paulbuzz

Yes I can, because my bass will never have a battery in it!

Yep, I know lots of people find the benefits of an active bass to be worth the battery aggravation. Fair enough, but it's definitely not for me! If I really wanted one, I could possibly live with some kind of cunning phantom-powering arrangement, but a battery bass... noooooooo.......!

I dunno man, a p-bass seems like a pretty damn reliable object to me! No failures yet in 40 years! With reference to your particular example: this one definitely wouldn't happen to me because, if we're talking about feeling confident regarding equipment, one of my personal foibles is an utter hatred of battery-powered gear on stage. Ugh, I don't know how people can stand the uncertainty. It's even worse when people say "oh, but the battery in my bass lasts for 18 months or more" - that just means it's bound to catch you on the hop when it does die. Just no... I get that going wireless on stage would be really physically liberating, but the batteries...urgh! What if you accidentally leave it turned on between the soundcheck and the gig...? 🤮 (I do understand that this is a particularly personal neurosis! 😁 )

The weird thing here is that in almost every musical situation I've been in, I am the most cautious, backup-ready participant; yet in the context of this thread, I feel like I'm towards the casual, nah-it'll-all-be-fine end of the scale. I imagine that this is because the people likely to participate in this kind of thread on an internet forum are probably a self-selected group of slightly-obsessive preppers... 😜 So - are your band-mates all as well prepared as you, or are they a bunch of recklessly optimistic ne'er-do-wells, hopelessly vulnerable to equipment failure at any second...?

Very sensible, I'm sure! 🙂 However, having selected reliable gear and (mostly) kept it in good order, such experiences are very rare; just a handful of gear-embarassments in 40 years of gigging. TBH, the most gig-disruptive equipment problem I ever created was when I found I didn't have my bass strap, after having previously removed it from my bag for some reason. (Fortunately I did manage to get one from somewhere in the nick of time.) It can be the most mundane and unexpected of items that cause a crisis. So, do you super-professional all-eventualities-covered types take a spare of every single item to every gig? Including PA speakers, mixing desk etc, if you're providing your own...?

Same. Over a similar period of time, my two biggest amp fiascos have both involved the amp vibrating off the top of the cab and hitting the deck: 1) Old Trace Elliot GP11 pre-amp. Very loud bass, very resonant stage. Amp hits deck. Carries on working like nothing has happened. I'm completely unaware until my bandmates start gesticulating frantically at me. Shrug and carry on playing. Lesson learned: Trace Elliot amps are tough as shi t. 2) My first Class D amp. Amp hits deck. Stops working, input socket caved in. Replug directly into PA, bass sounds terrible, finish gig anyway. Lesson learned: Class D amps are really light. Put some velcro on the bottom of them.

This. "Uhh... have you got a spare 4-way?" "No, sorry, I haven't. Where's yours? Did you forget it?" "No, I just haven't got one. But you've got a spare socket on yours. Will it reach over here?" "Yes, if I fish it out from where I've tucked it tidily behind/under all my other stuff, and instead drape it (and all my cables that are plugged into it) right across the middle of the room/stage." "Well, we'd better do that then, because I need to plug my stuff in." "..." Although this is not quite as annoying as the time we arrived at a gig to find that the PA guy hadn't finished setting up yet, so we dumped our gear and went off to get a beer while he finished. On returning, I started to set up my bass gear, only to discover that my 4-way wasn't in my leads bag. I then noticed that this was because the PA guy had taken it from my bag and used it to plug one of his amp racks in...! He was quite alarmed and seemingly surprised when I unplugged it... 🙄

Pretty much the only kind of EQ pedal I wouldn't even consider is the Boss GEB-7 (or clones thereof - yes, I'm looking at you, Behringer BEQ700). The selection of centre frequencies used is absolutely bizarre: 400, 500, 800, then nothing until 4.5k...? Just no. The standard guitar version (GE-7) is much more useable, even as a bass equaliser, though it's true that an additional low band would be kinda helpful.

As an old-time TE fan, I really like the idea of Ashdowns with a proper sensible graphic equaliser. The arbitary mix of rotary knobs and sliders used for the EQ controls on many (most?) of their previous amps gives me the conceptual heeby-jeebies. Now if only they would dump the silly pointless VU meter too, we'd be cooking with gas...! 🙂 Oh - and while I'm having a moan: why can't I find any specs for it on their website? What size is it? What does it weigh? This is basic information that ought to be easy to find...

Surely a typo here? I can't believe you were renting a £200 piece of equipment for £1 per day...? 😮

I did this mod many moons ago. It's easy - if you can work a soldering iron you can do it! 🙂

Ashdown RM-112T-EVO II ?

Although the early-mid 70s tends to be seen as their classic period, I am especially fond of the mid-late 70s period, with Bob Calvert dramatically upping their lyrical game, and also filling a much more traditional 'front-man' role for much of that time. Astounding Sounds - Q,S&C - Hawklords - PXR5 - Levitation is a great run of albums.

Sound Master Rhythm 1 ...?

With reference to the research referred to in the OP's post, the full paper isn't available without paying, but there's a video abstract that gives a bit more detail on parts of their study, and is very interesting (at least I thought so!) https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)31036-X

Intriguing suggestion, Bill! In general there seems to be a broad consensus that input impedances less than about 500 kohm cause a loss of top end from passive guitar/bass pickup signals. Would you disagree with this? The little Behringer mixer mentioned above, for example, has an input impedance of only 5 kohm. Would you say this impedance would be ok for passive pickups?

Most mini-mixers have too low an input impedance to work well with a bass guitar plugged directly into them (especially passive basses). You really need something with a high impedance input. You could use something like the little Behringer mixer mentioned above, as long as you used another pedal as a buffer between the bass and the mixer. Alternatively: The Palmer Duetto is designed for pretty much your exact requirements, but is maybe a bit pricey, and you'd be unlikely to find one second hand. Or the venerable Boss LS-2 could certainly be pressed into service for your purpose, and you might pick up a second-hand one pretty cheap here on the forum.

Aha, this is an interesting opinion! Could this apply to other string brands/types too? I recently bought a set of La Bella nylon tapewounds for my Harley Benton violin bass. Overall I really like the sound, but dithered over whether I should request a replacement set, as the E string seemed to be a bit dead compared to the others, as you describe. In the end uncertainty (and inertia!) won out and I just kept the strings and didn't contact the seller, but have continued to wonder whether I should have. Your comment makes me wonder whether this is a thing with some types of strings...? I'll be interested to see whether they balance up as the strings get broken in...

Worse things happen at sea! Like I said, I understand that it's not my call. Still have an opinion though! Sorry for the thread derail; I'll stop now!

Since you ask: no, I do not love the swear filter; I think it's stupid and pathetic. But then again, this is not my website.

That Phoebe Bridgers track is a bit ordinary, but still more enjoyable than anything EC has done in the last 50 years. Don't think she's ever likely to match up to his work in the decade before that, though.

Yes, I think you are probably making this too complicated for yourself! I take it you are familiar with waveform 'graphs', as seen in audio editing programs, DAWs etc? These are displaying the way the voltage of the signal changes with time. A single simple continuous note is displayed as a nice neat sine-wave kind of graph, whereas a complicated sound (or an entire song) consisting of many frequencies simultaneously looks like a messy, scribbly kind of line. These graphs showing the electrical signal rising and falling over time correspond directly to the in-and-out movements of the cone of a speaker reproducing these sounds - you can think of the graph as also representing forwards-and-backwards movement of the speaker cone over time. So a speaker reproducing a single continuous note is going in and out in a fairly simple and obvious manner, whereas a speaker reproducing complicated 'multi-frequency' sounds goes in and out in a much more complicated set of movements, like the 'scribbly' waveform graph.

Hmm, maybe you're right! Is the "tops-producing" driver actually a proper dual-concentric with a crossover then? I had been assuming it was just a passive parasitic-cone arrangement without a crossover.

Ok, except then wiring the drivers in parallel would give you 2.75 ohms rather than 4 .....?

I have wondered about this before, but never got around to asking: how does this work? Surely, if it's a 4 ohm cab it contains two 8 ohm drivers wired in parallel? In which case, you could wire them in series to get 16 ohm; but where does 12 ohm comes from?