Which bass speakers to buy

[Andrew Truscott]

Hi everyone. My name is Andrew and I have been playing bass for 56 years, when career allowed. At last after retiring I have formed my dream band which is a tribute to FREE and BAD COMPANY, although to me it's really all about FREE. I own a 1973 Gibson EB3 and play through an Orange Terror 500w amp with valve pre-amp, into a lightweight Bareface 1 x 12" (maybe 700w) cab + a Lightweight Orange 1 x12" 400w cab. For years I have been focussed on getting those punchy, overdriven but precise notes that Andy Fraser produced with Free. I have the right guitar, although maybe 6 years newer, and I play through the bridge pickup and use my fingers close to the bridge, so I have got close to his style. What alludes is the tone. I can get pretty close but never clean enough and I wondered if anyone has a view about gear, especially speaker cabs. At our local studio I use their huge Roland 4 x 10" combo and with everything set flat this gives the right sound, but at 73 years old I am past lugging big gear and I only use light weight now. Does anyone think using 10" speakers, like the Roland, would add more clarity?    

[SpondonBassed]

Welcome Andrew.

[SpondonBassed]

Paging @Phil Starr.

 

You seem to have a good understanding of cones and horns and the boxes they are mounted in...

 

Andrew (above) is search for his holy grail.  Failing that... he'll settle for a good reproduction of Andy Fraser's tone

[ezbass]

Can’t help you with your tone question, unfortunately, but 

[Phil Starr]

1 hour ago, SpondonBassed said:

Paging @Phil Starr.

 

You seem to have a good understanding of cones and horns and the boxes they are mounted in...

 

Andrew (above) is search for his holy grail.  Failing that... he'll settle for a good reproduction of Andy Fraser's tone

 

That's kind but I'm better at theory than I am at tones. I'll do my best for Andrew though. I had a quick look and at the Isle of Wight in 1970 Andy Fraser was standing in front of a couple of full Marshall stacks and there seems to ba a WEM stack over there too. The only one I could see clearly was  a couple of 4x12's with 100W valve amps on top. The nearest one seemed to be guitar cabs and the ones stage right looked a little chunkier and may have had different drivers in. However it was common in those days to split the guitar and bass stacks cross the stage so they were both sides of the drummer and guitar and bassist could hear each other. Something I used to do at the time when doing sound for bands. In 1971 Jim Marshall was still serving in the shop in Cricklewood and building amps himself as I found out when he remembered building the amp I took in to the shop for some spares. Yes Andrew I know what it is like to be 73

 

I suppose what I'm saying is that in those days there were very few purpose built speakers for instruments and free may have had things made up specially for them. Bassists were quit likely to use the same drivers as guitarists so that may be part of his sound. Certainly there isn't a lot of deep bass and not a lot of top end in the tne he has there. The studio tone is probably the result of a miked cab and DI mixed. Anyway i had a good time listening to the live tracks on the Free Story which was fun.

 

So yes in general the tone you hear is that of lots of cheap drivers packed together in a big cab, lot's of 10's is really more of a late 70's early eighties thing and I think he might have used 12's for live work as above. In any case it's more about the individual speaker rather than it's size so you can get similar tones from 10's 12's or 15's. I suppose I'm saying buy a cab because it sounds right not because it has a 10" driver. 

 

You have two possible approaches. You could probably achieve something close to that tone in the studio taking the output straight from your bass and eq'ing it after it's recorded, maybe adding in some fx too. On stage you can do the same by using a neutral toned/flat response cab (FRFR) Nowadays you can get bass cabs that will do the same job as a studio monitor like the LFSys range and there are all sorts of tone settings you can download where someone else has done the work. You won't be the only Andy Fraser fan. It's even possible that someone has recorded the bass and used a computer to work out the response of the cab. You then feed that into your Barefaced which has a reasonably flat response

 

The second approach would be to look for a cab engineered to give an old school sound. The Barefaced One10 mcomes to mind but I think that will be a bit warmer than the Free live sound. You can add in fx and tweak the eq to get closer to the sound you want. Other people will be better at guiding you then me. Apart from anything else I've got considerable hearing loss from standing too close to big speakers and even bigger drummers too often.

 

Welcome to BassChat

[Stub Mandrel]

From photos, I'd be pretty confident that Andy Fraser used 4x12 cabs with his Marshall 100W bass heads.

 

I think his tone was mostly in his fingers.