Phil Starr

Oh dear, I was in a grumpy mood when I last responded to this I Just felt the OP's frustration. A couple of people have picked up on some things I said. I think I was the first person to mention contempt for the audience which others have repeated. For me standing up in front of an audience is still something special, my 'contract' with them is to do the best I'm capable of, never to say 'oh well that was good enough, the audience won't notice'. I'd be the first to say there are people way better than I am, whose half committed efforts would surpass my bass playing by quite a distance but I still think it is disrespectful not to do your best. Ambient made the points about the quality of the musicians and the difficulty of the music and there have been plenty of comments about not needing rehearsal for gigging the same songs you did last week. All true of course but most of those bands will have rehearsed at some time in the past. There's a balance between rehearsal, personal practice, regular gigging and the skills of the musicians. There's no point in rehearsing if people haven't learned their own parts at home, you can't stitch things together if they are full of holes. There's no point in rehearsing stuff you are already on top of and did last night. Better musicians may need less rehearsal, though I suspect they are better because of lots of practice. Simple songs need little work other than perhaps the starts and finishes. Sometimes for weekend warriors you have to reach a practical compromise between music and the rest of your life. But, I don't suppose any of us couldn't improve what we do with a little bit of intelligent time together in a rehearsal room. Sure the Rolling Stones would have been rehearsing in session men, staging and lighting and so on but shouldn't we all if we can? It's OK for me, I enjoy any time together with freinds making music and I enjoy the social side but I don't buy the claim that 'me and my mates are so good nothing could be improved by rehearsal' either. The rest is just about compromising between what you need to do and the practicalities of how to achieve it. As for the OP I think with a new band member I'd want to have a run through, just to check starts, ends and any odd bits of arrangements rather than do that in front of an audience, if at all possible.

Those three are all good brands, also consider Yamaha, JBL, QSC K12's. Of all these, and I've auditioned them all, my current favourites are the RCF's. Get along to PMT or somewhere with a range and take along some decent recorded material and try them out. Concentrate on those that do the best vocal sound, any lack there will affect your bands sound most of all, you are doing PA not disco! Don't obsess over 1000W, mainly that is advertising hype, the amps in question can usually only achieve peaks of that level, which does help at cleaning up the peaks but that is all. Few 12" drivers are going to be able to handle more than 300W continuously and the difference between 500W and 1000W is barely noticeable. Most PA speakers will specify their maximum sound levels and anything over 128dB is going to be enough for most bands. Mackie used to be the go to PA speaker, they've fallen out of fashion since they stopped using RCF drivers and moved production to China. There are rumours of reliability problems but I've no direct experience of that. I'd go for the RCF's or K12's, Yamaha stuff is pretty bomb proof and a lot of people like them a lot. I just didn't think they did vocals as well as the RCF's. Hope that helps, you'll get plenty more opinions.

Hi Phil, funny how you feel closer to somebody with that name. Really you 'ought' to be able to hear perfectly well with a 2x10. I gig with one and in a room with up to 200 people everyone can hear the bass perfectly well. Being neo should mean your speakers are more likely to be louder rather than quieter. It simply makes stronger magnets, though so many factors come in that there is plenty of overlap in performance with ceramic magnet speakers. I'd say the perfect way to use these is back against a wall and leaning so that they point at your ears. A £15 stand will arrange that though it means your amp will slide off. Raising it onto a chair will lose you some of the bass reinforcement having it on the floor gives so you could end up boosting the bass and running into distortion. Back against the wall means the bass is boosted even more so you can turn down the bass and use more of your speakers power. If the amp/speaker combination isn't loud enough I wonder about your eq. Room acoustics are so important, are you using the same eq you use for personal practice at home? Cutting bass and boosting mids will help you cut through anything and allow you to turn up without distortion. Sorry if that is teaching you to suck eggs. I didn't take your half-deaf statement literally and 70% hearing loss was meant to be a joke, but if you play in a band you will have some hearing loss. It isn't what most people think, you don't lose sensitivity largely you lose frequencies as you selectively damage tiny areas of your inner ear each time you are subject to a loud noise event, those areas don't grow back. Eventually enough frequencies are lost that it is harder to separate sounds in noisy environments even if you hear a pin drop in quiet times. you can check your hearing here if you have a decent set of headphones https://www.actiononhearingloss.org.uk/your-hearing/look-after-your-hearing/check-your-hearing/take-the-check.aspx Your 2x10 can reach peaks above 120dB, that will be as loud or louder than the drums, anything over 100db will damage your hearing in a fairly short time the HSE say 15mins http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/priced/hsg260.pdf That is about the level you are probably currently rehearsing at so any increase in volume will cause hearing loss. Honestly I think you should investigate using in ears or decent earplugs (not the solid foam ones), getting a little more out of your 2x10 or even getting everyone to turn down. If not you will get permanent hearing loss.

My gigging amp was a Hartke 3500 still sounds better than anything else I use but it is getting a bit cranky and is on the heavy side. I bought an MI bass and sent it straight back. Just couldn't get a sound I was happy with. I've settled on a Little Mark Tube which sounds absolutely fine. The Tube input isn't a dramatic change from the standard Little Mark but I've gradually settled on an all tube pre amp sound so I guess it must suit me. Having added even further to the Mark Bass love I'd say try the amps through your speakers before you buy if at all possible. It's your sound.

Hmmm, your hearing is poor and you are turning everything up to hear what you need? I'm concerned about how this will end up for you. I understand the appeal of loud sound but if you are genuinely 'half deaf' you don't want to move to being 70%, you'd have to give up playing at that point. Your young drummer needs to learn to play more sensibly at rehearsals and to save it for the gig, he probably lacks control but lighter sticks will help as will damping the skins. The other thing is that your ears are probably trying to protect themselves from further damage, there are tiny muscles inside the middle ear which contract at high sound levels, this reduces the energy transmitted to the inner ear but is frequency dependant so you also lose the ability to discriminate and sounds end up a bit muffled. One way round this which is counter intuitive is to get some musicians ear plugs, the ones with the holes down the middle, that turns everything down and I find emphasizes the bass. You'll find you can pick things out better with the right sort of plugs in and it will protect your hearing. It's a lot cheaper than just increasing the number of speakers.

I think you really have a simple choice, arrange the courier yourself and keep control of the process including any insurance or stick to collection only and accept that there will be fewer bidders and possibly that you will get a lower price. I've arranged couriers from my end as a buyer and it is a hassle for the buyer too as the couriers expect to deal only with their customer which makes pick up awkward. You'd think couriers would understand that there are people at both ends of their delivery chain As to this purchaser you now know he is a dealer and apparently a pushy demanding one. My experience with eBay is that they work well when there is a problem especially if you have a good reputation with them, and most people are incompetent rather than dishonest but if you have reservations then politely message him and say either that you do not wish to get involved with a courier or that you are not happy to sell to a dealer. Then block him if he bids.

IME it often takes longer to find a fault than to fix it. Charging you for 45mins labour to diagnose a fault which at the very least is probably going to involve removing the case opening up the amp a quick visual inspection, connecting everything up on the bench maybe some quick tests with a meter and then reassembling the amp for return isn't unreasonable. £72 an hour is more than almost any local repairman would charge though. So it's the car analogy again, what do you think the labour charges should be for your car, would you expect the main dealer to charge more than a local garage? It'd pay you to shop around but in this case I don't think you are being ripped off, if that was your worry. Bad luck, hope you get it fixed soon.

This is a sore point for me. There is clearly a balance between personal practice,rehearsal and gigging. If you are the new guy you'd expect to put in a lot of work on your own. If you are an established band gigging a set you've done a hundred times then there is no need to rehearse stuff you already know.If you've a new band member you aren't an established band any more, performing with no rehearsal is a bit of a lottery. Youmight get away with it but it's just not a professional attitude to risk it. If you are all readers it might be OK I guess but symphony orchestras rehearse, lots. IMO to perform without rehearsal shows contempt for the audience, or at least a lack of care about what you do. Bands who busk it or who talk about playing it their own way without rehearsal and thought are rarely as good as they think they are. I saw an interview with Keith Richards where he said the Stones rehearsed for three months before their last tour, how often must they have played those songs? I'm probably bitter, I fell out with my last band because of this. We made the same mistakes in the same places every gig but there was a reluctance to sort the problems and half the band thought they were so good it wasn't an issue. It's frustrating when you've been playing a set for years when someone leaves and you have to rehearse the new person in but if you care it has to be done. If you don't care why are you playing music?

There really should be no problem with this, the only proviso being that some people are capable of breaking anything. (usually by doing something unexpected/slightly crazy) Your amp should have been tested at some stage in it's development for continuous running at it's full output with a test signal. (Unfortunately at some point after that advertisers may/will have got hold of the technical spec and may have picked out an instantaneous peak they choose to push but that's a separate issue) In addition just about all modern amps have extensive electrical protection against over-powering built in and will switch themselves off/limit the power if you do something stupid. On top of that you play music which has loud bits and quiet bits and gaps with no notes, if you play at 800W peak it will only be for a few thousandths of a second for each note. Your average power during a song is likely to be 20dB lower than that at about 8W unless you are using compression. Despite all the advertising claims about the 'high efficiency' of lightweight speakers that is only in comparison to previous generations of speakers of the same size. The efficiency of speakers at low frequencies is proportional to the square of the surface radiating area. It makes perfect sense to use them with all the extra power available but you would expect to have to turn up a bit compared with using an old school 8x10 it's good design but it doesn't break any laws of physics.

It probably doesn't matter because you'll never know, and there is no reason not to check your leads and speaker wiring. Just a thought though, what repairs were made to the cab, which I assume is now working? 'Almost certainly failed short circuit' implies that either he didn't actually check the speakers or wasn't the person who repaired them.

Snap

I don't see the problem either, a sealed cab will have a flatter response and may sound nicer, but that is to some extent subjective. putting these two speakers into a ported box that size won't get all the bass they could generate but it will still exceed them in a sealed box. You do get a 2dB hump at 100Hz so they will sound boomy (or punchy, choose your adjective based on your taste) but you will also get an extra 3db of bass down to 40Hz with a ported box. You maybe shouldn't have started here as Bill says, but it's not a disaster. Especially if you picked them up cheaply. If you are happy to bodge the baffle or make two then try both and choose the one you prefer the sound of.

[quote name='uncle psychosis' timestamp='1487016677' post='3236307'] At the risk of offending, I'm not sure that the demise of the pub band (as I see them, anyway) is necessarily a bad thing. Most of the "pub covers" bands that I see are, frankly, pretty dreadful. Too loud, no sense of dynamics, singing songs that are inappropriate for the singer's range, lurching from one style to another as little more than karaoke with instruments. Yes there are exceptions but I'm not sure there are enough exceptions to sustain it. All of the best cover bands that I've seen in recent years are those that put their own identity into the music - a duo of acoustic guitar and singer with cajon that had the dance floor at a mate's wedding filled all night playing everything from Abba to Bruno Mars to The Clash and another covers bands doing all the usual stuff but using their own arrangements in a soul style. So yeah, rock karaoke might be dying but great live music is still out there, you just need to try a little harder to find it. For those of us who have never been into "mainstream" music (try finding a band down the dog and duck who'll play Sonic Youth or Sun Ra) this is nothing new. You just have to look harder to find your fix. :-) [/quote] I don't disagree about what you say about a lot of bands approach to their repertoire but there is a knock on effect I believe. If their act is predictable and ultimately dull then it creates a shrinking audience for the venue and ultimately for the next band in. People decide that pub bands aren't for them and eventually the venue will close to music if they cant make a profit on the deal. An exceptional band may be bucking the trend on a particular night or for a one off gig, but we operate within a 'scene' which is beginning to atrophy.

bad luck, The truth is your amp shouldn't have blown your speaker and even if your speaker did short, which is extremely unlikely, the amp should have been able to protect itself.Without being there we will probably never know what actually happened. Underpowering is a bit of a myth. Without getting too technical an amp can produce a little more power than it's ratings under very limited conditions but that isn't going to blow your speaker. Your Burman is perfectly safe to use. It's not simple to be absolute about matching amp and speaker power. Amps are measured in terms of their electrical output with a test signal and speakers by how much power they can continuously take without over heating but music isn't a test signal, it has loud and quiet bits. The biggest variable is the person using it. If you turn your amp down a notch you are probably halving the power. Your 500W amp can be a 1W amp if you turn it right down. You've been using it without problem for years and with it mended nothing has changed. You can go on using it in exactly the same way without worries. There is one other possibility, It could simply be coincidence, your amp may have been about to blow anyway and the friend was just unlucky enough to be the guy playing when it happened. Broken amps can pump a lot of power into a speaker under certain conditions. It might well be bad luck and him paying half the repair bill a fair income. I'd take that for peace of mind rather than walk around feeling hard done by, especially since you will never knoe the truth.

Anything to do with the treble in a speaker system is a tweeter, the deep end is a woofer and the middle if you have one is a squawker though only older readers will have heard that one I guess. As you say it is advertising, the compression driver on the horn has a 1" voice coil, I don't suppose it has changed much maybe not at all which means if it was good before it still is and if not.. Anyway it's how it sounds that matters, I'd really strongly recommend you go and try it. 12's and 10's don't really have a sound which won't overlap a lot. It was easier in the olden days when everyone made a 4x10 and a 1x15 and pretty much tried to make them sound fairly similar. The reason for using 12's is because it is where the sweet spot is nowadays. Amps commonly output 300W into 8 ohms and 500W into 4. Put that much power into a 12" speaker and you'll typically generate just over 120dB which neatly matches a drummer. Most 12's will handle this power fairly well too. Take a second 12 and you'll have enough headroom to just about do everything you need given that at these sound levels you absolutely have to get the sound level on stage lowered and into the PA. I don't think you need to worry about it not being enough, choose on the basis of how it sounds. Obviously there are cheap 12's that won't quite work that well but once you are in the mid price bracket you'll hit the sweet spot.

I don't know that particular amp and I may be teaching grandmother to suck eggs but two things I've found in the past. if the thing has never been apart before then glue used for the covering sometimes sticks the chassis in place if it a tight fit and a judicious wiggle frees it, Or a tap with a hammer if you use something to stop it marking the bit you whack, I use a rubber sanding block for that. Before I did that I'd remove the nearby corners and handles, the bolts/screws sometimes go right through the cab and screw into the chassis.

[quote name='fftc' timestamp='1486570058' post='3232886'] It was the mobile phone what did it! I'm not saying I'm a Luddite, but that is just too modern for me. Lots more to think about. I want an aux in for headphone practice, so I'm not worried about the sound through a cab. I know the Ampeg won't even play the aux through the speaker out. Not sure about the others. But perhaps from what folk are saying I should widen my search to amps without an aux and either use what I currently have, or get another similar thing that is separate from the amp. I was hoping to get something that will be a bit better for my silent practice,[i] and [/i]do the loud thing. I'm not in any real rush (apart from GAS) so I'll keep mulling over the options. Thanks for all the input folks. [/quote] let's face it GAS is fun, get the silent practice sorted then the real search and associated GAS can start. You can be practical, practiced and still dream

[quote name='LukeFRC' timestamp='1486507747' post='3232428'] So just the one big port? [/quote] I think it's a good decision Stevie found it was relatively easy to create chuffing in the ports with his test signal and multiple small ports. Since his main aim was to get the best out of this cab it made sense to address that. The aim for the first design was around making it easy to build and the ready availability of black downpipe and hole cutters that size drove a decision on multiple ports for my design. Our aim in sharing this stuff is to give people a design they can follow exactly if they want, with a guaranteed performance, but also to give enough explanation and data for anyone to modify the designs easily enough if they choose.

[quote name='BigRedX' timestamp='1486558604' post='3232736'] Unless someone is going to be permanently collating the information into the first post of the thread, pretty soon it's going to be very difficult finding the info that you want from several hundred posts. Forum software isn't the best way of displaying this information IMO. Just have a look at the recommended luthiers and amp tech threads. [/quote] It's a problem of course but a fairly minor one. The nature of sudden changes at venues was that word got around in a few weeks anyway. It's in the first week or so that getting the news out makes a difference. In practice I found it only took one person to notice something was up and we'd all pretty much know who was there that week so someone would tip them the wink. I personally wouldn't want anything like a blacklisting of venues permanently up, it would be an impossible thing to police in practice. Just something where if a band were cancelled at short notice they could post it up to warn the next people there. Beyond that it'd just be nice to have all the threads about the ups and downs of playing live in one spot, to kind of make a community of gigging bassists chatting about the non bass playing parts of live performance. Much in the same way that bassists playing other instruments have their own little corner. Maybe it's just me though

There used to be a forum on Lemonrock where this sort of thing was discussed. I found it immensely useful not least because venues sometimes close suddenly or landlords are removed overnight by the pubco's who own them. Often in this case the bookings for bands are all lost and bands turn up to find another band booked by the new manager setting up or that the pub is no longer doing music at all. Word got around very quickly saving a wasted journey at least. Lot's of other practical things as well. Unfortunately Mac withdrew the whole forum, it wasn't his primary purpose and there were a lot of adverse comments about poor payers, unhelpful pubs and so on. Basschat isn't trying to sell membership to the venues so it would be less embarrassed about anything like that so long as it was fair comment. I'd love to see a whole sub forum dedicated to the practical stuff about gigging, everything from the PA to booking gigs. It often seems to fall to the bassist to sort out these things. The gig thread just seems to be 'we had a gig last night, we were wonderful'

Another vote for a separate mixer. That enables you to buy a practice/small gig amp without any restrictions so you can get the sound you want from that. Most bass amps sound pretty poor with an aux input because they are designed for bass not hi-fi. You can feed a mixer into your bass amp if you want to mix bass and an aux and hear it without phones anyway. Like quite a few people here I use a Zoom B1ON for practice. It is sold as a multi fx box but it has a tuner/metronome/drum machine and aux input built in and a good quality headphone output. It runs for a week on rechargeable batteries which I find useful for practising in any space I can grab. £45 new. It has extensive speaker and amp emulations built in too so the headphone sound of your bass can be what you want within reason. That leaves you with £150-250 for an amp with you free to buy what you want without being restricted to the few with an aux in.

[quote name='Dan Dare' timestamp='1486389020' post='3231309'] Phil's correct - probably a bad connection, although I don't think there is any "almost certainly" about the cap being used to prevent low frequencies from reaching the horn. It will be. That looks like a simple first order crossover with a resistor. As Moon says, a cap won't give you a reading like a resistor or an inductor will. If you have 2 PA speakers, try swapping the drivers between them and seeing if any have failed. [/quote] I think that's almost certainly right but it's such a basic crossover that it might just be a series circuit, though I haven't seen one of those for over 40 years. It would be very unlikely but I've seen very old crossovers where they used this to reduce the size of the inductor.

What is actually wrong with the Speaker? The capacitor is almost certainly being used to stop bass reaching the tweeter so if that was broken it would mean the bass unit would still work the white 22ohm resistor will be part of that circuit too. The coil is to stop treble going to the bass unit. If nothing is working then the fault lies between the crossover and the amp or in the amp itself. Start off by checking your leads and then the sockets.

[quote name='TimR' timestamp='1486369619' post='3231074'] What are you practising? [/quote] That's the best question so far Practice needs to be focussed, it will vary over time but you need to have a clear idea both of the short term and medium term gains you want to make. My practice for the last few months has been dominated by the demands of a new band and completely new set lists. I've got 50 new songs to learn so I've just divided them up into digestible chunks and head down and get on with it. My practice would be very different if I was working through exam grades or trying to learn a new technique on bass. I don't think anyone can really concentrate for more than 15 minutes, the research I read as a teacher would indicate that it is much shorter than that. The solution is to break each hour down into several activities and switch them around. Maybe attack four or five areas an hour. For example I've five songs I'm working on concurrently. Spending no more than 15 mins on any one combats boredom, one of them is in 6/8 time, something I've never played before. I'm going to put in some 15 min sessions with a drum machine in amongst sitting with chord sheets and the incessant repetitions of songs I'm at various stages of 'knowing'. You will almost certainly have different aims but you can always break down tasks into small blocks and then rotate them to avoid getting stale. The other thing is about regular breaks. Learning only puts things into short term memory initially, unless it is something with very high emotional impact. We all need a period of assimilation for it to be incorporated into long term memory. Taking short tea breaks will help that process. Once your short term memory is effectively full you wont be doing an hours practice you'll mainly just be over-writing the memories you made earlier. Everyone is right, little and often is best.

Wish I'd started with floating thumb, just for the string damping. One day soon I'm going to have to start to retrain myself to use it but it's always difficult to break years of muscle memory/bad habits. Given your early stages I think going for this is good advice.