alexclaber

The bass shouldn't sound like the kick but it should fit the vibe - when they hit together they should be coherent but distinct. An interesting case of this that I've found is that my new bass naturally has a thicker warmer fatter sound than my old one which was more punchy and midrangey. On our last studio recording when I was using my old bass my drummer used his smaller kick drum with a typical thick and slightly woolly sound, like that you might hear on many 70s rock and funk recordings. However at our last gig he was using his vistalite kit with 26" kick drum with that huge fast sound like Bonham's on Physical Graffiti and the slam and attack of that fitted so well with the fatter rounder sound of my new bass. Alex

You could always use a badder 1x15". Alex

[quote name='fusionbassist1' post='265591' date='Aug 19 2008, 03:41 PM']ANy particular meters album? I own a Parliament best of already but I might aswell get a propper album ....I have something against best of's and compilations.[/quote] Although I haven't heard it their live album is meant to be very good - I think it was for the Wings launch party on the Queen Mary IIRC! Otherwise Funkify Your Life, The Best Of The Meters gives you a greasy wodge of N'Awlins fonk. Alex

Rather than definitive albums it's easier to ask for suggestions on essential albums. I'm not sure if any album can ever be definitive of a genre. Also quite lot of genres are more about singles than albums so compilations are your best bet. Reggae - Exodus or Babylon By Bus (Bob Marley & The Wailers) Country - Patsy Cline best of Jazz - Kind Of Blue (Miles Davis) Hip-hop - Black Sunday (Cypress Hill) Drum n bass - New Forms (Reprazent) Metal - Master Of Puppets (Metallica), Paranoid (Black Sabbath) Rock - Back In Black (AC/DC) Funk - Tear The Roof Off (Parliament best of), Foundations of Funk (last '60s JB best of) R n B - Hitsville USA (Motown compilation) Rock is the most ridiculously massive genre to try and define - AC/DC nail all those hard rock clichés so well though... Alex

[quote name='Chopthebass' post='265187' date='Aug 19 2008, 08:04 AM']So basically ignore the manufacterers specs, except impedance I guess, and let your ears judge.[/quote] Indeed, though there are enough ears out there writing posts online that you can build up a fairly accurate picture of what a cab can do if you're good at reading between the lines. Alex

[quote name='Chopthebass' post='264953' date='Aug 18 2008, 09:29 PM']So when buying speakers should we be going for cabs with the highest sensitivity poss?[/quote] No. Why? Because the quoted sensitivity is usually made up by the marketing department and cannot be trusted and in the rare exceptions where it is the truth then it is only relevant if your amp could not drive a less sensitive cab to gigging volume. So if you have two cabs and one is 2dB more sensitive than the other but the other can handle twice as much power without farting out (because the speakers have 40% more travel or Xmax) then the less sensitive one with greater excursion limited power handling can go 1dB louder. Alex

[quote name='sixshooter' post='264679' date='Aug 18 2008, 04:05 PM']Matching Power OK, the Amp can be seen like a car engine in that it supplies power, and your speaker like the clutch brakes and tyres delivering the power to the road. If you put a bigger engine in it will work, but your clutch will fail much quicker if you use all the power and the tyres and brakes will fade and you will be replacing parts much sooner than you would like! The same is true for the amp and speaker, drive the speaker past its limits and you will be replacing the speaker a lot sooner, so rule of thumb is make sure your speakers can take all that the amp can give plus a bit more. Now if you put a smaller engine in the car again it will work but perfomance will be sluggish. Using a speaker that needs a lot more power to drive it than is being supplied and it will not reach its optimal range, but it will work.[/quote] Although this analogy is full of holes it does make some sense given a bit of tweaking. If you take a normal car onto a race track and try to achieve consistently fast lap times then your brakes will give out, guaranteed. Take that car back on the road and those same brakes will be more than capable of decelerating the car as required for many thousands of miles, even if you like to drive fast. Consider the amp the engine and the speakers the brakes - in normal use your amp can have significantly more power than the speakers can handle and you will never ever have a problem. Push your amp to the point where things are not sounding nice, just as driving a car fast round a track will seem rather brutal compared to driving quickly on the road, and you risk speaker damage. And just as a low powered car has enough power to wreck its brakes on a track, so too can a low powered amp wreck a speaker if abused. [quote name='sixshooter' post='264679' date='Aug 18 2008, 04:05 PM']How much output, (watts) being delivered to the speaker, (not to be confused by being generated by the amp) will depend on where the volume control is set, and there is no set relation to the number on the dial, (so just because it goes up to 11 does not mean that it is louder than one that goes up to 10, remember Spinal Tap).[/quote] The wattage delivered to the speaker depends on the voltage output from the amp and the speaker impedance at that frequency. The voltage output from the amp depends on the voltage input to the amp from your bass and the gain within the amp. Play hard and use a hot bass with the volume on the amp set at 2 and more voltage will be output than with a quiet bass and a light touch but the volume set at 11. See the other thread about gain vs volume for more information. Alex

Why not just stick with the TE combo? Alex

On another subject altogether, I have just designed a hi-fi speaker from scratch! It features a coaxial 7" midbass/tweeter (3kHz crossover point) in a sealed cab, Q=0.707, with an 8" woofer (200Hz crossover) in a large ported cab tuned to 30Hz. Response +/- 1.5dB from 40-6000Hz, +/-3dB from 30-20000Hz, and can manage 100dB output from 30Hz upwards. The reason behind the unusual design is to get the big clean bass output of a large floorstander without the need for a separate subwoofer but the coherent nearfield response of a coax design and in the process get very low distortion midrange and treble by minimising excursion of the midbass speaker (which also acts a waveguide for the tweeter). It's also designed for near-wall placement so large non-rectangular baffle and no baffle-step correction. The crossover is hellishly complicated - six inductors, eight capacitors and six resistors per speaker (and that's assuming I can get correct values and won't have to use multiple components for certain values). Fortunately the impedance curves look ok to drive - phase doesn't get too weird and magnitude stays above 4 ohms. Alex

One thing I noticed from watching back video footage was that if you're going to do any really obvious MOVES then you have to commit 100% to them and even exaggerate them. A case in point is the Townshend style windmill, anything less than reaching for the sky and then flailing an outstretched arm like you're going to rip your strings off looks rather limp. But as said above, you have to make it look natural and it has to look right in context - i.e. do not mosh in a disco band. Alex

[quote name='Sarah5string' post='263205' date='Aug 15 2008, 04:24 PM']You're popular alex lol[/quote] I gather the laydeez lurve a bass player. Alex

An old one of me which appeared on facebook recently: Alex

Ah, I remember it now, don't know what they were fussing about: (The following song is a new one - nice groove but rather messy at the moment..) Alex

[quote name='coasterbass' post='263124' date='Aug 15 2008, 02:46 PM']Does anyone else actually have room to move about on stage?[/quote] Now that I'm the singer as well the bassist I get to claim the whole centre of the stage from drum riser to monitors, which leads to numerous opportunities to get tangled in my own lead, fall off the riser, hit my guitarist with my headstock (ah, the joys of a 36" scale beast). Last gig I fell over the stairs leading up to the drums (bizarre pub) - am now trying to find it on the youtube video... Alex

Showmanship! With practice you'll be able to achieve both - but if you don't try acting the goat then you'll never get the hang of being an accurate bassist and a crazy fool simultaneously. Alex

Your Markbass combo has a piezo tweeter so that's not a great start! In my opinion there are two ways to get good highs from a bass cab - either use a large horn tweeter with a steep crossover on woofers and tweeter or use a midrange driver and tweeter with shallower slopes. The Bergantino HT cabs take the former approach, Acme cabs take the latter. For my own designs I've gone without any high frequency components on one model and with just a midrange driver, no tweeter, on the other model - in my opinion the majority of bassists don't need the treble to go much beyond 5kHz. A lot of bass cabs use a smaller tweeter and cross it over relatively high with a steep slope and they can sound great on-axis but as soon as you move off-axis you get a gap in response between where the woofer starts beaming and the tweeter kicks in. At least if they use a steep slope on the tweeter you get a nice sound from it, even if the off-axis response is poor, which is much preferable to the grainy sound from less well thought out designs. Alex

Hi Lrak, I believe you used to hang out on TBL back in the good old days! Alex

[quote name='Fraktal' post='262685' date='Aug 14 2008, 08:21 PM']Alex, I have seen lots of manufacturers adding a huge condenser in the tweeter cables. Is it working as a high pass filter?[/quote] Yes, first order high pass filter. Unfortunately that isn't a steep enough slope to protect the tweeter from unnecessarily low frequencies hitting it which is why most tweeters sound nasty and grainy and distorted instead of a clear smooth yet bright reproduction of the higher overtones and percussives. Alex

The position of the volume knobs tells you nothing about how much power the amp has left to give. If two amps are putting out the same power the one with the most midrangey sound will be loudest. Cab sensitivity matters more than amp power. TE 4x10" combos tend to sound very loud for their wattage because they have very little true bottom, tons of midrange, low Xmax high sensitivity speakers that rapidly compress and add extra overtones which increase apparent loudness. Alex

Tuffcab with a textured roller, five coats or so, gives an excellent finish. Takes a good few days to harden fully but can be recoated within hours. Alex

I haven't heard one but the theory is fairly straightforward. The isobaric 2x15" has the same frequency response as a 1x15" in twice the cab size (i.e. it goes very low) but the sensitivity is 6dB lower so it won't play anywhere near as loud as you'd expect. Compared to a normal 2x15" the sensitivity is 9dB lower but the cab only has to be 1/4 the size to go as low. Alex

[quote name='Protium' post='261858' date='Aug 13 2008, 07:54 PM']Yeah it's Maplin prices haha. So the overall impedance won't be affected?[/quote] Indeed. Alex

No crossover required as it's a piezo tweeter so you can simply wire it in parallel with the existing drivers. However due to the low sensitivity and power handling I would recommend using a vertical array of four of these tweeters wired series/parallel to double power handling and raise sensitivity by 3dB. Also, that seems expensive for piezo tweeters. Alex

[quote name='umph' post='261427' date='Aug 13 2008, 10:55 AM']you could just daisy chain the cabs?[/quote] That'll still connect them in parallel. Alex

I believe the GS112's more scooped sound is due to a slightly higher tuning giving a mid-bass hump and the effect of a less rigid cabinet (harder to quantify but presumably the wall resonances are absorbing some of the speaker's midrange energy). One of the pioneering lightweight 1x12" bass cabs though it's nowhere near as light as recent neo offerings. Alex