Phil Starr

Some really interesting posts here. this is what I'm attempting so tell me if I have this right. I'm trying to do two things, get a community of musicians together, people who have gigged and are winding down a bit and people who are working up to forming bands. Giving them a chance to network and to make music. It's got to be open and welcoming but giving people the stage time they want. Above all it is about playing in a band, there are plenty of acoustic nights round here so I'm clear I don't want solo acts, apart from anything else that's only one person having fun. For the pub and audience it's got to be entertaining and attract an audience, a good atmosphere and lots of customers for the beer. So it's got to be reasonably slick and organised. I going with a house band, someone has to play if no-one turns up or rescue the evening when everything goes **** up. Apart from kicking off the evening though they are there to play for any singers and support the other musicians filling in for incomplete bands and so on. I'm going to look for another bassist so I can do front of house and work the desk. I've filled the first session with friends, some decent singers from previous bands who'll do a session with the house band and a couple of bands who'll do four or five songs each. I'll end the evening with a jam session of another four songs to make people feel there is a chance for them to join in. I've got a set list for god's sake. Is this too controlling? I'm going to try and have chord and lyric sheets there, people can take them away and learn songs if they want or join in and at least know what key it's in. I'll collect any details from any musicians who turn up, fit them in if I can but try and book them in for future sessions and offer short showcase sessions to any local bands who fancy it. good ones invited back. Beyond that I'm expecting to have to adapt to whatever turns up on the door. I want to try and keep it to 4-5 song slots to keep the gap between acts down and give people time to enjoy playing. It makes no sense to me to get people up for two songs, have them warm up and then have a break only to call them back an hour later to spend five minutes re-tuning and adjusting the drumkit. I'm hoping it's going to be busy enough to let me run a book each month and keep the musical standard up. I'd really like to see people having their first band experience here but I want to attract the best musicians I can and keep a proper live audience coming back. I wouldn't expect good musicians if all they hear is c**p. Lot's of ideas on this thread I'm going to copy, and I don't expect plans to work out exactly or even roughly but what do you think?

Proverbially 'if that's where you want to go, I wouldn't start from here. Where you are though is someone with a 4x10 and soon to have a 2x15. They probably won't work well together and the low impedance of the combination may cause a premature failure of the amp. Though the HA3500 is fairly tough I wouldn't knowingly abuse mine. On the plus side either cab on it's own is quite capable of drowning out the drums and causing long term damage to your ears so do you really need all that hardware? Once you have both cabs working and assuming you are happy with the sound in rehearsal go and give each of them a run out at a couple of gigs. Keep the one you like best and sell the other. I'ts worth getting out in the audience area with a long lead during soundcheck if you can or have someone in the audience you trust having a listen. They may well be hearing a different sound to the one on stage you are hearing. Personally I doubt you'd need an extra cab but if you did you'd need two 8ohm cabs.

I'm going to have to read this whole thread. I've taken on organising a 'Jam Session' but it's taking it's own course and I'm not sure what it is going to be. I want it to be a place where musicians can network and hopefully some will grow into 'proper' bands. As it happens all my mates want to do it and will take over the first session completely, in fact I had to stop inviting people. Not as inviting as I hoped. On the plus side the standard of music should be fairly decent and the pub/punters will be pretty pleased. Gig tonight and the band are adding four unrehearsed songs so I need to leave BC and do some work but I'll be interested in advice when I get back tomorrow.

That would be my ranking but of course A&H make a wide range of qualities The x18 has the Midas designed mic pre amps there is also a Midas version with the better Midas pro pre amps. I'm told that the Midas mixer is a definite upgrade to the X18 but I've no direct experience of the Midas mixer, The x32 which uses the same pre amp as the X18 I think has a great sound so the Midas must be terrific if what I've been told is true and it is better. To be honest the limiting factor at this point often becomes the skill of the operator rather than the mixer. I was really responding to Al Krow's post, just saying get the extra couple of mic channels, you will use them eventually, and that you won't regret paying a little more for the extra quality you get from moving up the food chain a step or two. if you don't have to keep upgrading it is cheaper in the long run most of the time. At the moment I'm not in the market but if I was the Behringer X Air XR18 would be the one to beat for my needs and I can't imagine spending a fortune on an analogue mixer again once you get above £300

That's the one, it does the job, the fx are good but the sound quality is just OK, you can't complain for the price but there are better out there.

I was sceptical but I bought the Yamaha (MG16) to replace a Behringer which belonged to another band member when they left. No complaints about the Behringer which did us proud for five years ans was far from new when we got it. However the mic preamps in the Yamaha gave us an immediate gain in sound quality. Recently our drummer bought an old Allen and Heath, it had some problems but the sound quality is way ahead of the Yamaha. The Alesis is just about passable in quality. My mate went for a Yamaha MG10XU basically for home practice but it's a no brainer to use it instead of the Alesis. I doubt it's about the chips used but about the design effort and the components around them. Behringer have been using the Xenyx input stages for as long as I can remember. Their better mixers use 'Midas designed' input stages and the best Midas made, each has an improvement in sound quality.

Hi Al, I currently use an Alesis mixer for smaller gigs, in my case the Multimix8 with two extra inputs. It does the job and the fx is quite good, I suspect a lot of the budget mixers use the same chip to do their thing. Sound quality though is a bit meh! I used to have the Behringer Xenyx 1204. I have to say it served us well and the sound was OK, however as soon as I bought a Yamaha MG mixer the sound quality went up a notch and I have used A&H and that is really nice. you get what you pay for a bit in this price bracket. My duo partner bought the Yamaha 8 channel mixer and we use that over the Alesis all day now. If I had my time again it would be that or the A&H I'd buy. False economy IMO. I'd always go for one or two more channels than you need if you want to save money long term. If you are going to put a guitar through at any stage then an input that matches all guitars kind of seems a necessity and having adjustable sensitivity on all the channels gives you so much more flexibility. Those stereo channels are more about marketing than serious use. They are all advertised as it they were four extra channels but of course you can only mix them once. We have the option, which we do use, of putting bass and guitar through the PA directly and having the right channel means if something goes down at a gig you can DI and finish the gig. Extra channels every time. These things are all tiny anyway

There's a couple of these on ebay https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Mesa-boogie-2x10-600w-Bass-Cab Asking price is £300-400 so working that would have been a good price. You could keep looking on Ebay for a driver or a broken spares/repair cab and make one good cab out of two broken ones, though agedhorses warning that 4 different drivers were used should be part of that. A lot of US cabs use versions of Eminence drivers which is why I suggested a pic, someone might be able to identify the model it was based upon. If it was indeed an Eminence. If Bill Fitzmaurice comes along he has a lot of first hand knowledge of US speakers and may be able to help, especially as you have built his stuff. Might be worth messaging him. If you do want a build project there are plenty of people here who will help with a design, from just suggesting a coupe of drivers that will work through to something custom designed. You could sell the working driver to help find that too, I'm sure somewhere there is someone else with the same problem as you.

Bad luck. What do you want to get out of this? Is this a cab whose sound you just love or just a 2x10 you want to play with? Effectively it is useless at the moment worth only a few ponds for spares so £216 for a mesa 2x10, well only you can decide that. It would stick in my throat to pay £216 though. You'd need two drivers to replace the ones you have, mis matched drivers are likely to give you a very poor outcome. £100 for a driver isn't the cheapest you could go but you could end up paying £120+ easily enough. you could even decide to upgrade, you can get some nice drivers around the £100 mark. If you have the cab apart send us details of the cab dimensions measured internally and put up some photo's of the blown driver. It'll give us a better idea of what we are looking for.

I'd be very reluctant to be so categoric from a distance and with so little information Bill. It's a question of bottom line really, how much is a working amp worth? If it is worth nothing as a broken amp and £500 working then it's worth spending hundreds on to repair. That allows for a lot of hours work or the replacement of all the electronics in most cases. Reputable manufacturers IME who move to using modern circuit board techniques usually provide a supply of circuit boards and a repair often boils down to unplugging the old board and plugging in a new one. Irritating if the failed component is only a few cents but you save on labour. The amp is still in production so spares should be available, it would at least be worth contacting Ampeg who probably have authorised repair services in the UK. Repair men/women vary in their skill sets. Most faults boil down to very simple blown fuses or broken wires or a bit of owner misuse. Any competent electrician can usually spot these and repair them but it takes a greater level of skill to read a circuit diagram and diagnose a fault and the OP needs to go to someone who is more skilled IMO. No amp is unrepairable if the parts are available and it really shouldn't cost more than £200. I'm afraid it's a common thing over here for people out of their depth to say something is unrepairable or uneconomic to fix if they are out of their depth. Nobody likes to admit shortcomings.

Sorry this is a £1100 amp? Well that' the price from Thomann. Even used it's got to be worth half that. I'm sure you could buy a set of circuit boards for way less than that. It doesn't sound like your current guy is giving you very good advice. Take it somewhere else.

I used the Behringer 205 as a personal monitor and upgraded to the TC Helicon. It does sound nicer and you do have fx built in, I still use it but the Behringer in a loud band works better as it's limited frequency response means it is less prone to feedback which comes in fairly early with the TC. However after some experimentation I've ended up with the RCF 310's Mk3 they just do the job so well and at that price I wouldn't look anywhere else at the moment.

Celestion are pretty good at providing these for their speakers via email. I've not tried Eminence but it might be worth emailing them. Fane tend change the designs of their speakers whilst keeping the same name which get's confusing. If the speakers are OEM then you probably won't get any details, although Ashdown are pretty helpful generally. If the speakers date back to the early 70's nobody will know the T/S parameters because their work only became widely known then, There were still designers in the late 70's who hadn't adapted to use them for instrument speakers.

Funnily enough I was loading up the small cab a couple of minutes ago and I wondered whether it would be possible to squeeze in a tweeter. I think that if I did try to do that I'd probably change the port into a slot port, alternatively you could easily shift the ports to the back. That would easily create enough space on the baffle for a tweeter.

It would do, the sound of bass guitar doesn't usually have those frequencies and when it does they often excite room resonances. Bass sounds cleaner and clearer without those problems which is why HPF's clean up the sound and why subs aren't a good idea for bass. The sensitivity is 96dB so they've simply done a mathematical calculation of the level at 600W. roughly an extra 28dB. A lot of modern PA speakers ( maybe all of them) though are using very different figures for peak output. If you look at that QSC for example they quote the amplifier as '2000W peak' with a 12" driver it is unlikely the speaker can handle more than 300W, either due to heat dissipation or more problematically excursion. If that speaker is 96dB/W too then they are probably claiming it outputs 129dB 96dB@ 1W so 129 @ 2000W In practice it will probably handle half the power the Ampeg can and thus will be 3dB down on the Ampeg. I'd also suspect that a lot of the figures are based upon some room reinforcement from the floor and possibly walls. You make a good point about the sensitivity of the Ampeg though, it is very low for a 4x10. Not their usual fare. If you modify the drivers for low bass it means adding mass to the cone and using longer coils to cope with excursion at low frequencies.

So far I've had a good experience with the Maui 5 too, our singer bought one for his solo act and immediately went out to buy a second. We used it at a rehearsal and had planned to use it at the next gig, until said singer fell out with the drummer. End of that band. The Curve looks like it will go just a bit louder and is within the sort of budget Sam is imagining I think. I've heard the Markbass version of this sort of PA and that is excellent too, no idea what sort of price. the Evox 8 looks like RCF's version with the Evox12 being the louder version again I'd imagine they'd be pretty good but I've not heard the Evox.

Hi Sam, I quite like the EV's but the RCF's sound better and the 12" ART732's are lighter and cheaper so that's a no brainer. Having the 735's will mean for smaller gigs you can leave the subs behind and they are also lighter and cheaper than the EV's. The only other things I would look at in that price bracket are the QSC K series but the RCF's are currently the ones to beat. The only other thing to consider for a function band is something like the LD systems Curve or a similar line source system. They probably don't give any advantage in sound quality but the coverage is more even and they are quicker to set up and knock down. They look very professional and that is also a factor in your sort of market https://www.ld-systems.com/en/complete-pa-systems/?force_sid=22osc7lca2em2tbefnnbdg7875lsqfk2sgj210as4k9bnhe28hrig72kgocc7g6907sofe0uq9h0bqgov2eugb5c10fo8fn7ko2di51

Just a quick one. What do you need your cab to do? Increasingly people are moving to put all the instruments through the PA and just use their rig for monitoring. It has a lot of advantages to do things this way but basically that is down to PA's being so much better and being able to handle everything at loud volumes in a compact package so you don't need backline to do all the lifting. That assumes you have a decent PA though and that all the band are willing to cut down on the on stage levels. If you go this route a single 12 or a 2x10 will just about give you all you need. A lot of us are carrying two of these so when we need the extra oomph we just add the second cab. One will do monitoring duties, rehearsals and small gigs even without PA support two give you the flexibility to cover the rest of our needs. The only caution is that really capable 1x12's or 2x10's don't come cheap. The reasons for the 8x10's and even 4x10's have gone. Single drivers can handle much more power than a few years back and amplifier power outputs per £1 have improved so multiple drivers with high efficiency aren't needed in the same way. The only thing I would say though is to try as many cabs as you can. In the end the sound is what matters and you won't like the sound of every modern lightweight

All these arguments have been pretty well rehearsed over the years, like others here I suspect I was alive at the time all these songs came out. It was a pretty polarised time and I'm pretty sure the song was intended to be inflammatory. You are all entitled to a different point of view. I don't assume every covers band that plays the song is racist and it's a catchy tune. A lot of MJ's songs are pretty catchy too, it's a loss if they disappear but it is also a moral challenge and we have to think about these things. My point is that I think we all contribute to the normalisation of ideas and values. I'm a great believer in the right to cause offense but most of us have lines we don't want to cross and I prefer to live with people who have principles and they aren't principle if you don't put them first. There's a lot of grey areas too, I don't expect or want us to all agree. So hurrah for people who say no thanks, I may disagree with you over what we find offensive but I support anyone's right to say whoah that's far enough.

I think that's just justification after the fact, the song specifically refers to Governor (George Wallace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace ) and was a response to that Neil Young song. I'm happy to believe 'Alabama' was the foolish response of a then very young man from the South and I'd probably play the other Skynyrd song if asked but Alabama itself is quite specifically opposed to the equal rights movement. I suppose it would be the equivalent of a song written in support of P.W. Botha at the heart of apartheid. I'm happy to accord the same reasoning to NY, we all have done things as young people we wouldn't do now.

Our vocalist walks in plugs in a mic and just sings along. The rest of us spend hours in the shed figuring/learning chord progressions making our fingers do things they don't want to do. I love the bass lines in a lot of MJ's songs and I dare say drummers and the others find things to admire. I doubt Jackson had much say in any of that. Do we lose all of that because the singer was (possibly) very dodgy. I'm also an innocent until proven guilty sort of person and there is a lot of money riding on a successful case in this instance with some pretty hot lawyers coaching claimants. Truly legal systems are distorted by big money of all kinds. We may never have truth. Equally for those of us playing covers I think we have to exercise moral judgements and also not offend audiences. I won't play Sweet Home Alabama because it is explicitly racist and I won't play Brown Sugar, I'm not sure it is actually encouraging us to 'whip the women, just around midnight' or that raping slaves means we are 'doing all right' but you can form your own judgements. I wouldn't sing it in front of my daughter so why play it in front of anyone's daughter? For each of us the lines are different of course but music has the effect of normalising things and I don't think we have no responsibility. fortunately we have thousands of songs to choose from. PS our singer is actually a lovely guy, and that mic is really heavy

You may be right about the neo speakers, I took that from a manual downloaded from the GK website but couldn't find an exact match for the SBX ii. However those GK drivers that Bill linked to look like good units at that price. If the OP's cabs are a similar size to the cabs these drivers come out of there is every chance they will work well. It isn't guaranteed without knowing the specs and doing the calculations but drivers tend to cluster around similar engineering solutions to the same problems of amplifying bass so you can often get away with swapping out drivers. Using these would at least mean the cab was all GK even if not original. the drivers Bill linked us to are described as Paragon 10's http://store.gallien-krueger.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=082-0460-C

OK so what you have is a box. If you put in different drivers it will sound different. how much do you want to pay to replace the speakers and what do you want to get out of the swap, just a working cab or do you have something more than this in mind? Is lightweight important to you, high sound levels, punchy sound, or whatever? Remember the more you want the more you will probably have to shell out? Are you handy and willing to modify the cab or do you just want something to drop in? Is this something you need up and running quickly for a gig or can you take some time? Finally a couple of quality 10's are going to set you back £150-200 maybe more, have look to see what else is on offer at that sort of price before sending good money after bad. If you still want to go ahead I'll start making suggestions and asking for technical information.

I was hoping that Bill might have known which speakers are fitted, but in the absence of that you need to find the best match you can. the first thing would be to contact the manufacturers https://www.gallien-krueger.com/ they may provide spares direct. If not an exact match is difficult, The Thiele Small thing just means it has to match the cab, the frequency response will be unlikely to match so the sound of the cab will change. The original speakers are 200W drivers with neo magnets, I couldn't find anything like that on the Eminence web site. Why do you want to change them?

Looks like you are out of luck, the cab is 4 ohms I think and the amp is 4 ohms minimum so won't run a second cab. If you really like the Aguilar then running a second cheap cab would change the sound and you might not find that as nice. I was going to suggest a second matching cab but unless yours is 8ohms your amp won't cope. Sorry