alexclaber

The first bass demo video is done:

Sorry, just a correction to my above post, Chris did say he “cut his finger quite badly” in his first email, he signed off that email “All in all, a stunning cab though, many many thanks”. So he did make clear it was quite bad but the general tone was positive. I responded thus: “Glad the cab performed well! That's very odd about the corner - it isn't something we check, they should be safe for installation with no sharp edges when we receive them. It's the first I've heard of this happening in a few thousand cabs. How's your finger now?” Obviously I should have said “sorry” too! My response was quite a few days after his email was sent so the “how’s your finger?” wasn’t flippant, it was a genuine “how’s it healed?” question. As a mountain biker I’m forever injuring myself so I’m used to the timelines on all manner of grazes, scratches and deeper cuts. And the same day Chris replied, “thanks for getting back. Finger pretty much healed, no biggy.” As is probably clear from my general approach with Barefaced, I really don’t like inaccuracy or untruths, so I thought I should add that in as my prior post wasn’t quite right. On another note, to provide some perspective, I don’t have a corner to hand to measure, but it’s thick steel, thicker than most stamped steel cutlery handles. I’m not sure of the exact radius on the actual edges but everything is rounded off - for example it’s thicker and more rounded than a typical steel ruler, a few times as thick and with much rounder edges. That’s why I keep saying that it isn’t a design fault to have that overlap, it’s not an unsafe feature. It’s very frustrating that this one bad corner ended up on a cab and hurt someone but as I’ve said a few times, I really do believe it’s a very low probability issue. When Chris brought it up last year I spoke to the factory team and they said they’d never noticed a sharp corner but they’d look out for them. I checked again with them this week and they said that it’s not something they come across, despite all the manual handling of the corners. I need a bit of a break from all this, it is Saturday evening after all, so I’ll come back on Monday to see what everyone says. Please be kind whilst I’m away.

We've been using these metal corners since 2009, so all but the first few Barefaced cabs have them. It's a stamped steel nickel plated corner, supplied by Adam Hall. There is a slight overlap at the port inside edge because of the thinner ply we use, as you can see in the photos. All the edges on the corners should have a very slightly rounded edge to make them safe, as is normal with stamped steel parts that are exposed to people - you don't want people getting cut, as happened here! What I tried to say to Chris at the time, but didn't explain very well, was that I believe this is a freak accident caused by a very rare fault on that one metal corner that was supplied to us. It was not Chris's fault that he picked the cab up by that point - we do the same all the time here, the front ports are a handy place to grab the cabs when moving them. In the factory those corners all sit loose in a plastic bin (they come in larger cardboard boxes and we decant them), we grab a handful of them, and then fit them in a batch, front corners (two sided), then rear corners (three sided). We don't wear gloves and and grabbing 16 or 20 corners does require you to grasp the handful fairly hard - being pretty thick steel they're not light in multiples. We then push pretty hard on those front corners to make sure they're on all the way and properly aligned, so there's quite a lot of manual handling with bare hands. I have no record of anyone in the factory coming across a corner with a sharp edge and no other customers have ever told us that the inner edge on the corner has cut or scratched them. Yes, because of the slight overlap it'll make an impression on your skin but it shouldn't hurt anyone. I'm very sorry that Chris was hurt in this way but I do not believe it is down to a design or QC fail on our part - this is the first recorded example of such an incident with a Barefaced cab and it happened after over 10 years of using the exact same corners from the same supplier and fitting them to the same thickness plywood and port designs that we've been using over that time period. I believe it is a freak accident. I wish Chris has not said that it was "no biggy" at the time and told me how serious it was - the initial email about it was worded like "cab was awesome on its first gig but I'm just letting you know I slightly hurt myself so you might want to look into your QC". As I haven't yet seen the faulty corner I can only hazard a guess at the manufacturing fault - I think the most likely thing is that when stamped some swarf was left on the edge, and then that wasn't knocked off during the pre-plating prep work, and then the plating has built up on the swarf making the edge worse. I did ask Chris to let us send him a replacement and him send the bad one back, so we could send it onto our supplier. I don't think filing it back is a good solution because it's a nickel plated corner, so doing so will just expose the layer of nickel which is plating the steel and that could form another sharp edge. I'd estimate that we've fitted somewhere in the region of 20,000 - 30,000 of these corners to our cabs and this is the first time we've heard of someone being injured by a corner. Obviously I'm concerned that others may have had problems and not let me know but generally because we sell direct we get a lot of feedback, so I'd hope anyone else would have contacted me. I'll continue to hope that it's a freak accident but maybe others will now speak up? But again, sorry this happened to you Chris and I'm sorry that you weren't happy with how I dealt with it. I'd still like to get that bad corner back - if nothing else, if you've filed off the sharp edge then the corner is likely to rust, which could cause further problems as well as look bad.

Obviously I’ll have to rewrite that blurb because of how people are assuming it’s just a pedal for going heavy heavy but on the site I do twice mention “subtle overdrive” and also that the distortion channel can go “almost totally clean”. I should probably correct the latter to “totally clean if your bass isn’t too hot and you don’t pluck so hard” because my main basses are all LOUD and my right hand is quite heavy. The joy of pedals rather than cabs is that you can listen to far more useful sound clips. So I’ll get back to that now...

Whatever I write that needs fuzz. But if you're asking that because you're thinking this is a fuzz pedal - you can get a Jamerson Motown sound from the overdrive section, or Roger Glover with Deep Purple, or Geezer in Sabbath, or Krist in Nirvana, etc etc. And the fuzz pedal can do all the worlds of fuzz, like the synth thing, or the Larry Graham double-tracked thing, or the Ben Folds Five thing, or Geezer again, etc etc. There's far more dirty bass sounds on recordings that many bassists realise.

I've got enough digital and computerised annoyance in my life that I don't want to introduce it to other parts of my life where I don't find it beneficial. I like digital recording because it makes massive track count and good sound quality affordable (not really bothered about all the editing potential, I'd rather just nail a good vibe as live as possible). I like streaming audio at home because its freed up a lot of space now I have small people taking over our house and it allows us to play random Disney things without buying the CDs. I don't like anything with menus etc when I'm in my musician instrument-playing headspace - I want a knob or a switch to do what it does. I hate when things crash. I don't want to plug a USB into my amp. And I don't like the tendency of digital gear to become obsolete, or fail and be unrepairable. How many of us have analogue stompboxes that are decades old and still sound good? How many of us have older digital FX that we still use? Yes, digital gear can be cheaper and yes it can give more options. But unless I can see a clear benefit for how I approach music then I don't want to use it. Hopefully some musicians will have a similar viewpoint and will buy our stuff - for everyone else there are lots of alternatives!

Thank you. It’s probably best to leave it as it is, it’s more honest. I think a lot of people have a very different idea of Barefaced to what it actually is. For better or worse, I’m not really financially driven, I just want to make the best possible products in the way that I believe is right. I want to make things that people use for years and years and years, I don’t want to make things that are at all disposable. From a business perceptive I am horribly cursed by a desire to not screw up this planet any more than possible - I know making speakers (the actual drivers, especially the magnets) is not environmentally friendly so I want those speakers to be really valued items that people cherish and thar even outlast me. And I also strongly believe in trying to manufacture here, creating jobs where you get to use your hands, not just poke at a computer. So because of those decisions, everything we make costs a hell of a lot to make. Everything we design takes a really long time to design (I can’t tell you how long we’ve spent on the amp so far...) We operate from an almost comically tiny factory and no-one here, me included, makes much money. Thankfully I’m not a big spender, my wife is very frugal and you can get an awful lot of things free (hurrah for sharing/freecycle groups) or cheap secondhand, and the children don’t seem to mind (yet). Last year I bought a new car because the front wheel snapped off the 15 year old one as the suspension had rusted through - and I really like cars. Well, I say new, it’s almost five years old but that’s new to me! I need to do an official announcement updating customers etc on what Barefaced is up to, but with the massive fall in orders due to the lack of live music, I now have half as many staff as in March, and the staff who are still here are only part-time and mostly furloughed. It’s really hard. I know it’s even worse for all the pro musicians who’ve lost their entire income, the events companies, the list goes on. And of course those who’ve been seriously ill, or had close friends or relatives suffer, or even die from this. I don’t know where I’m rambling with this but I guess I’m trying to say that I’m not sitting in some ivory tower making fancy products, I’m just trying to do something I believe in and earn enough to live. And because margins are fine and right now turnover is much lower than normal, I’m spread very thin trying to wear too many hats so that I can pay the rent and my mortgage and payroll and feed my family and not have to lay off more staff.

Chris, I’ve just emailed you about the corner problem. At the time you said that it was “no biggy” and that your finger had pretty much healed - my guess is that it then didn’t heal completely for a while (fingers can be annoying like that, I had to have antibiotics for a tiny finger wound a few years ago) but I didn’t know that that the wound had worsened. I think I mistakenly offended you by saying that no-one else had had such a problem - what I meant was “we’ve never had a corner come from our supplier with sharp edges on it”, not “you’re doing it wrong”. I said that we often pick our cabs up by the ports and they’re never sharp. When it comes to corner related QC, we check that they’re on straight and square and tidy, we never check them for sharp edges because so far we’ve only come across one sharp edge (on your cab) in 12 years of Barefaced cabs, which is an awful lot of corners. Obviously we handle the corners when fitting them so I’d hope we notice any issues at that point but I can’t recall a case of having to reject a corner because of that. When a metal corner is stamped it should always have any swarf removed before plating and obviously this one didn’t. I was quite annoyed that you’d been hurt and wanted to send this corner to our supplier to highlight the problem, which is why my last email to you was requesting to send you a replacement corner so you could send us this dangerous one. I didn’t hear anything back after that, not until this thread. If the corner still has the sharp edge I would still like to send it to our supplier, they need to see when their manufacturing process has issues. Again, sorry that you were hurt and sorry that my response made it worse because I honestly didn’t mean to do so.

Yes, I can't believe I forgot to put that on there! Would it be useful to know where the jacks are so you can see how well they nest with other side-jack pedals?

We never planned to have multiple knob choices, we chose a knob, designed the graphics etc around it and then because of the pandemic's impact on supply chains we couldn't get enough of them for the first production run. Then I had the idea of offering knob choices so we could make something positive out of this problem. I've got two of these pedals on my board (one at the start and one near the end of the signal chain), one with one knob style and one with another style.

If you were referring to me saying "musicians" as being a veiled insult, I didn't say bassists because it's aimed at guitarists too, and other instrumentalists. Again, apologies if you were insulted by that, it was not meant to be an insult. We're all musicians, even the drummers! 😉

It wasn't a veiled insult - I know it's a bit sideways using symbols rather than words but I didn't do it for the look, I did it because I think on this pedal (where the symbols can be logical and clear) it helps. Obviously we're all used to things just saying gain and volume so it's not as easy to understand at first glance. But I do honestly believe it's a good way of labelling it. Obviously if I'm wrong and everyone thinks this is worse than having words, then we'll have to make a version 2 with text instead of symbols!

Without there being something that's a perfect fit off-the-shelf (as with our discontinued active cabs), we have to develop something from scratch, which sadly isn't that easy. I am working on things but everything takes time!

I don't want to make just another amp with a Barefaced logo on. There's a lot of stuff I want to do with an amp, and I want to build it here and make it as serviceable and long lasting as possible because that's something I believe in. It's not easy to do...

It's quite hard to make text as legible as symbols when space is limited and I thought this symbols would make sense once a musician has used it for a short while. We had collars on the LEDs on one of the prototypes but it looked better without collars. Yes, it is, thank you for the positive!

It's the first non-cab product released, it's not the first thing we've started working on. An amp is a much more complicated thing to get right and much more expensive to get into production.

Yes, it's been a horrific year. I'm sorry for upsetting any of you, I really didn't mean to.

Yes, I'm sorry. Hopefully there is some forgiveness for someone having a pretty hard time right now.

This is such a spectacularly awful year for so many people, with deaths, job losses, no work etc etc. Sorry everyone, I shouldn't have got emotional. I should probably have had some breakfast but I've been run of my feet...

We've been working intensely on the bass amp since 2017. It's not far from being finished but right now there isn't the demand for loud live music equipment to finance bringing it to full production and releasing it.

OK, I'm sorry everyone. Running a business that specialises in making gear for live music is really hard when pretty much all live music is currently on hold. It's harder still when you have two small children and a very challenging baby. Can you just ignore my last comment, I'm just trying to stay the right side of a nervous breakdown whilst trying to not have to make all my staff redundant.

Comparing this thread to the thread on talkbass with the same title is why I hardly come on here.

I don't think you need to think about this unless you're designing a bass amp - or looking to buy an old one that has a bad reputation for shutting down on loud gigs (there must be some but I can't think of one!) You need a much bigger heatsink with passive cooling vs forced air cooling. Most amps with fans will have heatsinks too, just the fan allows the heatsink to be smaller, light and cheaper.

Two reasons: 1. Masking. Once you add the rest of the band, the other instruments mask a lot of the bass guitar's mid and treble response. Not all bassists are good at understanding the difference between a tone that sounds nice on its own and a tone that works in a band. 2. Non-linearity. Drums and electric guitars have always been prone to drowning out bass guitars. Eventually it got better for bassists as rigs got louder (but only if the bassist was willing to carry enough gear and/or spend enough money - and even then the loudest guitarists still win if they start volume war). And then everyone started trying to downsize their rigs and the problem returned. I have heard some horrific live sounds from bassists who are playing gear that I'm certain would sound good if they weren't asking it to do more than it can.

We have a one month trial period. If it isn't loud enough send it back. There's no better way to find out if a cab works for you - you can't crank any bass or guitar rig up loud enough in a shop to hear the truth.