51m0n

Any number of drum riser type/size devices to minimise sound transfer are available - cheapest option, two pieces of ply, some 1/2" baton and a load of tennis balls

Not so sure about thT Jack, take another look at the frequency plot up above, an awful lot of energy between 125Hz and 1Khz, which that foam wont really touch. Yes it wont be so bright, yes the 16KHz will be dealt with but there will still be all the mid and lo frequency hum and air noise, the fan whirr will be lessened slightly. The gobos I described are 4" thick plus the mdf and existing structure (maybe 6" thick in total), and even then they will only deal with the direct path from the source, but they will at least deal with that....

Yup they make kit thats good for sure, no doubt about it - its a shame about the wattage thing, rock and hard place, some people can definitely feel what its doing, some people can't (or it doesnt bother them). Some of their pedals and studio kit is superb.

If its a one knob compressor on an amp (or pretty much anywhere else) avoid it, because so many choices about how you play must have been hardwired (literally) into the design of the thing. Attack time, Release time, threshold or ratio, and make up gain must all be automated (the knob either controls the ratio with a fixed threshold, or the threshold with a fixed ratio, or in some predetermined way manipulates both at the same time - predetermined meaning unsuitable in all cases IME). The chances are very slight that any such compressor will really work well for you. And you are right to think you may be over compressing, how could you tell though, since there is no metering on the useless thing. They are the devils spawn of hell in terms of compressors - especially nastily done ones stuck into amps to make you fiddle about with an inadequate and space/money/time wasting extra knob on your amp. Leave it off if it is in any way less than 100% convincing to you. My advice, don't bother with it, its almost certainly cr4p....

That celotex insulation wont offer any meaningful isolation below about 1KHz Its lightweight, so it doesnt prevent lower frequencies from passing through it.

[quote name='pete.young' timestamp='1348169567' post='1810428'] The LM II is shipped with a parallel effects loop, so if you run the compressor in the loop you get a blend of compressed and uncompressed signal, which I'd expect to be less 'effective' . Unless of course you've re-jumpered your amp so that the loop is in series. [/quote] Good point - the reason according to MB is that if you have an fx unit fail then at least something is getting through (not a good reason IMO, but what can you do). My sa450 took about 10 minutes to switch the jumpers on, so its not a tricky operation at all.

I'm completely puerile....

[quote name='charic' timestamp='1348145281' post='1809957'] Am I the only person who zones out then? [/quote] No, I do it all the time whenever I'm jamming - I record everything, always, because otherwise I have no idea what I played a lot of the time, and more often than not I find that on listening back a large part of what I'm producing is really nice stuff that, were I to sit down and try and just come up with something, I wouldn't think of in a million years. There comes a point when I'm improvising, usually about 5 minutes in, where I can hear myself (on the recording) just letting go of the imposed 'come up with something to play right now!', where i am effectively trying too hard, and instead I stop thinking and instead I start to play off everything else (drums, guitar, air-con, whatever). About 5 or minutes after that good stuff starts to happen. Unfortunately thats the point where I can no longer remember what I just did - and I never stop gurning like a baboon when I'm playing either (whats that about???)

[quote name='thumperbob 2002' timestamp='1348141257' post='1809848'] I have an LM2 and also a Hartke lh1000. I think both amps can be pretty clean (uncoloured ) but using the EQ etc can also be particularly coloured too. Its ok talking about these points in a studio environment ( Hartke too noisy for that )- but for Live use, once you add a cab and god forbid people in a strange sized room ( Venue ) - forget about uncoloured tone - sometimes its jsut a battle to get a good sound and to be heard above the band. [/quote] The stranger (ie more complex) the room shape, and the more people filling it, the better chance you ahve of a half decent sound. Acoustics are very counter intuitive, all that meat in the space acts as a really good bass trap and a hell of a good broadband absorber, all the odd angles help to diffuse reflected sound, preventing nasty standing wave and large peaks and nulls. Of course some venues still manage to make it all sound horrid, and never bother to look into fixing it, but the one truth is the more bodies the better the sound will be!

I can play pretty much whatever I am likely to imagine as a bassline, but that may be because my imagination is so defined by what I have played and worked out before for the last 20 odd years....

[quote name='DaveFry' timestamp='1348134563' post='1809695'] ( Retired piano player learning bass here ; ) I guess it is one of those things that get easier the more you do it . One handy trick is to imagine " louder " ( in your head , that is ) , and to make that imagination so compelling that the fingers have to follow ; [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_7DgCrziI8[/media] [/quote] That is an absolutely brilliant video - thanks!

[quote name='Walker' timestamp='1348133004' post='1809660'] Thats why I love this place! Thank you so much for the advice. I've attached a reading of what I'm getting withing 6" of the servers, so looking at that, would your full monty be the way to go rather than just the rockwool option? [/quote] Well you have a lot of very very low frequency in there - which is unlikely to be the fans (traffic noise, air con maybe?), but nothing is much louder than 65dB so we arent talking huge amounts of energy here. You definitely want to try to block out anything above 125Hz if you can, you have the kind of noise I was expecting in the mid range, and a very nasty spike at 16KHz which is possibly whats driving you mad as you probably cant perceive it as more than something very irritating about being near those fans. The 16Khz would be blocked by your existing partition without any trouble. So dont worry about that. I would look at trying just the mdf and rockwool - the bitumen acoustic matting is not pleasant to work with (its unbleievably heavy - duh!) and is expensive, the mass of the mdf may be enough to control this with the absorption layer of a good 4" thick of rw45 over it. If the very low frequency stuff is annoying you after that (unlikely to be honest, its not loud enough) then adding bitumen may help, but you are really heading into the realms of full floor to ceiling partition walls then since low frequency suff is omni directional and will be going everywhere. [quote name='charic' timestamp='1348134059' post='1809683'] I have nowhere near the same experience as 5imon on this but sometimes adding two layers is more beneficial than adding one massive layer. The airspace in between the two areas causes much more energy to be absorbed [/quote] Absolutely right Charic me old mucker! If you are looking to build a partition wall type thing from scratch than an air space is definitely the way to go. The BBC site has some excellent white papers and R&D on this type of thing - search for the 1995 r&d paper #06 "Lightweight partitions having improved low frequency sound insulations" for a good lesson in making super efficient 'lightweight' (err not so much) partition walls. Not done so much in gobos (IME), since the airspace boundaries need total separation from each other or you are just adding transmicssion points through the gobo. Which sort of defeats the object really. You just want something heavy as hell, and floor to ceiling (or near as) from a gobo.

Oh, I have 'quite a lot' of stuff about compressors and compression that I will be putting in the blog when I get time - don't worry...

I always pack the Butterometer baby! I have absolutely no idea where abouts the dB meter is though..... Anyone got a Behringer ECM8000 measurement mic handy?

Not a lot. Server fan noise its really irritating, and when you get enough of them you tend to get the sound of all the different fans 'beating' against each oither creating a lot of eneregy at far lower frequencies than you get from any one or two fans IME. To defeat lower frequencies you want mass, and plenty of it. Get some high density membrane (as used for acoustic dampening in building). Glue it to both sides of your screens, cover that in half inch mdf (bolt it through or screw it in). Now the screen is so heavy you may need to strengthen its legs I'm afraid. On the side facing the server box add 4 inch thick rockwool rw30 or rw45 covered with hessian or som eother acoustically transparent materal (ie hat you can blow through). You wont hear the fans with those in the way (you have effectively just built a couple of gobos). If you dont think you have any meaningful low energy output going on then just use the rockwool and material to create a couple of lighterweight higher frequency broadband absorpers.

[quote name='charic' timestamp='1348044188' post='1808360'] Could get pretty boring that way, if we were to just do the comparisons people ask for we may yield more interest and a better response. For example, how does an S12 compare to an Ampeg 8x10? (I havn't looked at the list so it's probably not possible but you get the idea). [/quote] Blast me and my attemtps at making it all scientific! Fool that I am, lets just pick a few rigs at random, eat donuts and compare them, much more fun, you're right! I shant bring the dB meter then either (phew its 'somewhere' in the studio, no idea where!)

I run a Focusrite Compunder in my loop. Its on all the time, very low ratio, low threshold, medium attack, fast release, sensible makeup gain, and with the limiter section catching any silliness from the fx. I use it that way to fatten everything up a tad, even out the changes in volume from different techniques and fx, all whilst remaining very transparent. I regularly hit over 3 to 6dB of gain reduction according to the meters, yet I can never 'feel' its on, unless I'm really digging in, and thats a sure sign I need to turn up the master volume of the amp before I wreck my hands... A properly set up compressor can not affect your ability to play with dynamics, it just doesnt work like that! If you are looking to put a compressor in your fx loop, do yourself a favour and get a full fat rack jobbie (dbx, focusrite, even an alesis 3630 - all are more versatile and easier to set up than a pedal without metering once you know what you are doing). Conan - search for some of my posts on setting up compression (hint: they are [i]old[/i] posts now, you will have to look back quite a way) - they should help you get your head around it!

Cheers! Punchy and clean (as in you can hear everything, there's all sorts of saturation going on to help with that which always seems a bit counter intuitive) and also as close as I could get to sounding like a band just plying songs was what I was after. And yes, they're apparently 'stoked' since the mix sounds 'sick' - I think thats supposed to be a good thing, but didn't want to double check in case I was wrong .....

Sorry there's been so little movement on this, I've been preparing for the SE Bass Bash and its taken up the time I normally spend thinking about the blog. On the plus side what I've prepared will go up on the blog once I'm done with it (woohoo two birds, one stone!)....

Wonder why it stopped happening? Had a great time (including a jam with Plux and Terry Popple on the drums which was hilarious!), and it was properly busy all day - the pub must have made a mint....

Are we saying we are going to try and get a meaningful comparision between 9 amps, or 9 rig combinations (amp + cab)??? Because I reckon most people struggle to get something meaningful with an A/B test, an A/B/C test is really tricky, an A/B/C/D test is just about impossible. Should be an interesting couple of hours then

There are plenty of jazz songs with lyrics no better than those of Good Times, but they may have some amazing compositional aspects, truly exceptional playing an interplay, marvelous phrasing and a really uplifting feel and most importantly evoke a great wmotional response in the listenr. The lyrics do not make a song great, the entire song does (every part is equally important) and the recording and subsequent production of the final product (assuming its recorded rather than live) are every bit asw important a part of the communication of that emotinal response as any note or word in the composition. Good Times is a party time disco track, and as such can be considered a pretty definitive example of the Disco scene. It has certainly evoked a huge emotional response for millions of people since its release. It is definitely not throwaway, it also isnt high-brow, you do it a disservice Bilbo I think.....

Ella Fitzgerald Niiiiiiiice...

Ooooh! Thats got to be enough for at least one of the remaining rooms. Dont fancy bumping that lot out though, sweaty work

Nice resume, and having someone totally clued up on PRS and how it works is a major plus, even better such a person who is annointed with the funk Welcome