Phil Starr

That was just the RM, I used to have a MAG 300 and that definitely had the Ashdown 'sound'. It's been an interesting journey for me the past few years. You'll probably know I've designed cabs for folks on BassChat mainly to put something back in. I was a complete newcomer to bass when I first joined and people here helped me a lot with my playing. @stevie and I worked togetehr on the earliest designs but came from slightly different angles, he was always an FRFR man wanting the most accurate cabs he could make, no expense spared. I was more interested in finding out why people generally wen't for a cloloured sound and what it was they were looking for in their ideal cabs. It soon became apparent that Stevie's expertise was greater than mine particularly in crossover design and he was interested in making the best cabs possible with cost almost no object. I was lucky enough to be able to be around as he developed LFSys trying some early designs out, listening to a lot of prototypes and discussing loudspeaker design. I've finally settled on two of his designs. The original BassChat 110T and a Monza Meanwhile I've gigged more and moved towards using in-ears and no back line. Floor monitors for low volume gigs and the in-ears for everything else. The Monza is only used rarely when I've a drummer who wants a bass speaker behind him or at festivals where bad experiences with poor techs means I take backline as a backup. If the sound people get it right the volume stays at 0 if I can't hear myself I turn it up and leave them to sort front of house. I had a couple of experiences playing sets with no bass at all on stage so I won't use somebody else's PA naked, so to speak. Having gone FRFR by going direct to PA having the FRFR Monza is a godsend. Room acoustics allowing I get a consistent sound through PA/floor monitors/in-ears/backline and practicing at home through studio monitors or headphones. The surprise came when @stevie bought a Trace Elliott amp, it just spread some magic through the FRFR speakers. I tried my Peavey Minimax and it does a similar trick. There's no mystery, whoever shaped the sound in the Trace amp was very good at their job in tome shaping and I can't quite match their expertise. It isn't one sound to rule them all, I still shape my sound differently for different bands and songs and enjoy being able to get it whatever I'm playing through, but when I do use backline I treat myself to a little bit of colour from a definitely non-flat amp.

We did measure the response of an Ashdown RM once and it is pretty much flat with the controls set flat anyway. Go to Ashdown for after sales service every time, they even come on Bass Chat from time to time. I bought a Bugera Veyron as my neutral amp, I'm a cheapskate, what can I say They are 700W amps in real money but you can turn them down. If you want a cheap solution this is a good option.

Pre fader every time for me. As David says you don't want anything you do to FOH adjusting someone else's monitor mix, generally you want a clean feed to monitors anyway. A lot of singers are put off by delay or excessive reverb even when it sounds really good out front. Most musicians are happy with a clean version of what they are doing anyway. As I said above I keep the settings on the monitor the same as front of house and then globally eq the monitors to match the FOH sound as best I can. I'd also advise against tweaking the main mix during gigs if you are mixing from on-stage unless there is something seriously wrong, a mic going down or a guitar swap forced by a broken string and the like. You've pretty much no idea what the audience are hearing so are much more lkely to make the sound worse not better if you tweak in the basis of the on-stage sound. I use a radio connection for my bass though so I can wander out mid song in an emergency. It doesn't look very professional though IMO

I've actually got a steamer, but stalled at the prospect of making a former. It's a thought

I don't think we have enough information to answer definitively. How big is the garden? How loud do you need to be? Are there any wlalls around you.? The problems outside are ambient noise can be louder people further away and for the bassist the sound from behind the cab being lost. Since the sound behind is just the lower frequencies you lose bass. If there is a wall behind you lean the bass cab back against it and the bass sound will be enhanced. If you have two cabs I'd take both on a precautionary principle, if I had them available. There's only one way of finding out waht works and you can't do it if the cab is at home

I don't think it was a daft thought, it just needs to have a little work done on it. You can feed a speaker level output into an active speaker but it needs the voltage reduced and some impedance matching. You can buy a DI box which will reduce the signal roughly to a thousandth of the speaker signal and sort all that out for you. In terms of power it would work like adding in an extra Rumble, you'd have the extra power coming from the amp in the active speaker instead of coming from a reduction of the impedance to 4ohms. You'd also have a bit more speaker area radiating sound so you'd get extra volume that way. Though the active might not be as loud as the Rumble depending upon what it is. Connecting the speaker output rather than a line out or FX out from a bass amp means all the tone controls on the Rumble will affect the sound from the active extension. It won't sound like the Rumble though as the combo's speakers are meant to be coloured and the PA speakers to be uncoloured. It might be something to try if you just want a bit more volume but get that matching DI box

Another day another gig, thank goodness. I do love it With my duo; guitar/vox, bass/vox and programmed drums. PA is two RCF 310's and floor monitors also two RCF 310's. Last night's lesson was just how awkward room resonances can be. The space was a social club in Wincanton which was an old chapel, Really nice open space with decent ceiling height and good proportions but our space was in what was an opened out side room around 3m high 4m wide and maybe 8m deep and a real bass trap. No eq needed for the FOH which sounded like it always does but the bass on the monitors was really overpowering. I kept edging it down, upped the HPF from 40hz to 50hz and ended up turning the bass down 16db in the mix. Given that the bass eq on the monitor is already shelved by 9db below 90 Hz. I think 16db just to compensate for the room resonance is remarkable. I should have cut by more and boosted the mids on the bass maybe but that's hard to do mid gig. Of course in-ears would have meant no problem and FOH was unaffected. I have to confess that I find singing easier with floor monitors

First of all I don't think getting a trained electrician to look at all your leads once a year is a bad idea particularly if you are not a technical person yourself. If they are PAT testing thenthey are also handling and looking at your leeds and are more likely to spot something dodgy than you are. It won't spot everything but it will improve your odds. If everyone on Bass Chat did it then it might only avoid one injury a year (I have no data, so this is an entirely made up no) but that might be a decent pay off. Just Saying. As to house wiring in venues, I've had numerous mild shocks and the occaisional 230V from poor wiring. I've found sockets entirely incorrectly wired but more frequently floating earths. You have no guarantee that all the sockets in a room are wired to the same circuit, The wires have resistance especially if there are a number of poorly wired joints in the circuit. The end result is an earth that is considerably higher than 0V which is fine if everything you use is connected to the same earth and nothing goes wrong. Big buildings also have three phase mains inputs and the sockets can be on separate phases giving a voltage difference between them. they shouldn't be next to each other but in old buildings someone will have taken a short cut wiring in an extra socket. Anyway I've measured 45V difference between earths which is plenty enough to make a little spark between lips and mic. I always run our gear off a single socket meaning that they are all earthed to the same point. We only draw around 5A with everything plugged in so a 13A socket and 30A ring main is going to be fine with the load

I think @David Morison is right, you should be able to do this with the mixer and this will give you better control than any other method. I've not used the CQ so I can't help there. I use the aux to drive floor monitors with my duo It uses more or less the same mix as FOH (except when I swap electric for acoustic guitar where I turn down to compensate for the direct sound of the acoustic) The difference is that I adjust the bass frequencies as floor monitors are boomy due to floor reinforcement and you can in any case hear the lowest frequencies from the PA and you don't need both. Anyway after a bit of twiddling I get the same sound from the monitors as I do from the PA which means I can tweak the mix if my guitarist has changed his settings. You could do something similar on the monitors to create a better sound through your headphones, not ideal as the kick sound will also change but it will give you some flexibility until you sort out how to split the bass on the mixer. If you want to go for a hardware solution The Behringer powerplay P1 will allow you to balance two inputs from a beltpack headphone amp and your BD121 will allow you to split the bass into two signals albeit one balanced and one unbalanced. The Micromon 400 has a through feed and a stero input which are mixable and the Behringer Ultra DI 120 will split or combine two channels as well as matching impedances or can be used as two DI boxes. It's my favourite 'get you out of trouble' way of sorting connection problems and I have one in my leads box and one in my mixer box. Any one of these will work.

Our duo use RCF 310's as our only PA. I've posted here about them a couple of times but it was last weekend's PA. We are pretty loud as a duo up with the levels of a few full bands. This gig was in an old converted cinema so a big barn of a place. We were pretty loud and the sound was really good, vocals especially but drums (programmed) and bass also loud and clear. The difference between the 310 and the 710's is that the 710's use a better mid/bass unit. With the 310's being so capable I don't think you will have an issue with bass and kick with your band. Let us know how you get on though. It might help others if you put up a link or two that I looked at, so they can get a picture of what you are doing with your 710's

I dont use it much but my duo partner does. Soundtrap is an online app for mixing. Very simple and basic https://www.soundtrap.com It offers a free introductory period and then asks you to upgrade. I've just turned the upgrade down and it continues to let me in, five years now and it's still free.

Getting an honest rating is a real problem over here too. The current trend is a two way exaggeration. Firstly amp powers are routinely calculated (ie not measured) at 6db above their measured rating, so a 500W amp becomes a 2,000W amp In PA active speakers it is even worse. They add the power of the tweeter amp to the amp driving the bass unit despite the fact that they don't both work together at any frequency other than at crossover where the power is reduced 3db. Then they save money by using the same amps over all the ranges but throttle them back so they can't damage the speakers. The poor old horn driver is likely to be 30W handling. The protection circuitry makes ssure there is no chance of it ever seeing more than that whatever you as an operator do. 250W is likely to be plenty through even an average speaker and through your 4x10 will be awesome

I don't think there is an issue here either but you could ask the venue if their insurance will cover your amp if it is damaged by their tester. We had a venue try to book us for a cancellation, they wanted public liability insurance (what you don't have your own?!) and PAT testing. We do have insurance but no PAT testing. When I said we wouldn't do the gig because we didn't have time and the expense for a one off gig made it uneconomic it suddenly wasn't a problem A lot of social clubs in particular are run by committees who are unrealistic about what a band can provide at the ridiculously low charges we ask.

You are beginning to sell me on the idea of the ZAR's, what you say about the ZS10's is true. I love them for listening to music and for monitoring bass but that harshness does nothing for my vocals and I prefer my Sennheiser IE100's if I'm singing. How similar are they physically to the zs10's I ask because I've had custom moulds made for my ZS10's and if they use the same shell I can just swap them.

It's hard to say without a lot more detail but putting a sub next to a wall is going to effectively double it's output on top of the reinforcement from the floor. I think having any mic within a foot of a sub is going to create issues. The sound coming from the sub may not sound very loud but at those frequencies the mic 'hears' better than you do. All of the sound from the sub is omnidirectional The tops point most of the sound away from the mics but behind the subs is just as loud as in front. Using subs isn't as easy as plug and play, be prepared to turn them right down, keep them well away from any mics and consider whether you need to use HPF. It may sound counter-intuitive to filter the bass from your subs but if sound below 50Hz is causing feedback problems and sets off room resonances it has to go. Percevere and you'll get there

What you are looking for is gain. A microphone puts out a few thousandths of a volt, a bass pickup a bit more, pre amps usually give you a bit of gain. 10x is not unusual in which case your few thousandths would become a few hundreths of a volt. Power amps tend to be looking for around 0.7 volts so little mixers or even big ones will put out at least this much and a bit more. Not all power amps are equal so some need a bit more than 0.7V which is usually described as line levelor 0db. Most of the multi-fx units will give you plenty of gain and amplify your bass up to line level and more. Many active speakers can be switched to take a mic level signal and you should be able to just plug your bass in and even have to turn it down a bit. But not all separate fx boxes will add enough gain to drive line level and not all active speakers will be guaranteed to have a mic level input (most do) so you will have to check. Your 2-3 channel mixer will give you all the gain and impedance matching you need but probably won't be necessary.

I agree with @TimR it's a long time since I played HtoH but I'm pretty sure my bass line included a lot of what the brass section were doing. In a lot of songs over the years I've found a lot of the original bassists playing things musically wrong but those things survived the edits and are there in the original rerecording. Famously Jean Genie contains quite a 'few slips' including in the bass riff that runs through most of the song. Trevor Bolder the bassist says he can't remember what he played. The whole idea of original is quite a blurred vision of music. Is the 'original' the first take, what the bassist played or something the composer wrote down before the session man walked in? Is it the album version or the single version? Or maybe the version wher the original bassist played the wrong note? I think those of us who have played in multiple bands probably do it differently. We've often got a lot of songs to learn in a short time often in bands that prove to be unstable/short lived and with people who work full time so rehearsals are a luxury. I'd have 'learned' this as part of a batch of 30 songs and I'd probably have known 10 of the songs. I'd never heard the Black Crowes before. Learning would have been lots of listening followed by downloading the chord sheet and initially just playing the rhythm and the root notes and making notes of any fills, stops and stabs etc. The aim would be to be able to go through the first rehearsal with a firm base from the rhythm section so the rest of the band can do their stuff without any startling errors. If it worked I'd take that to the gigs. I'd also know that the band might be missing some of the instruments or that the drummer would be playing four to the floor and I might add in bits to the bass line not in the original. Each song sets up musical challenges and with limited abilities I do my best. Set lists often change and songs get dropped so with 20 songs getting things 'correct' is a waste of time, if the songs last I'll add in refinements but this is often based upon what the rest of the band are doing. Like @Al Krow I take a pragmatic approach. Go Your Own Way is a good example. There are at least three guitar parts in the intro and I've played with drummers and guitarists that struggle with the intro. I've variously started the song playing one of the rhythm guitar parts on Bass and I've also played it properly. It's got that lovely run at the end and initially I played the notes all 'wrong' but with the rhythm and feel of the original and nothing that would clash with the guitarists solo. Later I went back and learned it properly but I doubt a single band member noticed and the audience not at all. It's great to sometimes learn things note for note and you learn loads by doing it but criticising people by describing it a lazy isn't seeing the bigger picture IMO Now I must go and learn the proper ending to that Monkees song btw it's the Black Crowes in the original spelling, couldn't resist it

Welcome to Bass Chat. I think all my direct experience is detailed above. The BW speakers are now another 5 years older and most will now be showing signs of their age. I think you've little to lose by trying the repairs detailed above. The life expectancy is going to be short anyway depending upon how you intend using them so you have little to lose if the repair fails. You haven't told us what the exact problem is.

Was this just your in-ears? Are you using ZS10 Pros? I find these do have some pretty striking resonances and unless your in ear fit is near perfect they can sound this way. I've ended up first of all with the tripkle flange ear tips that go deep into my ear canals and ultimately with moulded ear tips and they've improved matters. There is quite a pronounced mid range suckout too, they are far from flat, see below. I'd start by trying to get a great fit but then filtering out the sub 50Hz content and boosting 100-1.5kHz to flatten out the response, or at least being aware of the response when you eq. The other thing is that the audience experience of your bass looks to be pretty good and I find the live sound of my bass compared to my practice sound is really mid dominated and thin and clacky might be a good description. If you've got your bass well forward in your personal mix then you aren't hearing what the audience hear. Even if you aren't using ZS10's the mid suckout isn't rare in headphones I'd still be looking to check for a good fit and looking to boost low mids a little for bass.

Your SansAmp will do the splitting for you, it has two pairs of outputs a pair of jacks and a pair of xlr's. One of each is a clean output the other tone shaped within the SansAmp. Simply plug your bass straight into the SA and take one of the outputs to the clean amp and the other to all the fx in your dirty channel

Thank you all for your contributions. I've rarely depped and only for friends. I was part of a house band for an openmic/jam session and just about coped but the idea of busking a set is just too scary for me this is definitely about findng how the other half see it. So I'll make sure I have up to date charts before I start looking and have everything else ready. We always play as per the originals apart from faded endings, key changes are few and always flagged up. We do have 40+ songs for the dep to choose from and to be honest four chords cover most of our songs so in that sense it isn't too difficult to cover most of our set. I think if we phrase any ads right we should be able to sort the enthusiast for new songs from those who are balancing the cash with the amount of work. Most of you here seem to be working for a share of the pot rather than having a fixed fee which is pretty encouraging. Not denigrating those who play for a living and have to consider the cash, let's face it few of us 'earn' the living wage from this so good luck to those few that do. We just can't afford that sort of level of expense. The biggest issue left is avoiding some of the gutarists who've offered to dep in the past who just don't have the skills or experience. I've met @tauzero's seven bar guitarist rather him than the ones who stop 7/8ths through a bar

How's the lead guitar work coming on? I may have a job for you

I guess there's a worry about crossover distortion. We treat crossovers as neutral things that just cut off the lows from one speaker and cut the highs from the other. In practice the cut off isn't instant and there are a range of frequencies when both speakers are operating. At the crossover point the theory is that both speakers are designed to be 3db down halving the power to each and tow halves make a whole. That's the theory in practice it's really hard to get the exact match and on a frequency plot even with the best hi fi speakers you can always see the crossover frequency as either a little dip or a little peak. In most speakers you can hear it too. This is compounded by phase changes, slight delays between the sound coming at you from one speaker and the other. This makes the sound cancel at some frequencies. There's a slight delay in the speakers moving with the big ones taking longer to get going, the crossover components cause their own phase changes and to add to that the speakers would need to have their centre's equal distances from your ears. Crossover design is really complex and even the best computer aided design only gets you so close. Sombody really needs to sit down and spend the hours/days remeasuring and tweaking to get it right. Digital active crossovers make it easier and we benfit from the move to active PA cabs. Various trade names like 'Firphase' indicate where the manufacturer has tried to tame all the phase related crossover distortion and used a bit of delay to time align the drivers. However I don't think this is so much of an issue in using subs. Our hearing is just so much less sensitive down there and although theoretically a bass singer could get down that far he would have so little fundamental content that I reqally don't think it would be noticed. Maybe a trained sound tech in ideal studio listening conditions would be able to hear something in the kick drum sound but not in the wilds of PA. A lot of the new stick PA systems crossover in the 300-1,000Hz range and do so quite successfully and have the advantage over the 2-3,000 Hz crossovers of conventional PA in that part of what they do. The OP doesn't need to worry he only has 100 or 120Hz to choose from.