Phil Starr

You guys are going to get so much more pleasure from the cake than you will from my little demonstration. I've decided to try and catch you all out this time, you have to guess what you are hearing and get marks out of 10. I'm hoping to puncture some myths and demonstrate some truths on the way. I'll not say more in case it gives it all away. It'll be fun for you if you get everything right and hopefully informative if you don't. Maybe I should bake a cake for the winner

OK I've decided on a little demo/shootout for the SW Bash. We've never done a proper blind test before, because we've never managed to totally hide the speakers This time I've realised my band's banner is big enough to hide a good number of speakers so I can re-purpose it and do a properly blind test. I won't say more because then it wouldn't be a fair test

Glad it's not the proctologist

This isn't right or OK. Something electrical is going wrong and needs fixing. It isn't static which will discharge once and go away and doesn't ususally build up on properly earthed equipment. The most common cause is a floating earth. We all trust the central pin on our plugs but it is connected to earth by many metres of cable in the walls and under the floor via loads of connections which may have been wired by the apprentice last thing on a Friday 30 years ago. You'll have some resistance between earth at the entrance to the building and this will be greater with any corroded or poorly made connections. A voltage will devlop between the earth on the plug and if the supply in the room is on spurs or two different ring mains then there may well be a voltage dfference between the earths on the two circuits. You can often measure a difference between two earthed appliances as they are both 'floating'. I run all our electrical gear off a single socket whenever I can, much easier nowadays with LED lighting and more efficient amps and speakers. That means the earth may be floating but if every earth is at the same potential you won't get shocked. The highest difference I've measured is 47V between earths in the same room. Mostly it's less than 10V which gives only a tingle. There can be other problems with the mains wiring. I've had cables shorting within walls and problems with buildings with circuits within rooms on different phases. Not every electrician is a genius unfortunately. Obviously the floating earth is a problem with the room so it should only happen in certain venues or practice rooms It could however be that something is shorting within a faulty bit of gear and that needs checking if you can find what it is

Mine had horrendous electrical noise on it. It may have been faulty. I didn't really manage to get a setting I liked either and preferred the sound I've been getting from the settings on my mixer. The plan was that the Critical Mass would fil out my bv's but would make it possible to mute the effect when talking between songs with the stomp pedal. I thought it would be a quick simple solution but I wasn't prepared to spend time getting it replaced or setting it up to get a sound I didn't like as much as the one I already have.

Two gigs in three days for me. Both with my duo and both open air. The first was a fairly small affair at a brewery tap. The brewery is in an industrial unit on a small indusrial estate next to the Henry hoover factory, nice It is nice actually, a really friendly West Country event every Fri. A bit odd, but normal for Chard and the beer is fantastic. Anyway PA for this was Two RCF 310's for FOH and a single one for monitors. I can't persuade my partner on iem's but we aren't loud on stage. Mixer is an RCF M18 and we've done so many gigs that no tweaks are needed for an outside gig other than turning up the bass a touch. we don't use back line and drums are programmed. Last night was outdoors in a lively music pub, a much bigger space and audience so we got out the RCF 745's. Two 310's for monitoring and our new lighting set up. Again no tweaks to the M18 mixer other than turning the bass up. The bass tone outdoors with the 745's was fabulous and the vocals are stunning, well the speakers are anyway. I love this set up, you can just relax and concentrate on your playing knowing you've done everything you can and that the sound would be fabulous, or at least makes us sound as good as we can. The new lights worked well. We've settled for six identical LED strips all a metre long and mounted vertically on stands. Two static illuminating us and the other four behind us on a sound program. We also use one of the usual four PAR's on a stand running a chase program. Indoors we add a couple of low power lasers to add a bit of movement but outdoors there's nothing to project onto so we didn't bother. I think that's it for us with lighting for a while. it takes us 20 mins to set up and knock down and for what we charge I think its at the top end of investment, complexity and time and we probably do it better than most of the other local bands. it looked good but I think I need to adjust the sensitivity a little lower on the soudn setting as the lights were maxing out a little too often. They looked pretty good for a first outing but I think a bit more dynamic range would make for more drama

Love your set up, I've a pair of RCF 745's with a single 905 sub but I think I'd go 932's if I wanted to go again. Such a fabulous sound from the big RCF compression drivers but the 745's are such monsters to transport and take up too much space in small venues. The 932's look like a great speaker. I can feel your joy, maybe gigging isn't so bad after all

I'm so glad you liked them, I'm always nervous when recommending expensive kit.

Hi John, it's good that you are moving forwards. We all get things wrong I was playingat a brewery on Fri and forgot to turn on the speakers. Nothing to do with craft beer of course First of all you are less likely to make mistakes once you start using the CQ mixer, you can see straight away if a chnnel is overloading on the meters. You can also save the mix once you have it right. A friend and quite a good sound tech offered to mix out front for us on Fri. Once I'd switched the speakers on he listened for a couple of minutes and said 'it sounds good, nothing for me to do'. That's the same mix you heard a coupleof weeks back and the one we've used for about 5 consecutive gigs. The second thing was suggested by Mike my duo partner. "Why not do what we do" which is that we rehearse with the monitors, then halfway through rehearsal we turn them off and point the PA at ourselves and rehease with that. It gives you plenty of time to get the settings right between songs and you know exactly what the audience are hearing without disrupting a rehearsal. Save or make a not of settings and you have a starting point for the gigs which will work, with perhaps a bit of tweaking to match the room.

As above ^ The thing is that the crossover does two things, it shares the bass and treble frequencies between the woofer and tweeter and it matches the output so that they are equal in volume. The horn may be much louder than the single speaker or even quieter. You'll need to transfer the crossover as well because passing bass through the horn will destroy it! Having said that crossover design in bass speakers is pretty crudely done for the most and is often only one or two components to protect the tweeter, if so they are easy to hack. Post a photograph of the crossover and we can advise Let us know which 15" Celestion you have and we can see if your cab will do the job for you.

I think you'll find that the £100+ ones are potentially hazardous to the audience and I think you have to designate a safety officer of some sort to operate them in public. I had a quick look as a result of this thread and some of the ads had warnings on them, I've no idea what the UK regulations are with more powerful lasers but you'd certainly need to check up on the regulations if you go for something that is potentially many times more powerful.

I've done a quick look over my morning tea. I'll stick the results up below but before I do can I ask what you want to get out of this? If it is just a cab that is an Ashdown and sounds like an Ashdown then contacting @Ashdown Engineering is probably the way to go. They'll probably provide you with a couple of 8ohm drivers at a reasonable price, the cab will retain it's value and it's sound. @Stub Mandrel's suggestion is a good one and I'm happy to help you set up WinISD if you get stuck. It's free and it works If you want to go ahead with a mod then it's a question of what you want to get out of the mod and how much surgery/woodwork you want to do on the cab. If it has a tweeter you might want to look at the crossover too so it could be slightly more complex than just re-tuning the cab. So this is the initial look at a pair of Celestion Pulse 10's in a 100l cab tuned to 50hz. For comparison there are two other more 'normal' responses in smaller cabs. That's partly to illustrate what we are all saying about the cab being 'a bit big' for the Pulses. Interestingly for a nerd like myself the response in your cab will be almost exactly that of an Extended 3db Bass Shelf/EBS-3 response which is a 'thing'. You just need to know this is the result. The bass shelf works well for bass guitar as the lower frequencies get reinforced by any hard surfaces near the cab but you just need to know that this will happen when you swap the speakers. Green your cab with the Pulses 100l tuned to 50Hz Blue is maximally flat SBB4 resonse in a 65l cab Red is a more typical commercial cab response in a 45l cab

I'm happy to model the Celestion Pulse drivers for you or indeed look at any others. As @stevie has pointed out the cab is a little large for those drivers (we used a 30litre cab for the Pulse design we did during lockdown), but they look like they would work in a range of cabs. It'll be good to return some of the help you've given me over the years

Pleased that it went well. Thanks for the update, we all like a happy ending

We have something similar, ours have low power red and green lasers that project tiny, intense moving dots in a matrix. They run off power supplies but i've adapted ours to run off a USB power pack to cut down on leads. They were about £10 ea.

Mine came with the light and are shaped to fit just that light. You can buy acrylic sheet cut to size but I've no idea if this would be suitable https://www.cutmy.co.uk/plastic/acrylic-perspex-sheets/frosted/translucent/3mm/L1020-W80/

Our recently ex drummer and a couple of friends bought their local inn when it was threatened with closure. He tried running pub bands and even quite good ones were only attracting a couple of dozen people and some were bringing in no more than a normal Saturday. He's switched to tribute acts and they are taking an extra £2-3,000 a night over the bar. Some of these are low-rent tribute bands but most are karaoke singers with backing tracks. One of my friends (ex Jules Holland Big Band singer, so he's good) is earning £400+ a night going out with backing tracks. Strangely I can't tempt him back to £75 a night to work with all the egos in a band. Our drummer is a really lovely guy who bought the pub partly because he wanted live music. He's faced with the choice of running a dreary, empty, loss making drinking den with bands or having a lively pub, full every weekend and being able to pay his staff decent wages. He hates that this is reality but his main aim was to save his local and there is limited space for sentiment. Meanwhile my singer is missing all the excitement and energy of a band but finds it hard to turn down the £400 gigs and enthusiatic audiences with no need for rehearsals or damage to his hearing.

It's a thought but what we've always tried to do are demos rather than talks. You'd need the right room to do that in and it would be difficult in practice. I'll give it some thought. This year I'm wondering about a proper blind test of something but I'll give it a little thought. I know I wandered into PA last year so I'd like to go back to something more bass related this year

Hi Sean, you'd have had a problem with any speaker in that position. Each surface the speaker is placed against boosts the bass in particular and you had all three surfaces to contend with. Effectively you had placed your speaker at the end of a huge conical horn. That's no criticism of you, I've been stuck many a time in the corner of a tiny performance space like that you really don't have a choice. Using the Monaco may have helped quite a lot but it's a horrible position to be in, literally The only thing you can do in that situation is to wind the bass right back. I'd use agressive HPF and be prepared to roll the bass eq pretty much right down if I needed too, I'd also be looking to boost the mids. Years ago I posted up the eq I'd ended up with in a particularly difficult hall. I had a Hartke with a graphic and I was stunned how much bass I had to roll off. It might have been better to swap places with the guitarist in this venue as it would be less affected by the corner position.

Hi Al, I don't really disagree, I think both things can be true at the same time. Let's face it the band really isn't the main event at a wedding It is a privilege to play and for the couple it is a one off event they can never get back. For the band it is just one event amongst many. but it is a huge responsibility to make it work. The audience generally just want to have a good time and are pretty much always on your side so there are lots of positives. The money is nice and when you are paid that much you expect your client to call the tunes. I admire the musicians who go this route, it is more demanding than the pub gig. For me though it's not something I'd actively go out and look for.

I've never aspired to function band work. I've probably not got the skill set anyway. The only functions I've done have been for friends who know what we do and are happy with our normal set. I've never seen the attraction of weddings. There's often a lot of travelling involved. There's usually lots of restrictions about setting up and knocking down at the end so it tends to be a very long day. The band is inevitably a bit of a side show, you work hard to fill the dance floor and then someone has to make a speech or there is a cake to be cut or whatever and you have to go again. They can be fun but more are just a chore, you aren't really encouraging me to start looking for weddings now

No come on, say what you really think I guess this gives @mrtcat a professional problem. If people commented on the band sounded at the sound at the event then the band's reputation is at risk. If the band start to highlight the problems with the sound then the venue could lose bookings and revenue. I can imagine that having invested £10,000's of pounds on this system the venue are going to be reluctant to re-visit the sound system. Equally the clients might eventually twig that the sound at this venue is never good. There are some delicate conversations to be had here. If the system is new the venue might have some redress with the people who sold them the system and the earlier they realise thay have an issue the easier that would be to deal with.

I havn't come across these, and not likely to with my band who rarely do functions and certainly not the posh ones. I had to look it up. There only seems to be one company selling them in the UK and for anyone not familiar it's a 'ceiling of sound' Lots of panels of small speakers forming a suspended ceiling directly above the dance floor. DSP is used partly for compression/limiting I suspect and also to do some phase control deliberately creating power alleys so the bass drops off rapidly as you move from under the speaker array. Reading between the lines there is probably some eq boosting the bass. To give anyone else reading this some idea there's a second hand system being sold for £17,000 with 64 panels totalling 576 tiny speakers. I'm imagining that with all the DSP it deliberately creates the full disco experience with the thumping one note bass that implies. Maybe @EBS_freak or one of the other sound guys may have come across the system so I stand to be corrected. Where was your band positioned? I'm guessing outside of the array and that you weren't allowed to use backline or floor monitors or that if you were levels were severely limited? Do you use electronic drums? The system wouldn't work to keep the noise down if the band were just outside the Zone Array creating 100db sound levels. The only solution for you would be for you all to use in-ears in which case you could have the sound you wanted, I've played the opening number of our set with in-ears only to find out the PA is still muted :)

I have some flourescent pink gaffa tape. All my leads have a strip wrapped round the cable so I recognise them as mine in the dark. Mainly this stops me 'acquiring' other people's leads as I box anything not nailed down at the end of a gig. It now means I can at least recognise I have someones kettle lead and return it to them. I also have sets of coloured XLR's from my days of running jam sessionswhere leads are swapped all evening.

I can never work out if this is just common sense or I am slightly bonkers/obsessive