LawrenceH

Mine is inputs on the side 😆 I find on the top is nicely out of the way especially on any single-row board, and it's easier getting the short cables to play nicely But really the most annoying thing is when you have a mix of both!

I think it's for people with big feet and/or chunky boots! Especially ones who are a bit more energetic on a dark stage - they don't like the switches being too close together.

Hi all, looking for recommendations please! I'm after someone in or near Bristol to do a setup on a Mexican 70s RI jazz including filing down nut slots (on a bound neck so can't just easily take the nut out to file the back) and potentially a bit of fret dressing if deemed worthwhile in pursuit of low action (7.25" radius I think). Also, any tips on going rate for this sort of work appreciated. Obviously I'd prefer it not to cost hundreds given that it's only a MIM but main priority is a competent job! Thank you in advance

I'd also add, that if you do want to focus on things like dynamics or smooth legato playing or whatever, it's probably better to spend a short time per session drilling exercises like scales/arpeggios where you focus just on that skill in a simplified context. That might appear to contradict what I said above but I think the short time is key. Do it only until you feel concentration waning or you've plateaued for the day. Try playing a C major scale up and down at p, then f, then after a while introduce mp, then mf. Do it legato, and do it staccato. Try doing it up and down one octave with a steady crescendo. Then up and down with steady diminuendo. Think about how your fingers are contacting the keys before and after the notes are played. Get your wrist angle right. I guarantee that kind of focus will help you when you go back to playing actual pieces where you're having to think about more aspects at once.

I'm not a pro-level musician/teacher so take what I say with a pinch of salt, but yes - I think only a minority of early-stage learners will play a piece 'perfectly' no matter how much they drill it. It's just not an efficient way to build up skill, you need a variety of exercises and challenges that involve as much of the brain as possible so one circuit isn't carrying the whole load. My own experience regardless of instrument is that improvement comes from moving on and learning coordination/phrasing/dynamics more holistically over many pieces. Sticking with your footballing analogy, it'd be a weird method to just drill one skill session after session. Pace of learning just won't increase beyond a certain point so you may as well move on to something else. Benefits of playing many pieces, all inter-related of course: 1. Rapid improvement per piece, keeps you motivated. 2. Builds versatility by practicing essentially similar skills but each in a unique context. 3. Improves sight-reading. This is huge, not just for the skill itself but what it means. You are decoding and finding the musical message in real-time, not just the black squiggles themselves but including the sense in the phrases, which means your ear is being tested in numerous ways. 4. Pattern-spotting between multiple musical pieces in succession, helps with reading, harmonic/scalar/rhythmic theory, general ear training, dexterity. 5. Going back to a piece after a break doing others gives you a fresh look with new musical perspectives and a chance to avoid baking in bad habits/mistakes that then take ages to undo. 6. Versatility gained here helps playing with others, and will translate e.g. from piano to bass! Edit: 7. Forgot this one, but avoids fatigue! As alluded to above, practicing one thing again and again is more fatiguing, relates to efficiency/rate of improvement. That bit of the brain is knackered now and won't get any better for a bit, move on to something else. Learning a new piece you're not just focused on coordinating fingers, but also all the sight-reading stuff (theory, reading, musicality etc). You're spreading the cognitive load!

I nearly mentioned Fohhn as being the ones I'd consider - really, really excellent speakers! As you say though the price is a fair bit higher than something like a DXR8 or similar...

Thinking about conventional small PA speakers - in small pubs I've happily used a single Yamaha DXR8 to carry vocals/acoustic instruments. It's good to have two for those instances where the room is wide, but one is enough for a lot of small UK venues if you position and angle it right. Sometimes, by the time you've put two speakers up you've obscured more than half the performance area from view!

Not sure what generation that is exactly, since round here I probably see as many if not more Gen Xers having those choices as Millennials/Zs! But IMO he's a really interesting choice - someone who merges music with hacking culture and has a popular 'new media' presence. Offers interesting possibilities for documenting development of a song/performance over social media which would be a very novel way of engaging people in the build-up, especially if followers can interact with the process. He's someone who I think retains something of the earlier DIY, anarchic spirit of pre-google YouTube in a positive way.

Fingers crossed!

I dimly remember - and could be wrong - the specs of that driver favoured using it in such a way that you could get a good amount of upper bass from it, but if tuned this way in a fair-sized box it was particularly vulnerable to unloading below the resonant frequency, so pops and thumps with ultra low frequency content would be dangerous, and accordingly it particularly benefits from a (steep) high pass filter. Xmax was also measured using Klippel analysis which put it around 4mm, because it remained quite well behaved as the coil started to leave the magnetic gap - but really Xmax by measurement the old fashioned way would be just 2.5mm.

It's a decent driver really when kept within it's limits but the xlim doesn't give the safety margin as for other premium drivers from European manufacturers. It was very popular in bass applications a decade or so ago, and works well enough but I think it must fail quite quickly above the point where it stops sounding ok. I have blown one myself and remember plenty of other users did too!

The irony for amplifiers is these numbers matter a lot less now that power is cheap and light. Just makes it even more confusing pairing with appropriate speakers. Having said that, subjectively these micro amps don't quite seem to match up to older class AB amps with nominally similar ratings. Whether that's because their power supplies can't sustain the demand for as long under load, or the older amps have more forgiving distortion characteristics at higher loads, or it's all in my head, I don't know enough to say (it's not all in my head though it's really reeeeeal :p). BUT, with my £150-when-new Bugera Veyron it's all immaterial. Weighs not much, fits comfortably into a laptop bag. Claims 2000 fictional watts, supposedly measures a hair under 800 watts, in reality it doesn't matter if that's not ultimately as loud as 'old watts'. I drive 2x 250w RMS 10" drivers and it's always enough. Played the Fleece in Bristol a few nights ago, it filled the stage easily and it sounds great, and the subs/PA take over for the venue anyway as is required in a place that size whatever you put on stage.

I like that tortoiseshell, where's it from?

Think that would count as 'cruel and unusual punishment' under the UDHR?

What I find really useful is if the timbre varies with playing dynamics, allowing lots of expressive variation, but the actual output volume stays much more fixed.

Personally, I would definitely want the timbre to vary with dynamics similar to how it does with a DX7 - otherwise it's just like playing a fixed sample. Edit to add: any of these voices likely to make it into the 4.5 preset list? They sound great.

I gig either one or two 1x10 cabs. Always enough between them. Often enough just one of them, though I prefer the tonal balance of two together. Generally the bigger the driver the better the weight/volume(size)/volume(loudness) ratio. Suggesting that 1x12" is a great size for a single cab solution. But I went with 2 1x10" because two lighter cabs is an easier carry. Along similar lines, I have recently thought about swapping to 2 2x8" because that slim tall form factor, while less efficient in terms of displacement volume and weight, is even easier to store at home and would make a great small-footprint vertical stack on stage. If only Markbass did a matching 802 passive cab it would be a perfect little modular setup which I'd imagine would cover most use cases. As it is I'd probably look at a pair of the Trace 2*8 cabs which AFAIK use the excellent little 8PR200 driver from Faital. But if you don't mind adding a non-matching box further down the line the Markbass does look good to me.

I have a TB Raxx and it gets pretty messy. I used it for recording an album straight from the pre into the desk once, and it did that just-past-the-edge-of-clean thing with aplomb, got a really satisfyingly thick sound. Very underrated preamp, would command a far higher price if it didn't have the Peavey hair metal styling IMO. Mine's a keeper.

I like reading people's different subjective preferences, makes me question/analyse my own. I don't think it's just a matter of volume per se, rather the EQ balance you want and where there is space in the mix for the bass. 100w is ample in some cases and woefully inadequate in others. Bear in mind that speaker/cab design philosophy changes a lot depending on how much power you have available. The right 15" driver and cab will let you gig a 50w head, but to scale that up even a bit requires a lot of boot space.

Not sure if that was directed at me or not, but I thought the whole point of a forum is to be able to voice opinions and discuss the reasons for our subjective preferences. Personally, I've found that in the gig circumstances where 200w is enough through 2x 10" drivers, then I can instead get away with just 1 driver if I push it using a 500w amp - remembering that at 8 ohms I'd only be getting about 130 Vs 300 watts based on typical amps on the market at those sizes. Plenty of good drivers nowadays will happily take 200 to 300w all day long so it makes sense to me to have amps that match that. For me, whatever solution gets me to gig volume for least size/weight is my preference. As mentioned by DGBass above, the likely reason why there is a plethora of 200w amps is, that's where the current technology is at in terms of cost sweet spot. Rather than it being the wattage the market 'demands'. With the previous generation of slightly larger and more expensive class D modules that spot appeared to be around 450-500 watts.

I understand well enough the relationship between watts, speaker sensitivity and volume. But (for example) wattage doubling tends to be dismissed as 'only' 3 dB difference ignoring the fact that a few dB is usually the difference between keeping up or not in the type of venue where you rely on backline. Super small amps are great but if I have to add more speakers they've made a bigger problem than the one they solve. My very cheap ~800w Bugera Veyron is only a little bigger than a Trace Elf or similar, and only a couple of kg heavier. If I'm using modern long-throw drivers that can handle the wattage, then I can squeeze close to 6dB more out of them than at 200, with barely any extra packing space or weight compared to doing the same by doubling my speaker complement. In practice that means my 2 DIY 1x10" cabs made well over a decade ago have handled any gig I've thrown at them and I've always had that 'punch' you get from having a little headroom at the amp. My 500w F1 used to work ok but was occasionally at its limit, whereas 200w wouldn't reliably be enough. I also agree with @la bam that in practice, for whatever reason, turning volumes down on powerful setups doesn't usually have the same effect as using a smaller rig. But that might be as much a speaker thing. I wish I could find a good lightweight 8" driver (or even 6") optimised for high power handling, low resonant frequency, medium Q and low sensitivity. Something towards the old Acme B1 but even smaller and less sensitive.

It's a tricky thing to get right. I really like simple analogue synth programming and the real-time morphing possibilities, as long as I'm working on a classic-style synth like an Odyssey or Minimoog, where every function has a dedicated knob/slider. Also that approach relies on keyboard as an input method as I can play with one hand and tweak with the other. Much harder to make that work in a pedal format - keyboard naturally has all that space above the keys. Assignable expression pedal is about the limit imo. I've not spent enough time trying to make sense of FM with the benefit of a good instruction manual, but it's certainly not intuitive like analogue. I think most users treated the DX7 as a tweakable preset machine and I expect that's how 99% of the FI4.5 users are going to approach it. Really looking forward to the release of this update! Though it's going to require me to make a new pedalboard, to fit it in.

IMO there's good mileage in playing through a lot of pieces in the early stages and moving on quite quickly. My daughter's sax teacher has been doing this with her, and she has been progressing quickly and, importantly, maintained motivation. If you go back to those pieces in a month after working on something else you might find them a lot easier and fresher.

I have both the 74s and older AV75s in a couple of basses. Both are great. I get better string to string balance on the 75s but big caveat is that I haven't had time to adjust the 74s on what is fairly a new arrival, so perhaps that will change when I do. I'd definitely go for a 70s-type pickup for a 70s bass. That said, I'd also consider something like the Ultrajazz.

Mine is the CQ20B which for good or ill has an inbuilt PSU. But I'd be disappointed if A&H don't offer any support for your case, key thing is usually to try and speak to someone directly rather than end up in the email void.