51m0n

[quote name='Ross' post='1375425' date='Sep 16 2011, 12:54 PM']Heres my tip, bring your rig, set your sh*t up, tune and play you pansy. Some of that is common sense and some is rubbish. Who brings a torch to set up with? Oh and be nice and explain yourself clearly but don't be afraid to call the sound guy a w***er if he's burying you in the mix against your wishes.[/quote] I bring a torch - does that make me a pansy??

At the suggestion of OutToPlayJazz I got one of these [url="http://www.gear4music.com/Woodwind-Brass-Strings/Archer-3-4-size-professional-Double-Bass/8UV"]Archer double basses[/url] for PLux, we had it strung with Thomastiks and set up properly, which bumped the price up a little over the 1000, but the result soudns amazing. Everyone who has heard it who knows double basses (like Plux's teacher) has been seriously impressed with it, its just a huge sounding bass. Highly recommended by me then Topics [url="http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=77602&st=0"]here[/url] and [url="http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=103170&hl=archer"]here[/url]

[quote name='TheRev' post='1374646' date='Sep 15 2011, 04:43 PM']We are - but there can be a fine line between immense fun and abject terror [/quote] Yeah, I have the same feeling when I see a 30 year old HH PA amp being used too! Didnt notice a badger, but there were some fine puppies wiggling about in one of those piccies I think....

#1 Learn your set #2 Make sure the rest of the band learn the same set as you #3 Play the same songs as at the same time as each other otherwise you arent playing the set (see #1 & #2) #4 The lead goes round the cab handles not the amp handle - especially important in this age of lightweight rigs #5 Do decouple the cab from the stage and or tilt it as necessary so you can hear it - esp with PA support #6 Carry spares #7 Carry spares for the guitarist & vocalist (wtf? no really) #8 Dont bin all the mids in your sound! #9 Make sure you have line of sight to the drummer and frontperson at all times #10 Declutter the stage - tangling yopurself up in the 12 meters of spare power cable running around ythe stage from you pedal board to the back of the stage is unsightly, uncool, and not atually as rock'n'roll as you might thionk #11 Stay sober

[quote name='silddx' post='1373924' date='Sep 14 2011, 11:40 PM']I was thinking of attending in a similar outfit actually I've had no takers at all for the Bassists in Drag challenge! Am I really going to be the only one there in a ball gown?[/quote] I'm afraid I'll have to decline, my pussy's not been very well, and the gusset has gone in these tights....

[quote name='silddx' post='1373909' date='Sep 14 2011, 11:23 PM']Well now, looks like Paul the Drums will be coming, so I will bring my Status Graphite Vintage PJ4 and my Fender USA Deluxe Strat (with the trusty POD X3 Live) and encamp in the Jam Room so you buggers can have something to jam to. I think Happy Jack is bringing a little amp for me, thanks Jack, bottle of fun your way. I would like to see some more action in the Jam Room this year, we had great fun last year, but only five of you made it in. Bad signposting If you want to see how a bass stacks up against drums and guitar, the Jam Room is the place. Paul is a seriously great drummer and you can show off your odd meter skillz in there with me and him, or have a nice easy going jam in A major. Whatever. It's all lovely in the Jam Room and there's never a reason to be scared. Get the f*** in there, or be well f***ing S Q U A R E ! ! ! ! ! ![/quote] Right-ho Mrs Slocombe....

[quote name='Kong' post='1372737' date='Sep 14 2011, 04:03 AM']There's a big difference between Pre-Amp - distortion and power-amp - distortion aka clipping. [b]If You drive Your power-amp into clipping You will destroy Your speaker. This is why it is dangerous using a small amp (let's say 100 watt) into a big cab (let's say 500 watt). If YAou have Your preamp maxed out, it will start clipping. If You don't hear this, the speaker will get killed by thermal issues. [/b] Pre-amp - distortion, carefully amplified with the power-amp, will add harmonics to Your sound, compress it a bit and makes it richer. This is why preamps with tubes (like Ampeg SVP Pro or the preamp-stage in my Peavex T-Max) sound the way they sound when pushing the tube. The T-Max, for example, has a pre-gain knob for pushing the tube, a post-gain for the tube-sound- volume, and a master volume for the poweramp. ith pre- and post-gain You choose the sound and the power of the tube-stage of the preamp. Master will dial the ammount of power sent to Your cabs. It is not confusing at all.[/quote] With all due respect, thats not actually true. It is not that simple. If you have a driver that can handle 1000w (ie thats its thermal limit) and you clip the bejesus out of a 50w amp into it it will run all day and never ever have problem. Clipping is clipping is clipping, pretty much every album released in the last 10 years has some form of clipping (or brickwall limiting, the two are almost identical in terms of waveform) on it, you didnt see your hifi go up in smoke now did you? No. It doesnt sound nice but the transducers can cope because its just not about clipping, its about how much power you are pushing into the transducer. You can push a tube into clipping, it could be a power amp tube or a preamp tube, the result on the wave form is the same. A simple rule of thumb is if it sounds like its straining/clipping/distorting in a bad way, then it is, back it off. A speaker straining does sound different from an amp clipping, but if you dont know the difference then back off the amp until everything sounds happy, if thats too quiet for your situation you need more power, or more speakers. Its deciding which that can be an issue.

You could do a lot worse thasn [url="http://www.studiospares.com/mics-condenser/studiospares-s1100-condenser-mic-only/invt/449010/?htxt=CKPKL0mKz9zRvzfmVnrfp36xYvLn1r4BDOCe18OUJ7QDggE%2FpY2j5xSoxjh7FC5LFj41qKWyHKLH%0AOjlySxJ7wA%3D%3D"]give this a go[/url] its about £65 for a studiospares 'own brand' omni large diaphragm condensor. Which whilst it wont set the big studio guys quivering, should do a sight better than what you have been using....

Who are you calling an Earthling, buddy?

Rock On (David Essex) Seriously, have another listen, thats Herbie Flowers at his best!

[quote name='Plux_the_Duck' post='1370254' date='Sep 12 2011, 11:41 AM']Indeed I can't make it... It's a shame, but I hope everyone has fun and don't fall asleep in dad's lecture (hehe, I'm in trouble now)[/quote] No, I think you are probably bang on again - from the mouths of babes, and all that

That is fantastic, thanks! Love the dropped one every few bars, that is absolutely killer - sooooo funky

Looks like PLux cant make it, he's got an open day at a Uni to attend. So it wil be just me. On the plus side that means I will have room for some monitors, a teeny little amp, and the laptop

+1 He sure does! Love the Boot EQ, wonder how this one will sound.....

Honestly, I cant see the point, and I dont like the idea of treating anything outside oif the mix, ever. Its always a gamble, however small....

Proof - you cant trust your ears with your eyes open.....

I dont think its a Chili Pepper sounding band though, I think its quite an indie sound. In which case emphasis on the backbeat (and I agree it is a very big snare sound indeed) and not the bass is fine by me. The kick is definitely not too loud (on my Senn 595s anyway, dunno about on the BIG speakers at home )) I do like a bit of the old "bass in this case is the bass in yer face" you know, but this is not that type of thing to me. I may well have ended up with a more prominant bass sound if I mixed it, but I'm not sure I would have been right to. I just listened to it again, and I like the mix still. Its all very subjective isnt it....

I dont think that it is necessarily a fretless, it does sound like a P pickup though (at the very least its a neck pickup not a bridge pickup). Sounds like a nice big tube amp just beginning to break up a bit. COuld have been a tube pre/DI I guess though - hard to say... Probably running into a nice fat sounding compressor (La2A maybe??) to fatten it up and keep it smooth and luverly. [b]Great[/b] bass sound for the track!

[quote name='BOD2' post='1367456' date='Sep 9 2011, 11:34 AM']The current music was not any louder - the peaks were the same as the sixties music - but it was just always up there and in your face. No variation - just full on constantly.[/quote] But the average level of the current music WAS louder....... Thats the point!

Good mix. Bang on for the genre really. Hypercritically it doesnt really have a big lift for the chorus, but thats the arrangement rather than the mix I think. The guitars/bass could have a tad more definition, but again its right for the genre so thats me applying what I prefer to hear over what fits maybe.

[quote name='flyfisher' post='1367484' date='Sep 9 2011, 11:56 AM']Interesting stuff. Can you expand a bit on why you use a compressor [u]and[/u] a tape saturation emulation if they are both ways of achieving the same thing?[/quote] Meeting done OK so a tape saturation emulation with dynamics control is going to be attempting to mimic what tape does, but in the same way that people used compressors all the time with tape I use compressors all the time with tape emulation too. I use varying amounts of the dynamics control verses the saturation artificats on FerricTDS (they are independant controls) depending on what works best for the source, but I'm also constantly working the envelope of the sound with careful compression to get it to work better in the mix. Often I dont think in terms of simply changing dynamic when compressing so much, I tend to use automation for that, instead I use compressors to change the transient, when a sound gets loudest, how the sound behaves after the initial peak and so forth, to make space in a mix. Its hard to explain, but if I trap the transient of a bass guitar, with a very fast high threshold/ratio compressor, and let the transient of a kick through with a slow attack compressor, then you would hear the kick more than the bass. Not necessarily what I would do, but you get the idea. It may be that the dynamics control of a tape saturation emulator (which tends to soften transients) is exactly what I dont want, but the saturation is working very well anyway, in this case I can use the comrpessor to get what I want working with the envelope of the sound, and the saturation effect helps to bringt he sound forward a bit too. I'd rather use several compressors to do different things in series/parallel than try and achieve the same result in one go - mainly because you cant do what I am talking about with any one compressor. Again on drum groups I quite often have a really hard pumping working compressor in parallel, maybe filtered too, and smashing the hell out of the signal, then just mixed back in enough so you cant hear it, but its doing something really good. A lot of the time small amounts of saturation at many different levels of grouping gives a far nicer result than more saturation just at one place. Its hard to explain, but I just prefer the sound as a result. However using the same generic tape emulation dynamics processing in lots of differnt places will kill your mix dead. Just how it is. You would never have always driven everything super hard into the tape back in the day (well Iggy Pop did, but no one else), not always, but there is always a hint of the way the tape couldnt quite replay what you put into it, and it helps gel a mix wonderfully. I use a lot of automation of levels, and thresholds and ratios too if necessary to get changes in sounds during a song. One of the tracks I recently mixed for Silddx involved automation of about 30 or 40 lanes of parameters on a drum kit through the song to seriously change the way the kit sounds, it starts of dark and muted and very obviously 'controlled' and yet punchy as, with a ton of subtle delay processing, then at another stage in the song it becomes far more natural with very little punch enhancement whilst the delay processing becomes at first more then far less overt, until in the final crescendo in the song the drums morph again to be very very hard hitting and in your face with no delay processing. The places the controls end up are derived from the emotional point in the song, and the way the drums needed to sound to best convey that emotional aspect, to give the most to the song as possible, everything changes, yet If I didnt tell you this happened you would probably not pick out the drum processing as the big wow on the track, that is the vocals, but it really helps make the vocals what they are (the BV processing is quite the head turner too as it goes). I control aux sends, fx level, dry levels, group buss fx, ratios, thresholds, makeup gains and sauration/dynamics level on amost all the drum tracks and groups and subgroups to get the desired effect. Mixing like this, for the song, to get the biggest payback at the important moments, takes a long time, and painstaking attention to detail, but the result is amazing.

[quote name='lowdown' post='1367408' date='Sep 9 2011, 10:53 AM']Have you checked this out? Raving about it over at gearsluz. So little CPU, use it on every track & Buss. Its a neat little tool and does sound good. [url="http://dsp.sonimus.com/products/satson/"]Satson[/url] Garry[/quote] Nice, hadnt seen it on GS, I am a complete cheapskate though, AFAIAC you can do as well with ReaEq (for filtering), ReaComp (for squishing), K-meter (or SPAN) - for metering, FerricTDS for tape saturation and TesslaPro for transformer style dynamics aware saturation (I only ever use this occasionally on groups), I also use several 'character' comps (DensityII, Molot, Blockfish, Attack and a few others very very occasionally) No doubt this adds up on CPU, but the metering is not really required once you are happy, and if its really heavy I just render the track.

[quote name='BottomEndian' post='1367433' date='Sep 9 2011, 11:11 AM']Before mixing, though? By all means, throw a 20Hz HPF on each track while mixing, but why bother re-rendering every track before the mix (and risk degrading the audio if your render settings aren't correct)? One simple filter per track isn't exactly going to kill the CPU.[/quote] Exactly, plusd you are almost certainly going to want/need a higher frequency high pass filter on the majority of tracks anyway, sub 20Hz? I've never ever set one that low, sub 35Hz is about as low as I've ever got, so why use two high pass filters on the signal when one will do it? You cannot tell until you are in the mix how high you can set the highpass filter, and you want to set it as high as possible, simlarly with low pass filters (which I set on as many tracks as I possibly can too).