Ian Savage

[quote name='51m0n' post='1185030' date='Apr 1 2011, 05:48 PM']Sennheiser E845 my just come in under budget (havent checked for years) Failing that the E835 is none too shabby, its a flatter version of the E845, so a little eq will bring a similar sound.[/quote] I've got an E840 and an E845 which I'm considering moving on, if you're interested - both with minimal use (mainly micing guitar cabs, not had people singing into 'em), would much rather keep 'em but the CSA are chewing my arse off - £40 the former and £60 the latter?

+1 on the idea of a half-decent multi to begin with, I reckon if you were to spend about a ton on a used Boss (ME50B or maybe GT6B if you're lucky) or Line 6 Bass Pod (they do floor versions now, I think) you'd have a good-sounding unit to get an idea of which effects you like/need which you could then sell at a minimal loss if you decided you wanted individual pedals, or keep and use for the effects you only use once or twice in a set and augment with 'better' stompboxes for the effects you need more often or which the multi doesn't cut it for. Line selector or A/B box is an option if you find the lack of true bypass to be an issue, but I suspect you won't notice tbh. If you do go for single stompboxes, there's no hard-and-fast rules for what order to put them in but as a rule of thumb you'd go gain-based effects first (distortion, compression) then modulation effects (chorus, flanger etc) then time-based effects (reverb, delay etc) with spectrum alteration (EQ, wah) wherever it sounds best; strictly speaking they're gain-based, but it depends very much on the rest of your pedalboard and the overall effect you're trying to achieve where they go.

[quote name='Thurbs' post='1183278' date='Mar 31 2011, 01:27 PM']I also upgraded from MAG to ABM and the head is definitely worth the extra money. Night and day really. The MAG 115 wasn't that meaty in terms of wattage so I also have a ABM 115 but still use the MAG 410.[/quote] What he said; my old MAG300 head would run out of steam at gigging levels fairly easily, the ABM 300W I got a year or two later seemed to have bags of power in reserve. Strange as on paper they're putting out the same Wattage, but that's how things seemed...

[quote name='xgsjx' post='1183102' date='Mar 31 2011, 10:58 AM']Nooo! Too sensible![/quote] Yes, there shall be no sensible here there is actually a reason for wanting to keep hold of the Peavey, it's got some sentimental value and it's also got my daughter's height marked up the side of it over her first couple of years (as well as a flightcase). I'll have a look at how easy it'd be to block off the lower half of the cab when i get home...

[quote name='LawrenceH' post='1182838' date='Mar 30 2011, 10:53 PM']Actually half the box would still be big enough for a lot of tens, but looking at images online not only does it appear to be a single box but it is open backed.[/quote] You're right, it is open-backed. [quote name='xgsjx' post='1182977' date='Mar 31 2011, 08:49 AM']For the price of a couple of drivers to stick in your 4x10, you could buy a cheap bass cab off of here (Ashdown MAG, Hartke, etc).[/quote] It's more an issue of space than anything else; I'll likely to be moving into pretty much the cheapest accomodation I can find in the near future so the smaller I can make the physical footprint of my gear the better! Hey ho, might try Mr Foxen's idea of just playing through the cab with a chunk of the low end carved out; as I say, as long as I can hear what I'm doing overall sound quality isn't paramount.

I'm not doing much bass playing at all at the minute (haven't even got one right now, but that's another story) so I can't justify having a bass rig kicking around the place. What I HAVE got, however, is my Peavey Classic 410E guitar cab which I'm keeping for six-string duties. It's very rare that I need the power of four speakers for guitar, so my possibly hare-brained idea was to take two of the guitar speakers out and replace them with 10" bass drivers. My thinking is that since the cab has the connections to allow stereo operation I could essentially have half of the cab available for running a guitar amp through and be able to at least get SOME sound out of it for bass duties (via my EHX Bass Metaphors and a PA power amp) should I be called upon to do a jam night or whatever - the bass would also likely go through the PA so I'd really only need to get enough out of the 410 to hear what I'm doing. Viable, or really bloody stupid and a waste of time?

Stage left too as a general rule, but that's really only a starting point Mind you, when I was in a band with two guitarists, only one of whom sang backing vocals with me, I did switch sides for the sake of symmetry - it looked sort of weird having two mic stands on the same side and none on the other, and we didn't want to have both guitars on one side (makes it harder for the drummer to hear/distinguish them, and certainly if your guitar cabs aren't mic-ed makes things less than optimal for the audience too).

IMO pretty much any PA-type power amp will do you as long as it's got enough power; due to lack of storage space my bass rig for a while has been an EHX Bass Metaphors running into a QSC USA 900 power amp, all sounds fine and buckets of power. The QSC runs 450W per channel into 4 ohms, I've only ever run one side of it on bass duties and it copes admirably; I'd say to be on the safe side you want 300W per channel (proper RMS Watts, not program or peak or other such bollocks) minimum, but that shouldn't be too expensive.

[quote name='thebrig' post='1169883' date='Mar 20 2011, 07:44 PM']I'm not too sure what SPDIF and ADAT actually means and does.[/quote] S/PDIF = Sony / Philips Digital Interface, 16 bit digital stereo connection on a standard RCA jack ADAT = Alesis Digital Audio Tape, 8-track recording interface often provided on an optical connection these days (some outboard gear will give you 8 mic inputs to an ADAT optical output, bloody handy - one of the few worthwhile bits of Behringer gear is the AD8000).

[quote name='redstriper' post='1169688' date='Mar 20 2011, 04:55 PM']I'm out of touch, but I thought you needed firewire to record more than 2 tracks at once.[/quote] That used to be the case around the time of the USB 1.1/2.0 switchover, but apparently most recent USB devices will perform as well as Firewire stuff on a bit-for-bit basis; the difference certainly used to come with Macs as the throughput for Firewire was more efficient than for USB (or something, I'm not a total computer nut myself ), and apparently was much less noticeable on PCs as certain FW chipsets (Toshiba rings a bell for some reason) weren't optimised for audio and caused dropouts (might have been what redstriper was experiencing). To be honest, I'm a Mac person for audio so I've always used FireWire as it was the better option back when I started, I'm still on it now. Last FW interface I used which'd do 8 tracks simultaneously (ten, if you utilise the S/PDIF digital interface) was the Presonus Firestudio Project, which I'd heartily recommend. Comes nicely within budget too.

[url="http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/acoustic-guitar-30-inch-black-kids-love-them-new-/290543203154?pt=AU_Musical_Instruments_Instruments&hash=item43a5b97352"]http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/acoustic-guitar-30-i...=item43a5b97352[/url]

If it's 'Crafted in...', it's been lovingly assembled by a specialist team of highly skilled luthiers. If it's 'Made in...', it was thrown together by a cluster of drunken monkeys.

[quote name='joegarcia' post='1166207' date='Mar 17 2011, 08:10 PM']This 1 day listing on eBay may well end up being a bit of a bargain: [url="http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/akg-rhythm-pack-1-DAY-LISTING-/230598015981?pt=UK_Music_Instruments_Microphones_MJ&hash=item35b0b67bed#ht_500wt_1156"]http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/akg-rhythm-pack-1-DA...d#ht_500wt_1156[/url][/quote] Really shouldn't, but I've now very much got my eye on these if no-one else has - just to avoid a bidding war between BassChatters!

Someone selling a 505 - [url="http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=127672&hl="]http://basschat.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=127672&hl=[/url]

If I remember right, Hendrix, Keef and Ginger from t'Wildhearts have all played a fair bit of bass on their records...

[quote name='Roland Rock' post='1162469' date='Mar 14 2011, 09:58 PM']I don't like lager. Can anyone recommend a bitter that has these free straplocks on them?[/quote] I was very pleasantly surprised to find the mineral water I ordered in a posh restaurant once supplied with BLACK versions of the Grolsch washers