Phil Starr

You might want to get this moved to Amps and Cabs where the more nerdy of us hang out Before we can advise you I think you need to indicate a budget. Tell us a bit more about the band (line up, commitment funding etc) If you are a bunch of well off 40 somethings for whom this is a serious hobby you have a lot of choices. If you are the only one with your hand in your pocket you might make different choices. If no-one else in the band is interested or prepared to work collectively then your choices will be limited by their co-operation. If i was starting from scratch I would love to start with all of the sound being properly mixed and going through the PA with minimum sound on stage. The band will sound better, you'll all hear everything better and you'll avoid everyone ending up with hearing problems like yours and also mine. If everyone else is committed to their own personal guitar amps and you have a drummer then you are probably condemned to 100db plus on stage, congested sound and having to buy a bass amp that will match the drums in volume as a minimum. The good news is that the headphone monitoring means at least you will be able to hear and not get too much extra hearing loss. There are any number of amps that push out 300/500W and these with a decent 1x12 or 2x10 as a minimum will be loud enough to match the drums as a rule of thumb anyway. One of the first things to consider is a mixer for your band's PA. If you are wearing headphones you'll want your own mix, as you've already realised. You can do this with your own mixer as you've suggested but I'd strongly advise not to go for what is a bodge solution. All the modern digital mixers will give you the option of every member of the band having their own monitoring mix (unless you are bigger than a six piece) Bought new that is around £350 your own sub mixer will cost probably over £100 and you'll have other expenses in splitting the signal to the PA. Someone will still have to buy the main mixer so it's probably going to cost more. As to PA most of us have a pair of powered 1x12+horns on poles which cover most small to medium gigs. So tell us the budget etc and we can give better advice. No point telling you what you can get for £1,000 if your budget is £500

There's three warning signs

It happens. I'm like you I suspect, not the greatest but work hard and take it seriously. The trouble is that you don't always know the whole story with a band. They may be a start up band or one that hasn't gigged for a couple of years (especially now). There may be some churn with new people coming in who aren't up to speed or people who have promised lots but won't deliver. I did one audition where they had five guitarists andfive bassists and they auditioned us in pairs! Bad luck if your guitarist was poor. I've had auditions where one of the band members had decided to leave but the departure of another member let them off the hook of telling the band leader they'd had enough, When the new bassist comes along they just aren't committed and leave as soon as you are recruited. I learned that bands whole set after the audition and never met with them again as the drummer left. I've also been band leader and let down by people in my own band not taking auditions seriously. Auditions where I've turned up and they've played in keys other than the one they told me or where they've all learned different songs from the list I was sent. I hate being 'between' bands. There are so many musicians who are deluded dreamers or just plain lazy. Bands where one person has all the energy and the rest are just passengers. The trick I've learned is to research bands before I audition. If they are a working band or even working musicians they leave a trace all over the internet. If there is no video or sound recordings then you can pretty much assume they aren't serious. If they say busy or gigging bands you should be able to find some publicity stuff for at least some of the gigs. I used to undervalue myself a little, grateful for anyone who would look at me as a bassist but 'reliable', 'organised' and 'hard working' are in short supply so add those to 'steady and reliable'. Really target what you want in a band and do some research before wasting your time on someone else's dream. I'm not one of life's pessimists, I've met some great people as well as some of the examples above but there is a world of difference between the genuine semi-pro gigging band and the bedroom dreamers and you need to spot the signs. Good Luck

I have a vague worry about how hard it is to learn this stuff nowadays. Like most of my generation I leaned most of what I know from practically tinkering with stuff and building my own gear from projects in magazines like Practical Wireless and Wireless World. There were also loads of books popularising electronics and DIY was a real hobby with loads of support. All of this stuff is now on the internet but so is a lot of poorly written and incorrect information. To be honest there is way more known with human knowledge doubling every few years. When I started it was all valves! At least BassChat is full of people trying to be helpful

Oh, what the hell. First of all don't worry about an amp which is designed to work in bridged mode only. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, nobody is asking you to redesign the amp and you can't undo or alter the way the designer/manufacturer has gone about making the amp. Just play bass and don't worry about it. If you have a stereo amp which is capable of operating in bridged mode then you do need to think twice about how you use it. Power goes up with the square of the voltage so theoretically bridging which doubles the voltage gives you four times more power through the same speaker. That's theoretically, but in practice the amps power supply and maybe other components won't give or be able to handle the current. Probably the speakers won't either. Not all amps or speakers are created equal so at this point you need to go to the manual and hope the information is available, correct and in language you can understand. If you understand and are confident in what you are doing then all will probably be fine but if you aren't a technical person why go down this route? If you are trying to understand this genuinely then it isn't complex but you need to know a few things. Electrical Power is Voltage x Current Ohm's Law is that Current is Voltage/Resistance (for speakers resistance is more accurately impedance which is partly frequency dependant but ignore that for now, assume an 8ohm speaker is 8ohms) These two formulae can be joined so that Power = Voltage Squared/Resistance or Current Squared x Resistance In bridged amps the two amps are wired so that as one amp goes negative the other goes positive so the voltage the speaker sees is double the power supply voltage. Most amps are limited in the amount of current they can supply and run hotter at high currents. This is where the manual might help but probably won't. It get's more complex than this when you go into detail but this is the basics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power

Well done for seeing this through, the SM212/CDX! 1445 combination is a lovely one, and as you've spotted really revealing. I'm actually about to order up the last remaining parts so my SM212 will end up with the same pairing. I have too many half finished projects. Yours is looking great.

I think you've answered your own question. If one cab is making a noise and the other identical cab isn't then it's the cab. That wasn't what you were asking though. Farting out is usually the description for a bass driver reaching it's mechanical limits, often the rear of the coil banging on the back of the magnet but it can be other things. If the speaker reaches this stage it's also likely to be over-heating and producing high levels of distortion. Asking too much is about too much power or excessive bass content. @stevie has posted whilst I've been typing and I was going to say pretty much the same. The one qualification is about eq, even relatively light bass boost can more than double what you are asking of your amp and speaker and an HPF halve the demands so a lot depends upon the sound you are going for. It's always wrong to drive your speaker to audible distortion levels disconnect it and see if the distortion goes

Still have mine. Fugly as charged but it's just entirely practical. Bass gear full PA and drumkit can be swallowed plus three people in the front. A few years back I made the decision to spend £1000 on a new subframe on it, probably the same as the value of the car at the time. I've had four years motoring out of that decision and it is still going strong. I dread the day when it finally goes and I have to find a replacement.

Yeah the bridge is in the wrong place and needs moving back Looking at the pics the rough windings at the end of the string are sitting on the saddles which isn't right. The saddles on my basses are about 1/2" from the end of the screw adjustment which gives me roughly an inch of potential adjustment for intonation which i check each time I do a set up or change strings. You'll have to take the strings off to move the bridge, I'd be running a straight edge along the neck to see what i've got. a slight bow along the neck wouldn't worry me and I'd check I could adjust the truss rod while it was easy to get to it, you might need to loosen and clean and oil it all easier at this stage. If it is straight when there are no strings it will bow into a concave curve when you tune up the strings. What you are aiming for is a slight concave bow. There are loads of YouTube videos of how to do this. Once you've set the relief (amount of bowing) you can then set the string height so that the strings just manage not to buzz when fretted all along the neck. I then set the intonation with an electronic tuner. If its E on the open string it should be E on the 12th fret and so on. Again all of this is on YouTube. It's just about working methodically and going back to double check as adjusting one thing may affect what you've already done. There are useful gauges for setting neck relief and string height which only cost a few $$ This is also a skill for a guitarist to know

I think what I find amazing is that singers often miss out on what the lyrics mean. I love a clever lyric especially in a pop song. How can you tell a story or sing an emotion if you don't know what it is you are singing about. I love little moments like the Nina Simone version of Feeling good where she changes one word (from you to I) and turns a song from a musical into a civil rights anthem. Stars when you shine, you know how I feel Scent of the pine, you know how I feel Oh, freedom is mine, and I know how I feel

Welcome to BassChat You might be asking in the wrong part of the forum. The real experts on this might well be stuck over in the build diaries where a number of luthiers hang out There's not much you can't fix on a bass so long as bit's aren't physically broken or the neck is twisted. So start with a simple look down th length of the nec and see if there is any sign of twisting. A bend isn't alarming if it is slight. as the truss rod is there to adjust that. I'd be suspicious of that bridge if it is a replacement. You can check if it is in the right position with a ruler first. the distance of the nut to the 12th fret and the bridge saddles to the 12th fret should be the same. The octave is halfway along the string so this has to be so whatever the instrument. If it isn't they've put the bridge on in the wrong place, though as you can see the bridge has allowances for slight adjustment. So if you've no twisting it isn't going to be expensive to fix and far from impossible to do yourself.

Can you clarify the speakers in the video aren't the Beta 12A's but the BP122's which are at least designed specifically for bass. Are you retrofitting the Beta's? These are entry level speakers but I'm a little more optimistic about them, they are the sort of drivers fitted in a lot of mid priced gear, nothing special but not awful either and they have a very enhanced top end so will give you a lively sound a lot of people like. The cab looks to be around 100l which is very much on the small side to get the best low end out of them but that does improve power handling. Even so a high pass filter would help a lot. You are going to get a bit of a rise in the 100Hz region which will give them a bit of a thump and smiley faced eq built in. Again this is common in a lot of mid-range gear. I think personally there is a lot of nonsense about the 'is it good for low B' question. Most of the fundamental is filtered out simply because of the positioning of the pickups right down the bottom end of the strings which means if the speaker isn't overloaded across the frequency range it shouldn't be overwhelmed at low B, not to mention that not many songs have you play a continuous low B or even anything below E. Unless you are going to use a 500W amp absolutely cranked with lot's of bass boost I think you'll find it will be OK. The cab is going to have a strong sound of it's own though so give it a good listen before buying. Lot's of love for Poland over here at the moment btw. Eminence Cab designs

OK, I thought WinISD ought to have a way of programming QL and it does. Select 'Box' on the menu bottom left and click on 'advanced'. Default on mIne is set to QL=10. Vance Dickason in the Design Cookbook has Ql=7 as median with values of Ql=3 and 15 as low and high. I've always assumed Ql =7 would be the default. As I said I've never bothered to measure Ql and only regard WinISD as a way of getting close and then something that will need tweaking.

I've also found that. So if you are doing something wrong then it's more than just you There are a number of reasons, the TS parameters can be hard to measure and there are manufacturing spreads but one of the problems is that there are other parameters of the speaker and cabinet that aren't accounted for in the calculations like QL the damping/quality factor due to leakage in the cab and inherent to the speaker. We have double checked most of the published BassChat designs and @stevie measured the TS parameters himself. Even so the WinISD port length is just a starting point for us. It's one reason we haven't gone for shelf ports where changing the length is more of a problem than just cutting a few different lengths of drainpipe.

It's a funny old world isn't it? Whenever this debate starts there are always two groups of people who dive in. Those who read proper music and demean those who can't and those who play by ear and look down upon anyone who can't pick out a bass line, note perfect from just listening. The implication is always that people who rely upon tab and chord sheets aren't 'real' musicians and really shouldn't be trying. Surely tab is just a shorthand way of writing something down so it can be widely shared. A way in which we can say 'I don't know how to play that bit' 'how do you play it? I think it's great that someone I've never met has laboriously listened to a song over and over, written down what they think it is and then wants to share it with me. I've even put up a few tabs myself and I'm kind of delighted that despite the mistakes in them over 300,000 people have used them. (I had no idea until I just checked). So the question is Why are tabs always wrong?". Well are they? Always? Does that matter? What does wrong mean anyway? Is it wrong because there is a note missing, a root/fifth that is just written as a root? A bass line correctly transcribed from a live version because the recorded version is so heavily processed you can't really hear what the bassist does? How about when the bass is double tracked? Actually on that issue the sheet music if often 'wrong' even though it is written in conventional notation. It is frequently a simplification of something that has multiple tracks overlaid. Actually I'm kind of sad that Ultimate Guitar is getting so good with the official tabs. I quite liked looking at four or five different ways of playing an approximation of a bass line. I pretty much learned to play with tab and looking to see what other people have done with a song is still a really helpful way of getting a working line quickly. I've always played in bands and someone always wants me to learn something yesterday. I've not got a great ear and for me a short cut is something I use when I can. The band aren't interested in how I get there and they don't notice when I cut corners so long as I hit a root on the one and keep the rhythm going. Tab is just a useful way of writing stuff down. It helps some of us, if you are lucky enough to have had lessons and can read that's great, I wish I was one of you but I'm not and nor are most of us.

Someone will say this so I might as well be the first. It isn't all about the watts. Extra power will make you louder but so will more efficient speakers. doubling your amp power doesn't give you a lot of extra sound just 3db but doubling your speakers will usually give you 5-6db. That being said most bass amps are of the 300/500W into 4/8ohms and that is going to be enough for most situations, nowadays amp power is almost not a worry. Enough in this case is enough to keep up with a loud drummer. Again not a strict law but a good rule of thumb is that a decent 1x12 will do for a rehearsal or small gig and two 12's will pretty much cover anything so a lot of us go for a couple of 1x12's. So yes the Ashdown Mag 600 plus the Eden cabs look a decent option. Ashdown's after sales service even on used gear is great which is a bonus. Going used is sensible, you'll never find the 'one' first time and you can get most/all of your money back if you decide to change things around.

This is clearly the guitarist's band, certainly in their head and in reality too if he is recruiting singers without discussion. If said guitarist is doing all the work of running the band and getting the gigs too then it's not an unusual situation. You've said yourself he's a limited musician but organising is a skill too. I'm a great believer that the person doing all the work get's to make most decisions, though it's a lot better if they also listen. To views that is you'll rarely get the majority of musicians to listen to others I've been in bands where I was just the bass player and others where I've run things. It's a PITA when everybody leaves it to you and moans at anything that doesn't go the way they want. It's great when someone else does all the hard work and you just have to play. It's greatest when everyone just talks to and trusts each other. The worst though is when the band has an unacknowledged leader and fills up with internal politics. It sounds like that is perhaps what is going on. Have you tried talking to the guitarist? Not about his playing, that won't go well It may be that he is just grabbing at solutions to keep going, find singer, find dep for bassist who hasn't made three gigs in a row. He may well just regard the rest of the band as just a way of getting to play himself. Or not. How do the rest of the band feel? Might be worth talking to them. If you enjoy the music then maybe just relax and let them organise, it is a load of unrewarding work after all. Do you have other options? Quitting a band with nothing to go to is rarely a good move. If the band politics is spoiling it for you then it's for you to make the decision.

I hadn't meant to get into a lengthy debate about rare earth metals and I think my sense of humour may have rather obscured what I wanted to say which was essentially that I think the world of mass produced speakers is going to change over the next few years as the production bottleneck which pushed up the price of neodymium is resolved and that new technology will bring the price down. I also wanted to alert people to the environmental significance of a new refining technique which will reduce pollution, energy costs and the need for more mining. I'm one of those very odd people who read academic papers for fun and I thought I'd come across something of wider interest which I've linked to in the OP Obviously the people reading on BassChat have a special interest in speakers but I didn't seriously think they'd miss the reference to electicity generation and electric motors or the implications for climate change reduction. I suppose the 'cheap speakers' was really a bit of clickbait. Sorry It is quite right that REE's aren't really that rare in the earths rocks, rare earth is just the mane the early chemists gave them. Even the rarest are more abundant than gold but they are more difficult to separate and refine and it is the supply that is limited. As well as magnetics they are an essential part of LED's and used to make the hard glass that make up the screens you are reading this on. They are used in fibre optics and responsible for the improvements in many battery technologies we desperately need. They are also used in the lithography we use to print semiconductor chips.

Well done, I'd come to exactly the same conclusion 110l is just too big to be a mini-sub but 80l is still manageable size wise but gives you a potentially flat(-3db) response down to 50Hz which was my target. If you're using winisd then you need to start looking at the tuning frequency, I found 40hz gives the flattest response with the slowest roll off but have a look at the power handling which improves a lot in the 50-100Hz range if you tune to 50hz. That's also reflected in the maximum output graphs. Tuning to 50Hz does mean there is a 1db hump and 45Hz looks a great compromise tuning on just the frequency response but excursion limited power means that response won't be available when running at high levels. That could bring on reliability problems but is much more likely to introduce distortion. On that basis I'd go for a 50Hz tuning, it's probably going to make little difference in practice as you rarely get to full power levels and the speaker still has a bit of safety margin beyond xmax. There is very little fundamental in bass guitar so it is only drums that will be likely to demand those high levels of output. Frankly I would always put a limiter/compression on drum mics anyway. I also don't think you'd notice the 1db hump in practice. This is an area where the designers choice comes in but have a look before you start making sawdust and see what you think. The port calculations are simple in winisd, just change the shape of the port to square put the full width of the cab in as one of the dimensions and away you go. You need to look at 'rear port velocity'; that's just a winisd quirk, you can put the port anywhere but it is calculated as rear port. Try and get the port velocity at all frequencies down to 50Hz below 17m/sec. Above this speed you'll get probable wind noise from the port. You need a larger port for a PA sub than a bass speaker as you are going to assume it will have to handle full bass output down to the design lowest frequency. As I've said you can get away with smaller ports for bass guitar which doesn't have a lot of fundamental. I found a 35cmx7cm port achieved this. Lastly shape; it's worth making the cab quite squat. the cab is likely to be supporting the tops so a bigger footprint makes for a more stable base. it also allows for a longer port which you'll need to avoid wind noise. Getting the speaker close to the ground will also give you reinforcement up to higher frequencies. With an instrument speaker a taller cab is better as it can improve the amount of mids reaching your ears when you are close to the cab on-stage. Good luck, you are pretty much there with the design. The bad news is that you now share my addiction to speakers

OK this has uploaded. These are the responses of the SM212 in three cabs. The blue is 30l, green is the 50l BassChat Mk1 design and the red is a maximally flat design of 110l. You can clearly see the smaller the cab the less bass, though the blue30l cab is actually louder than the others at 120Hz the loss of thee bottom octave 40-80Hz is obvious. So now it is over to you to decide what you want. You can't really hear the frequencies below 50Hz very well and in small enclosed spaces they just make everything sound muddy by exciting room resonances. Most important to hearing bass well are the harmonics with 80-160Hz giving us the impression of bass which is why you think you can hear bass from a small radio speaker. It is perfectly possible to use the 50l cab here as a sub in a deliberately limited system. With a slight tweak of the tuning it will go down to 50Hz(-3db) and give you a slight boost at 100hz. Output will be 122db max which equated to what most manufacturers are describing as 128db. Obviously you'll be missing about half an octave of deep bass but that's going to affect any keyboards or kick/floor tom more than bass guitar where you'll hardly notice it. In a small venue you'd probably want to filter those frequencies out anyway. However the possibility is there to exploit a bit more of the SM212's potential by increasing the cab volume and getting a response between the 50 and 110l cab. Keeping the profile of the cab and increasing the depth by 20cm will give you a significant improvement in deep bass response.

First of all the cab is correctly rated. It should be fine with your amp. if all else is well. Secondly unless the speaker cab is shorting out it is unlikely that the cab ort he speaker lead (which you might want to check) is responsible. The amp should turn itself off if there were anything wrong without causing problems other than temporary silence. There shouldn't be a smell of burning which is more likely to be an indicator of a failed or failing component inside the amp. if the amp is now working then all that has happened is that the protection circuits have taken over and switched the amp off for you, removing the power and letting the amp cool down has allowed it to re-set. It may be something as simple as a faulty joint sparking but something is wrong and I'd get somebody competent to have a look. Good Luck

From a technical point of view it is no longer sensible to try and fill the room from backline amplification. To reach levels of 90db at the back of even a modest sized room you are going to have levels of well over 100db on stage. That is going to make it impossible to keep the sound out of the vocal mic(s) and you will always sound muddy. More importantly those levels will permanently damage your hearing after less than an hour and you will progressively lose more each time you gig. It makes much more sense to use modest sound levels on stage and use the PA in front of you to fill the room. In the long run it works out cheaper that way too and your equipment carrying will be easier on your backs. If this is a new venture it is worth having this conversation with the new band before you go down the 1970's route. If your drummer is unable to control their levels and your guitarist a bit of a dinosaur then I'd really strongly advise you to look to going in-ears. I now have huge hearing loss and tinnitus and I wish I had changed the approach earlier. Speakers like the Alto are fantastic value for money and way better than cheap speakers used to be, unbelievable for the price but there are compromises that have to be made at the price. Generally the problem with the bass drivers in the cabs is that they have smaller magnet systems and so excursion is limited and the frequency response is compromised. I use QSC and RCF speakers and currently you can get better sound at the price from the RCF's but both are great speakers as are Yamahas. You get what you pay for at this price point but the choice is yours, the cheapest solution would be a second matching Alto. That should mean you can match the output of the drums. Whether you choose better speakers is your choice. I'm surprised by the idea that RCF's are unreliable, mine have been faultless and I don't know of anyone who has had any trouble with them. They are nicely made. Obviously any product produced in the thousands can have the odd problem but this is the first I've heard of with RCF's. If @Woodwindhas additional information I'd be interested to hear about it.

Whilst it is true that neodymium isn't particularly rare it is still in short supply, some of the other rare earths are in even shorter supply and a few used in computer chips are becoming a problem. Although the chemistry of acid leaching used to extract them isn't particularly sophisticated it's a highly polluting process. The 'ores' used in refining REE's have very low proportions of RE's so a lot of mining has to be done and almost all of this becomes acid polluted waste. Fly ash from power stations actually has a better proportion of REE's and is a waste product from mining that is already taking place. The electrical sintering process breaks up the crystalline structures of the ash and releases more of the neodymium so the process is several times more efficient. Reducing the cost of production by 90% and the increase in availability is going to reduce the price of anything that uses neodymium and that means renewable energy production. The extraction technique can also be used on mined ores and the waste products of aluminium production which is good because fly ash is the by-product of coal fired power stations which we all hope are on the way out. All of this is still in development, in the USA mainly and will take years to become significant but for those of us watching the increased availability of REE's with reduced environmental costs has to be good news and lord knows we need some now.

OK I know some of you think that neodymium is the devil's magnetic but really it's just a way of making more powerful magnets or the same magnets in a smaller lighter way. Until a few years ago lightweight speakers were falling in price and becoming more and more common then the Chinese who produced most of the neodymium started an evil plan to build windmills and electric cars and cornered the market for the neo they were in fairness producing. Other countries have now opened their own mines and the neo availability has eased but neo speakers are still frighteningly expensive. A few years ago I bought a Deltalite for £66 it is now £200, almost as good as Bitcoin Now I picked up in New Scientist that a new technique for extracting Rare Earth Elements including neo from industrial waste has been developed which may have solved the speaker magnet problem. To be fair it may also save us from global warming through all those windmills and energy efficient motors but I digress. Basically the technique is to release all the REE's including neo by electrically sintering industrial waste from power stations and mining. The ash from power stations produced each year contains around 3.75 million tonnes of Rare Earths and the most recent figure I could find for REE consumption was 19,000tonnes in 2018. The new extraction process cuts the cost of extraction by 90% compared with conventional mining. So there you go, it's profitable, cuts our need to r*pe the planet with mines and potentially brings down the cost and availability problems of speaker magnets (and windmills) Rare earth metals are also used in the manufacture of electronics so expect even more of the devil's amplification. It's no accident we call it class D. PS I read this so you don't have to Rare earth elements from waste https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abm3132

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