Phil Starr

I love a happy ending 💖

I think that pic is conclusive (though sometimes you can have more than one fault) You should be able to operate the swich manually (be gentle) with a pencil tip and get it to operate. The spring is to turn the stamp of a 16 stone bassist into a gentle push. You could try putting something soft on the bottom of the shortened spring to shim out the gap as a temporary fix while you wait for the replacement spring. A little rubber foot might work, or a piece of felt. Hang off with the Servisol until you've tested the switch. It doesn't so much clean the switch as move the dirt around so there are a limited number of times it will work in a semi-sealed microswitch

Hi John, thanks for offering to help out, they are non latching momentary switches allowing some basic programming. A double tap saves the settings

I opened mine up and gave the inside of the switches a good squirt of Servisol (switch cleaner) no further problems to date. I run mine on batteries, I find that if the batteries are getting close to dead the switches don't work as they should. Remember these aren't actual swiches, which are in the electronics, they just send a signal that you want to change something and if the batteries need changing then you don't have enough power for the programmable to work Paging @Chienmortbb

I did wonder if there weren't local names for playing styles. I really enjoyed the nostalgia of watching Rhiannon playing something I attempted so long ago.

Thanks Pete I was a self taught and not very successful banjo player back in the days when Scruggs was seen as not really folk music. My 'tutors' were Pete Seeger's book and another which I think was called the Art Of The Mountain Banjo or some such name. I spent hours trying to get the picking styles right but foolishly never really got on top of many songs. That three finger technique that she uses was one that I learned at the time. I never heard anyone at the time describe down picking or frailing as clawhammer but certainly now that seems to be common usage. It's nearer 60 years than 50 since I last seriously tried to play the banjo so I may have misremembered

Now can somebody tell me what that picking style is called. When I learned it (a long time ago) it was called clawhammer with the pinch being the 'claw'. Now i see internet guides callingthe picking that I call 'frailing' being described as clawhammer.

I probably need to go up into the loft, I'm not sure what is up there any more.

I'm going to miss the Bristol store, what else will I do when the family are hitting the shops. I'll miss Mansons in Exeter more though. It's been inevitable for some time that these stores would be in trouble. If we all trot off to Thomann and the like for our needs then they are bound to suffer. It's not as if the rest of the high street isn't in the middle of a huge upheaval also. I don't think the situation has been helped by the likes of Gibson and Fender forcing them to carry huge stocks either. The other reality is that the guitar has probably lost it's dominance in music and 'peak guitar' was actually back in the early 80's with perhaps it's own indy revival. On the bright side I'm seeing a couple of independent shops benefitting. Often by offering other services. In Chard (a small Somerset market town) we have The Somerset Music Academy, it's a guitar shop which also offers guitar and other music tuition combined with a repair and set up service. It combines a steady turnover of used gear with a range of um... lesser known brands. Even this has a twist, they are careful what they stock and every instrument gets a set up before they sell it. There are some very playable, nice sounding instruments at reasonable prices. Something you can't get from the warehouses. The tuition gives them a stream of customers for starter instruments and the kids get something decent to start their journey with. I believe they plan on running a rehearsal room too. There's so little competition out there that people will travel to go somewhere you can try before you buy.

If you want to design an amp driving into 2ohm loads then the first thing you'd need to do would be to double the power supply unless you are prepared to see the power produced by the amp limited by the current available. You'd also need to considerably beef up the heat sinking, although the basic design of most of the amplifier module would remain the same you'd also need to increase the power handling of the output componets to survive the extra current they would be carrying. There would be considerable expense involved in doing this right and it might well add 30-50% to the cost of production for an amp that would only appeal to a limited market. It's significant that historically a lot of 1,000W amps run parallel output stages mainly because it is as cheap or cheaper to do this than to create a 2ohm amplifier. A big beefy power supply does add funcrtionality to any amp and a well specified supply is worth having as it will also improve performance at 4ohms, to an extent you get what you pay for and power supplies are roughly as costly as amps, sometimes more so. An amp might well be advertised as 2ohm stable but if the output remains the same or is even reduced at 2ohms compared with 4ohms then what is the point?

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.