51m0n

I said I'd try the Trickfish without my rack compressor. That head was a disaster for me in the end. Now using an EA iAmp Classic. Fab head, huge power. Used it in anger the other day, love it. But you know what it needs? A little bit of transient shaping to bring out the attack of each note just a hair.... Compressor will be back in da rack bro, you know it makes sense 🤩

Ok so loud isn't that simple. If you are using a less forgiving preamp then having a limiter shave the loudest transients off the top can really help, also if FX go bonkers it can save your driver's....

That is exactly what a limiter is for matey 😀

Just suck all the mids and top out, instantly just like the old days, muddy blleeuuurgh all night

First full band rehearsal with it last night - the wait has been tortuous, had some very low volume writing sessions but nothing to give it a work out. I am a very happy bunny, this thing is monstrous, so much grunt, really can cope putting out a full range bass tone at serious volume. The aforementioned contour button didn't work in a full band context, ended up with hpf, eq, deep and bright in and then a boost around 1 to 2KHz to bring out the grindiness in my Roscoe tone and cut some flab at about 200Hz. This is with pretty dead strings, but even then the tone is just amazing in context, even the bridge pickup on its own feels fat, the neck pup alone (my standard go to tone in full band context) is just huge but tight at the same time. Handled filters and grindy nonsense with aplomb too. The rest of the band seemed to like it too, guitarist looked rather askance when I fired it up - it is definitely not shy...

Infamy infamy, they've all got it in for me...

All due respect Al that's a pile of horse crap. Its disengenuous to believe many of the audience are noticing the the bass on any more than a subliminal level anyway for one thing. But the one time a well set up compressor will be more noticeable in its absence all of a sudden will be on a reasonably quiet live gig. Get real loud and ears are compressing like hell too. A very badly set up compressor and people will definitely notice because the makeup gain will be wrong and the bass will either completely disappear or leap out like a howitzer. However a well set up compressor in a mix being turned off may not result in the bass going unheard, instead it may result in the kick drum bring more masked. I'd notice....

Get a BSS AR133 DI box as a minimum. It's bullet proof and effectively flat and will put out what you put into it. If you want to get really into this a lot of people love the REDDI box, rather than an amp SIM. Depends on the genre but don't forget all the Motown bass was recorded DI, Bernard Edwards did all his stuff DI, if you aren't rocking the grindy tones then stick with a DI in other words 😉

Anechoic is utterly awful for anything but measurements. Some people feel sick in there! You can also download all the BBC white papers on acoustic design, a fascinating few evenings worth of reading material 🧐

It's certainly incremental. And the worst piece of kit in the chain will hold you back to a degree.

That's a diffuser in front of an absorption layer. The gap maximises the bang for the buck because absorption is very efficient across changes in material. So you get sound hitting the diffuser, high frequency sound gets reflected and scattered by the diffusion pattern, lower frequencies go through and hit the absorption layer, that uses up some energy, it then hits the air gap, using up more energy. The lowest frequency energy goes straight through the wall, low mids bounce back off the wall: straight across the air gap, losing energy on hitting the absorption layer and again when hitting the air in the room. Lots of studies done on this to work out what frequencies are best effected by different thicknesses of absorption Vs air gaps. Gearsluts is the forum for this kind of thing, some very serious acoustic experts share their knowledge freely on there.... And yes acoustic coving, 2ft by 2ft triangular cross section acoustic absorption coving.

Word of warning an extremely good friend of mine went down the 500 route for his drum inputs in his studio; amazing sounding system, cost him 22k in the end. Not going to lie he bought best of the best throughout but it still made me think it's so easy to just keep going when you get into top end studio kit.... All the best with the will though, that's really tough.

Focusrite Compounder is a very capable clean compressor limiter that's been in my live rack for years. DBX160 is a classic on bass Then you are looking for magic boxes like a good la2a or 1176 clone. Apparently the Klark Technic ones are pretty good for the cash, warm audio wm76 is the next step up...

Well how did the rabbit hole work out?

You're not wrong about no place to hide, if you put poop in this you just get louder poop out 😂

Spent a couple of hours with the EA last night tinkering, as you do. I haven't ever found a preset 'shape/contour' mechanism I liked the sound of, until now. The EA contour 1 profile is absolutely amazing, its literally what I would do if it were just up to me and I had a fully parametric EQ. Caveat, this is definitely running at bedroom warrior levels, when this is running in full 'war mode' it may be a bit much in terms of low end, but there is a fully sweepable eq to use to tame it a tad if necessary. Still completely digging the upper mid range thing going on there, its a really lovely presence that's happening that I haven't heard in other solid state super clean amps. As for how loud is it, the blurb reckons it has a very linear volume pot, it certainly seems to be so although again I haven't been able to go flat out against a drummer yet to confirm, and I got asked to turn it down a bit when it was running at about 0.5 out of 10 - oops It gets warmer than the Trickfish did, not worryingly so, but there was definite warmth from it after the fiddling about. Just interesting, this amp has no fan at all, if I think its going to struggle to lose heat in a rack then I will get a couple of 120mm slow silent cooling fans and mount them in the back of the rack, that will do it.

Didn't get a chance to play with anything else but the Eich T1000, bad traffic meant I was pretty time limited. It's a good amp, tons of great features, maybe too many, a work of Satan compressor, no frequency control on its EQ though. All round tighter sound, more controlled bottom end, but the EA has a switchable HPF at 20Hz which I will leave in, it's like a built in thumpinator. The EA definitely seemed louder by a smidge to me. I preferred it's features and core tone. It is not a small amp, and on the upper end of the lightweight amp scale, but I don't mind that it's still very light and it will live in a rack anyway. Looking forward to trying it in anger.

Ok so I now have one of the new EA iAmp Classics. Love the feature set, 4 band sweepable eq baby, hell yeah! Nice tone, full but with a lovely upper mid presence. Best input level monitor I've seen on a bass amp, you all know I love an input monitor 😍 And 1200w. It's not remotely shy. Down to 2ohms too, I could run the BT2 and a pair of BB2 with this. Holy crap 😆

You're gonna love the noise that rig makes, seriously great tone, absolute monster volume too 😁

Well naturally I owe pints on this one. Bugger 😂 I compared the wd800 with the Glock and Trickfish and a few others last time around. I was entirely unconvinced by the flat tone of all of the compared to the Trickfish, and to date I've not heard a built in overdrive channel that I liked. Then again my idea of awesome overdrive is definitely in the SGFX Beta, a kind of deep whumphhhhfff of a drive. All that grumpy grindy drive stuff isn't for me in the main.

Well you will all probably enjoy this, the Trickfish is going back tomorrow... Its had an issue (really odd noise that at some gain settings on passive basses is intrusive enough to make me not be happy, a sort of chuffing/huffing intermittent rhythmic noise with a very pronounced tweeter only whine, reminiscent of a sort of DSP bleed), its been 'fixed' (power amp module replacement, I was not at all convinced it was the power amp module for various reasons), the 'fix' has turned up another issue (whilst at extreme settings showing the original issue to still be there), blah blah.... What can I say, Mark at Bass Direct has been brilliant in trying to keep me happy and resolve this. Very happy to be dealing with him. Trickfish are a fine company, their preamp is just great but, the amp had a poor S/N ratio to my ears under certain circumstances very poor. Post fix it couldn't handle the dynamic range I need an amp to cope with, and its power amp protection system shut the amp down, in rehearsal, repeatedly, regardless of my input gain setting going lower and lower, if the output volume was set to keep up with my (quite loud) drummer (on his own though, just me and him). I should say this was a single unit, it may well be a one off problem, I wouldn't suggest anyone hold the company to ransom over my experience, but for me I have rather lost faith in the brand, at least for now. Silver lining is tomorrow I am going back to Mark at Bass Direct going to be looking at the new EA iAMP Classic and the Eich T1000...

You get the best bang for your buck where surfaces meet - so the best ceiling solution is where ceiling meets wall, all the way around the room.

SKol303 will steer you right. Basic issue is almost certainly parallel walls/ceiling/floor at similar distances apart causing massive nodes where reflection meets original source. Solution will eat into the space in the room - too small a room is not effectively fixable (without much money). If I were looking to do this I would put superchunks in the corners, and maybe even the wall/ceiling edges, broadband absorption on the walls can help especially if placed in the path of reflection from source to ears... Beyond that it is possible to build a Helmholtz resonator to deal with more specific frequency issues, but you are getting way into serious DIY project territory and some time/effort on room analysis after all the other stuff.

Heh, I run 'drums and percussion' channels on one page and 'musos' on another, also use the grouping functionality to be able to turn the percussion as a whole up or down. There are 6 monitor mixes running as well (3 IEM 3 wedges). One of those (Keys IEM) has recently moved to one orf the natty Ultranet devices, which means I nolonger have any idea what he's doing in his mix, and don't care a jot, its excellent! Rather wish I could get one of them for myself to be completely honest, but they aren't cheap.

It was damn good actually