr

Sorry Al, I'm leading you astray again. On the plus side you'll be blown away by the sound per pound ratio. I still covet your new mixer though

That’s a tricky one. I think you have to decide that yourself. The speaker would handle bass and it has the full protection of the DSP which is probably common to all RCF stuff. A single speaker would be 6db down in volume though. I’d be mixing in stereo at home too so a single speaker wasn’t something I ever considered. I suppose £89 for a bass combo that sounds great is a bargain though. You could drive it off your mixer or something like a Zoom.

This was with my duo, two vocals, bass, guitar and a drumtrack going through a small desk into a pair of these. In my 'study' which is probably 3mx4m the volume was around our on-stage volume at gigs and loud enough that we had to amplify the acoustic guitar when we used it. The sound quality is stunning, certainly a match for hi-fi costing double and this is with the built in amps included.

The problem was probably excessive excursion. The cab is an awful lot safer with those sort of powers if you use an HPF at 50Hz or even higher. The output is very limited below 80Hz by design so there's no point letting anything through below that. The coil may have been smacking against the back of the magnet and if it over excurts (is that a word?) it loses the cooling effect of being in the magnetic gap. If i'm playing that loud I pretty much always put the cab right in a corner and roll off the bass which corner placing reinforces. I'm glad it's mended, the BAM will be a perfect match and does have some bass roll off built in which helps.

Btw they are also selling the RCF AYRA Pro5 studio monitors for £89. That's mad for decent studio monitors that will take bass at pretty high volumes (I've rehearsed with mine) and which sound not far short of my moderately expensive hi-fi

I'm so tempted at that price. Get ye behind me!

Ain't that the truth! The trouble is that they watch too many videos and copy the moves. It's quite fun watching some live video and picking out when you are listening to a recording or one of the backing singers. I've spotted Kylie's live videos where she has dropped the mic down to her knee and the vocal continues with no change in volume or timbre. Trying to persuade a singer to watch mic technique on genuinely live video seems to be like asking them to read War and Peace.

I've done that twice recently one of the downsides of in-ears is that you have this magnificent sound the moment you crash into the first song but only you can hear it. OOps 🙄

There are simply too many variables to give a definitive answer to this. Size of venue, genre of music, how loud the rest of the band are and so on. Thats only about how loud you need to be. That depends upon the power of the amp, the efficiency of the speakers and the tone you choose to set up. There are so many variations that no advice can be completely solid. However there is an approximate answer which applies to roughly 60% of the possible set ups and it is 200W into a single 12 or a 2x10 That's a bold statement so it needs some explanation. A few years ago I designed a speaker on Bass Chat. One of the design specs was that it should be ‘loud enough’ to work with a band on its own. I had to turn that into something technical so I made the basic assumption that the bass has to be as loud as the drums. No point in being louder, if the guitars are going to be louder than that then all is lost anyway. Match the drums and you are good. The next thing is how loud are drums? I found some health and safety measures and the average level at the drummer’s ears is around 100-103db. I took that to be 100db at 1 metre and that the bass would need a 40db dynamic range. So 100db +/- 20 and 120db clean was my target. Looking at specs for speakers efficiency wa around 94-100db for bass speakers and I took 97db/W as being typical. So at 97db/W you need to have 23db of gain which is 200W I gigged with one of these speakers for 2 years. The theory holds out for all normal gigs but not for really big spaces or outdoors where simple physics says you need more. There are a whole raft of amps that are 300W into 8ohms 500 into 4ohms. Any of these should be more than adequate.

Here you go

It was the AKG D5 I recommended, not that I think the D7 is a problem, I've just never tried one. The D5 is terrific at feedback rejection but at the cost of you having to be really close to the mic if it is to pick you up. It sounds terrific too and is built like a tank, makes the Shure feel flimsy (which it isn't) I have two which I don't use as: I have a loud singing voice so feedback is not an issue I bounce around like Tigger when I'm performing so I need something more forgiving of poor mic technique The D5 is cheap too, £73 at Gear4music and the sound is sooo good. I swapped out one mid gig once when I was mixing for another band and their SM58 went down. The vocals went from very ordinary to terrific.

FWIW, My technique is to apply a base coat with a paintbrush so that I have a good solid covering and no wood can be missed and show through. You can touch up bits you've missed easily enough. I apply my top coat with a brush too. I apply the Tuff Coat generously but only spread it loosely, a bit like spreading butter. Just making sure each panel is equally loaded with paint. At this point pick up the rollerand spread the paint evenly over all the panels taking care with the edges. Once you are satisfied about the even coating you are ready to texture the surface. The texture depends upon the roller you use , the pressure you apply and the speed you roll at. You need light, even pressure. Just enough to make full contact with the paint but not enough to dig into it which creates skid marks. Once you are happy with the finish on one panel you should try to work your way evenly arond all the panels at a nice steady pace. This all sounds more complex than it is in practice. Tuff Cab dries very slowly at first and in my shed which never gets very warm you can re-work the paint for at least half an hour. If it goes wrong it's simple to flatten it out and have as many 'goes' as you like. I've tried all sorts of rollers from the fine short-pile gloss rollers to the official Blue Aran corse foam ones. They all give a different finish but all work well with the fine rollers giving a 'linen' texture and the Blue Aran ones the closest to the sprayed 'splatter effect' you get with professional cabs. I use eiher the BA rollers or a long pile emulsion roller nd get a similar finish from both A couple of tips. you don't need a texture on the baffle which will be behind the grille so support the speaker on this side with the back of the cab uppermost. Make sure you have access to the whole cab before you put any paint on. If you can't walk round the cab freely then an even texture is difficult to achieve. Do the final coat in one go, it's hard to get an even coat if you let one side dry before doing the next. Don't do your first cab on a hot dry day as the paint will set too quickly if you get it wrong. If you aren't happy you shouldn't worry, doing a third coat isn't the end of the world.

Nice, I love playing that bass line It's the start of Chrismas for me when I do my first run through to check it is still under my fingers.

This was my experience. Mixing from the floor during soundcheck is such a game changer for a pub band with no sound engineer. Saving pre set mixes speeds up the whole set up and individual monitors are revolutionary. There are a myriad of extra things you can do of course but start off simple as you did and add in the frills only as you feel a need for them. How did the next two gigs go?

It depends upon the gig a little, I'm definitely more relaxed about pub gigs and those close to home. I generally carry spares for everything and our PA has some redundancy built in, we use the same speakers for monitors as we do for FOH in one of my bands. We carry a little four channel mixer as backup most of the time but I've stopped worrying about mixers going down, it's just never happened. I do have a backup iPad with the mixing software loaded up and I could also use my phone at a pinch to run the mixer.

At Snugs HQ, it’s not too far for me.

I do 90% of my practice with headphones. Mostly I use a Zoom B1ON now replaced by the B1 Four. Completely portable with batteries and comes with loads of emulations and effects, plus drum machine,tuner and metronome. Plus a jack input for playing along with recorded music. For the times I want to play loud I have an interface going into my studio monitors. RCF Ayra5’s but rokit,Yamaha, and many other brands have similar offerings. We all practice differently though. I ply in covers bands so a lot of practice is learning new songs. Having something that I can just plug and play woksfor me.

Well done Al hope it goes well.

Well I’ve finally done it. I’ve ordered custom tips from Snugs. One pair for my KZ ZS10 Pro and another for my Sennheiser IE100’s I’m booked in for impressions on the 16th and should have them for the new year.

I use a Gnome with a 10 (BC 110T) for the poor snowflakes who can’t manage in-ears in the same way you do 😄😂 Glad you had a fun gig.

I often find that simplifying things gives the best sound. Too often you can twiddle to solve one problem only to find you’ve created others. I’ve stopped saving settings at the end of a gig. They are rarely better than the basic mix I’ve set up in rehearsal. Don’t be surprised, i too get my best bass sound out of the PA on poles. You get several db of boost of the lowest frequencies from the floor and adjacent walls with backline and it just muddies everything.

I've just had a look at the saved calculations, my interal volume was assumed to be 10litres and the cab was tuned to 87Hz. I follow WINIsd in terms of inputting the mesured characteristics and leaving WINIsd to calculate the global parameters so you may get different results by using the spec sheet parameters. I'll have tweaked the cab after building the prototype. It's also possible that Fane have either changed the speaker or changed their specs over time. All my designs are built and tested before I share them so may vary from the calculated figures. Hope that helps

Another gig last night with my duo. We really have a stable PA set up of two RCF 310 tops and two more as floor monitors, mixer is an RCF M18 digital mixer. We don't use backline and its bass,guitar and two vox plus programmed drums. It's the only gig I do without in-ears but we ahve full control of the floor monitors so levels are not ear ringing and I find it a lot easier to sing with air around me rather than with in -ears. We are set up so the monitor sound reflects the front of house sound. In practice that means careful HPF of the bass from the monitors as we get so much of the sub 120Hz region coming from the FOH speakers so we need nothing of that in the floor monitors. This was a big pub if a bit less than ideal acoustically being divided into 4 separate spaces. I reckoned we had nearly 200 people there at the end of the evening though we started to an empty bar. The sound is bob on. You can't make more of a voice like mine but given the skill levels we have I'm pretty happy with how we sound. Having a fixed set up we stick with is such a help. All the settings are saved and recalled so set up is just plugging in. You can see the signal on the led meters on each channel so there is no irritating 'one-two' going on. Soundcheck is usually just 60 secs and the only thing I set is the master volume for the FOH unless the acoustics need a bit of eq. We were pretty loud last night with a full house and the two 10" tops were cruising with plenty to spare even though they were carrying bass and drums. This set up would carry most bands even with acoustic drums so it's surprising what you can do with reasonable quality but quite compact gear. Of cours it's never perfect, guitarist said at the end that he couldn't hear the guitar as well when playing the acoustic, the electric sounded great. I worked out last night htat normally we have the monitors lower so he can hear the acoustic partly from the direct acoustic sound. Somehow we'd turned the monitors up too high so other things were drowning out the acoustic guitar. I'll have to confess this morning

I think you have answered your own question You like what you have, so this is only a theoretical worry about whether it will be loud enough. The only test of whether it is loud enough is to use it as it is. Doubling the amp power won't double the sound level just increase it a bit, 3db at best. If you don't need the 3db why throw money at a non-existent problem. FWIW I use my Monza with a Warwick Gnome more often than not and have no problems with just 130W on tap.

I think @stevie uses a Trace Ellliott 1200. It does sound good