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[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

Well Plux can't make it, he's got a gig (splitter!) so it'll just be little ole me

[quote name='wateroftyne' timestamp='1347952907' post='1806948'] The word 'Funk' makes me sick up a little in my mouth. It just makes me think of [i]white socks and shiny suits[/i] with pushed-up sleeves. [/quote] Which is the antithesis of funk......

Funk, played really well, like proper grooving ace funky funk? Love it to death. All that 'wanna be funky' missing the point nonsense trotting out the same tired funky drum parts and cookie cutter bass parts (slapped, picked fingerstyle - whatever), with tired horn lines retreading the same old stuff, and over-souling vocals that on their own are enough to make me want to tear my own ears of the side of my head to stop hearing them. Not so much.... The other day I was in a rehearsal studio and everything we played came out all reggae, I mean properly layed back and really sweet reggae grooves. Turned out we were all utterly exhausted before we got there. So reggae is like funk but knackered maybe?? I do like a bit of reggae, when its really great songs, but then I like a lot of really great music that just hits the spot for whatever reason, could be the vocal performance (like the BVs on Sympathy for the Devil) the bassline (Story of American Life), the overall production (all of T-Power's Self Evident Truth of an Intuitive Mind) or the Kazoo playing (Crosstown Traffic). Funnily enough I dont really like Nirvana, but the Little Roy album of reggae covers of Nirvana tracks is just brilliant....

A couple of 'cold hard facts in the light of day' type points. It doesnt really matter what mic it is, if she's moving around and not paying attention to her mic technique then the level will be all over the place. Physics is not on her side, volume drops with distance from a source with the inverse square law, so for every doubling of distance she is a quarter as loud. A good engineer can try and help this a bit with a compressor, but as soon as you rely on a compressor you will start to get other artifacts in to at least a small extent (the mic will effectively appear to be more sensitive picking up more ambient noise, she may start to push her voice hard when she thinks about it if she is struggling to hear herself in the monitors). A decent boom stand set up so the boom is parallel to the floor (or close to) and pretty much fully extended so the stand is well away from her body and guitar is a must, put a cross on the floor where she needs to stand if she is singing. The other thing to point out is that with the inverse square law the closer to the mic you start off at, the more a tiny change in distance will change the level, so if you are on top of the mic at the beginning and dip back six inches then the level will fall more than if you are a good foot or two away to begin with and dip back the same six inches. The trouble with being a foot away is that the gain structure on the desk needs to be set to cope with that (ie it will be far hotter into the desk than if she were putting the mic to her lips), and if someone then reaches up and grabs the mic off the stand, or talks into it from an inch away the level is going to be massive. In this case you need a limiter on the mic to catch that kind of issue and save the PA! There may be issues with feedback (depending on the acoustic and the volume required) but I would imagine you guys aren't exactly Lemmy loud.... A decent mic (condensor or dynamic) should be capable of doing the job fine though as long as the guy at the desk knows what he's doing and your wife is aware of where she needs to be (about a foot or a foot and a half max) in relation to the mic. But you cant get away from it, if she loses sight of the goal (projecting well to the audience [i]via the PA[/i]) then you cant win this battle. A final technical point, pretty much all the mics mentioned show more or less from proximity effect - whereby the closer the mic is to the sound the more bass lift they will produce. So if you try the approach of backing her off from the mic and turning the mic up (because she is just going to move about and you want to minimise the effect of this on the performance as a whole) then her voice through any of these mics is going to quite possibly sound a bit thin and need some eq to beef it up again. If you want an example of great mic technique then you would do a lot worse than watching some live K.D.Laing or Tony Bennet, both of whom have impeccable mic technique, no they aren't playing a guitar as well, but thats actually irrelevant...

[quote name='silverfoxnik' timestamp='1347879053' post='1805959'] Hear one of his talks a few years ago at the Portland Pub in Brighton & Hove and he was fabulously entertaining.. Told me off for chewing gum when I walked in the room IIRC! By the end of his talk he had everyone singing and playing along to 'Walk on the Wild Side'.. He started off as a tuba player in the army he said and has just gone on from there. Sort of bloke that should be Basschat's Patron or something.. [/quote] Was that the Brighton Bass day thing? Was a great day that, and Herb really ought to be the Patron Saint of Bass

Clever stuff, very free compositionally (ie you just dont know where they will go next). Dont really like his voice though, which is a shame - not his fault, other than the upper range he keeps hanging around in, which just isnt floating my boat at all - might grow on me though. Cheers Nige!

Another plus one for the Sennheiser e845, or depending on her voice the e835 is a great (and incredibly cheap fo rthe quality) mic, slightly less hyped, so it gets the mids out a bit better (less emphasis on the 4-5KHz region), which can be excellent for a lot if uses (speech being one of them).

Nice one cheers!

Yup, in fact some might say its his best work, certainly the track with the coolest front man and lyrics that he has played on to date...

She's writtern some fine music and is very much into her music as performance art sort of stance. Done very well for herself as AFP and before that one of The Dresden Dolls. I think she's been clever in the past at trying to try new ideas all the time to avoid the issue of record company control, not sure how great this one is though. By the by she's married to Neil Gaimon, which is weird somehow.....