Bill Fitzmaurice

I noticed that. I guess they don't want to have to pay a royalty to Sir Paul or whoever it is that has the rights to the Beatles name.

I woudn't use a 1x8 anywhere other than my house, and then only when alone. I consider a 1x10 the minimum for gigging, even with PA. As for it sounding like the original, I played through some Super Beatles back in the 60s, didn't care for them at all. Besides, even back then what was heard on a record was seldom pure mic's bass cabs. Very early on they used a mix of mic'd and direct. Sounding like Paul isn't difficult, use flat wounds and a pick, with not much high end. No one ever mistook his tone for the Ox.

https://www.eminence.com/support/understanding-loudspeaker-data/

He had a valid question, whether playing bass through a guitar driver would damage it. In fact you're less likely to damage a guitar driver with bass than with guitar, because it will sound horrid at power levels well below the voice coil thermal capacity. As for excursion, exceeding xmax doesn't hurt drivers, reaching xlim does. Guitar drivers tend to have xlim to xmax ratios in the vicinity of 4:1, because they're intended to be pushed past xmax. Bass driver xlim to xmax ratios run around 2:1, so you're more likely to mechanically damage a bass driver by creasing a cone. One manufacturer was well known for their drivers creasing, because the driver xlim to xmax ratio was only 1: 0.6.

Carol Kaye probably played on as many records as James Jamerson and Duck Dunn combined. She was originally a guitar player who got pressed into playing some bass tracks with a borrowed PBass through her own Fender Concert, and that became her standard rig. She was paid homage to last year in Amazon's The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, by the Carole Keen character playing bass in the fictional Shy Baldwin's band. Kaye never actually toured in the 60"s when the show was set, so I guess one of the writers wanted to come up with a female member of the band that bore some resemblance to a real person, as do most of the characters in the show.

Ever heard of 'The Beach Boys'? Most of their bass tracks were played by Carol Kaye. Her main amps were Fender Concerts and Fender Super Reverbs. Bass can sound quite good through open back guitar cabs, provided the volume isn't too high.

You may be fine with the combo speaker. Guitar speakers will distort long before their power limits are even approached, let alone exceeded. If you don't play loud enough to cause distortion you're good.

It used to be a very common format, if not an obvious one. For instance, the ubiquitous Hartke 3500 is a 19" rack mount. You wouldn't know it to look at it in the factory case. There are fewer now, with the proliferation of micro heads.

I had one who played through a JBL loaded Fender Twin which he placed on the floor without using the tilt back legs. He stood never more than two feet in front of it, so the only way he could hear it was to play loudly enough to shatter drink glasses on tables thirty feet away. 🙄

Guitar amps should have a mute, remotely controlled by the bass player. 😊

My 50w '65 Bassman was loud enough to gig, but never without the bass control on 10, and if it had gone to 11 I'd have done so.

With the controls at noon maybe. So turn them up, that's what they're there for!

Two points to make here. First, the tone controls make a big difference in the output. 6dB of bass boost is equivalent to boosting power by a factor of four. According to Orange the bass EQ is capable of +/-15dB. That means with the bass control flat and the volume full you might not be getting 50w. Depending on the output level of your bass you might be getting 5w or less. Second, the difference between an amp at 25 watts and an amp at 50 watts is 3dB. 3dB is audible, but just. All else being equal if you want to sound twice as loud as 25w you'll need 250w.

I've never had the need for that. The reason for it is in case the battery dies, but when I went active I did so with phantom power from the amp. I still have a battery on board, but that's for if I ever use an amp other than my own.

I know that's how many do it, but they shouldn't, because of the loading of the pickup output. I went active with an on-board pre-amp in the early 80s. One reason was to be able to control the volume without loading the pickups, the other was to eliminate cable losses. It was no more difficult to separately buffer each pickup with a dual channel op-amp as it was to sum them before the buffer with a single channel op-amp, so that's what I did. Why anyone wouldn't do that today is a puzzlement, as the cost differential between the two options might come to a pound.

That depends on where the pot is in the signal chain. If it's between the pickups and the pre-amp then they will load the signal. The only reason to do that is to have separate volume controls on multiple pickups without having to use a pre-amp for each pickup. My EMGs have the pre-amps contained within the pickups, so the pots are post gain stage and don't affect the tone.

I don't see the high frequency loss caused by turning the volume down as an issue for practice, but if that's the case you can deal with that by using a bypass capacitor on the pot. Guitar players have been doing this since the 70s. https://octavedoctor.com/treble-bleed-circuit-what-is-it-and-do-i-need-it/

Turn down the volume on the bass.

It sounded good to me. The story behind it is that the Dead wanted to hear on stage the same thing that the audience did. That's why they stood in front of it. That would have been a mic feedback nightmare so what they did was to place two identical mics one above the other. What came out of the arrays behind them that went into both mics was cancelled out via a differential summing pre-amp, but they only sang into the top mic, so that wasn't cancelled. They got rid of the system because it took so long to set up and tear down that they need two, which leapfrogged each other around the country on their tour. That meant they had to pay for more crew, more trucks, and a lot more fuel.

It's not all wrong. Most of it is all right, because most of it is a line array. Where it differs from a modern PA line array is that each player had their own individual arrays for their instrument, along with the vocal arrays. It wasn't the best implementation of line array technology, not because it didn't work, but because it was much larger than it needed to be. That can be forgiven, because the Dead didn't have a blueprint to follow. As primitive as it might seem compared to a modern PA it was still far better than anything else that existed at that time. It would be another 18 years before Christian Heil invented the modern PA line array, although the first major installation using line array speaker technology was in St. Pauls in London in the late 1940s. Maybe. A few hundred years ago the Scots gave the Irish the gift of the game of golf. In return the Irish gave the Scots the gift of the bagpipes. The Scots didn't know it was a joke.

It looks big, I'll grant that. This is the kind of Frankenstein's Monster abomination that can only come out of a marketing department with no input whatsoever from an engineer. That was a common enough scenario in the 60s and 70s, but there's no excuse for it today.

I suppose if you know absolutely nothing about loudspeaker design it's impressive. I would have found it so, fifty years ago. But not forty years ago, let alone today.

I'll not bother with the 'whys', it's far too complicated a subject to be explained in a post. One basic bit of audio engineering that I've been shouting into the void for 20 years is that virtually any two cabs together will sound better than either on its own. The real question is whether any particular combination of cabs works better than, or even as well as, a pair of matched cabs. The only way to know for sure is to compare combination AA, AB, and BB side by side. How many actually do that? Virtually no one.

Everything. If you look at response charts for guitar versus bass drivers they both have steep roll offs, but guitar drivers tend to do so above 5kHz, bass drivers above 3kHz. That's mainly because guitar drivers have higher Fs, lower Mms and lower Le.

When I started playing in '65 there were no real bass tens, and very few real bass twelves. The original '69 SVT was loaded with guitar tens. That's why you needed two of them to handle the 300w head without farting out. In those days it wasn't easy to get what you wanted from one cab, or from two loaded with the same drivers, thus the practice of mixing began. But that hasn't been the case for a long time. Sure, there are still cabs that don't sound good, but you don't address that problem by mixing. You address it by getting rid of a cab that doesn't sound good by itself and getting one that does. Not loud enough? Get two.