flyfisher

[quote name='Wil' post='992231' date='Oct 18 2010, 02:25 PM']I prefer Stanley Unwin's remarkibold way of slappoping the streels.[/quote] Deep joy.

"Imagine a perfect world" Ah, but who's idea of a perfect world, that is the question.

I've known people into photography who amass huge amounts of expensive camera gear, yet have no photos on their walls. I've known people into music who have spent 5-figure sums on their hi-fi systems, yet only have a couple of dozen albums. I've even known people spend £60k on the best 4x4xfar and never so much as drive it up a kerb. I guess some people are just into the gear side of things, but great musicians can astound on any instrument.

[quote name='King Tut' post='987594' date='Oct 14 2010, 12:40 AM']Flyfishers response refers to laser pointers - not display lasers. There is a difference in that a scanning laser is believed to cause much less damage than a pointer because it never stays in the same place for long enough to cause damage UNLESS IT FAILS and stays in one place.[/quote] That's a fair point, and I've read that it's actually quite difficult to cause permanent harm with laser pointers because of their low power and the fact that, in practice, it would be very difficult to keep them focused on one area of the retina to cause tissue damage (think, shaky hands, blinking and gaze aversion reflex). BUT, I regard such things as low risk but having [u]huge[/u] consequences. A bit like suspending a PA stack - the chances of a single bit of the rigging breaking will be tiny because of over-rating etc, but if it did fall someone would probably die, so they have backup fixings etc etc. Fretmeister raised a similar point about laser eye surgery. I wear glasses but would never consider laser eyesight correction because of the risk - tiny though it may be. Wearing glasses, I have perfect vision, with pretty much zero downside, so why would I want to risk destroying that vision. However small the risk, the potential consequence is too great - for me anyway. Something that the unfortunate person mentioned by Freteister is now going to have to live with for the rest of their life.

Yes, similar sort of thing to USB but the drivers are more optimised for real-time data. It was part of the miniDV digital camcorder specification. MiniDV camcorders used tape so downloading the video data to a PC had to be guaranteed because the tape could not stop/start. Camcorders no longer use tape and when downloading from a hard-drive or memory card, the data can stop/start so USB2 is now widely used. Firewire is used in quite a bit of musical equipment and a plug-in card for a PC is only about £15 or so.

Two bands; one is mostly originals, the other about 50:50 . Also also working on some original recordings with a couple of mates.

[quote name='King Tut' post='985040' date='Oct 11 2010, 11:32 PM']I've just bought a secondhand laser GVG 701 - it's either 30 or 40 Milliwatt depending on what you read! Would this be safe to point into the audience - I've no instructions and the company has stopped selling lasers![/quote] You might want to check for other sources but according to this, anything above 1mW is illegal in the UK (read the entire article): [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_pointer"]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_pointer[/url] [i]UK and most of Europe are now harmonized on Class 2 (<1 mW) for General presentation use laser pointers or laser pens. Anything above 1mW is illegal in the UK. Health and Safety regulation insists on use of Class 2 anywhere the public can come in contact with indoor laser light, and the DTI have urged Trading Standards authorities to use their existing powers under the General Product Safety Regulations 2005 to remove lasers above class 2 from the general market [42][/i] I'd want to ensure my liability insurance would give me gold-plated guaranteed cover before I started pointing any sort of laser into an audience, particularly if it's a DIY rig.

[quote name='stingrayfan' post='985444' date='Oct 12 2010, 10:19 AM']Sheet of A4 and a big marker pen (don't write in biro, you'll never see it on stage). Write down simple chord changes (verse and chorus) and any bits of song you can't remember. Keep it simple, so you can look across and pick up where it's going next, without having to decipher. Gaffer tape it to something at eye level, so you're not looking down. PA speaker cab is usually good.[/quote] Yep, that's pretty much what I do, usually making a few notes on the set list and tape it to the PA head cab. If we're playing a new-ish song I might write the chord progressions and/or structure, it depends on how confident I feel. One thing I do like to have on the set list is the key or sometimes the first note of the song. Muscle memory get's me through most songs but sometime I blank on the starting position - a simple note on the set list avoids this. But at least bassists can adapt to a different key if necessary. We recently played a gig where our singer had learned a simple harmonica solo for a song we play in A. For some reason, the guitarist started the song in G, which I and the lead guitarist immediately noticed and shifted key. But I couldn't get the attention of the singer to warn him not to play his harp solo and it was like waiting to watch a car crash. Fortunately. he quickly realised something was wrong once he started his solo and wisely decided to to persevere. Fun and games! The bottom line is to make up whatever crib sheets you feel you need containing whatever works for you.

I've been playing around with the Kristal Audio Engine. Very stable and completely free for personal and non-commercial use. I'm using it with a 12 channel firewire audio interface. Might not be the best set-up in the world but I'm still learning and have not yet found its limits. It sure beats just using a single mic during rehearsals to record stuff.

The Beatles. No contest. Huge variety of music, global influence and a place in the history books.

Unless the bass is bare wood then I wouldn't be too worried about it soaking up loads of moisture. I'd be more concerned about abrupt temperature changes when moving from an air-conditioned house to an outside gig and back again. The resulting tension changes on the strings (expecially when going back indoors) will likely put far more strain on the neck than the actual humidity of the place. But I guess the local musicians must deal with it so it might be worth asking them when you get out there.

[quote name='TimR' post='976377' date='Oct 3 2010, 08:14 PM']This is getting to be a familiar story here. I really believe that studying the arrangments, forms, and bass lines of hundreds of other people's tunes is the best way to learn. It does frustrate me that playing covers is seen as selling out as opposed to a valuable learning experience. I wish I had learned that before I started playing in originals bands. If I wasn't in a covers band I don't know that I would have had the patience or motivation to learn (study) a high proportion of those tunes. I hated the Beatles tunes with a vengance but I had to learn them, once learned they're a little bit more enjoyable. They pack the dance floors and at least I now know why. In the past I would have asked "What's the appeal of Get Back?"[/quote] +1 (except hating Beatles tunes with a vengence ) And didn't The Beatles, not to mention countless other bands, hone their craft playing (mainly) covers? That way, musicians develop the experience and skill to do any subsequent originals real justice.

The thread title is a good question and, given the range of tone controls available on most bass amps these days, I sometimes wonder myself. Seems to me that the very primitive tone control on most basses is just a historical throwback to the early days when bass amps provided less flexible tone shaping. So the answer to the original question must be no, it's not essential. Indeed, in that seemingly never-ending seach for the 'perfect tone', a simple RC filter starts to look pathetically puny when faced with multi-band tone control on the bass amp plus a multi-band graphic equaliser pedal or even a full-on DSP-powered amp-modelling wonderbox.

I suspect TimR was referring to MCBs in the consumer unit rather than every plug or device - an example of where technology advances can be incorporated into updated regs and replace rather imprecise fusewire and minimise consumer error at the same time.

So the UK has the safest electrical regs in the world because of fused plugs? As I said, there are lots of ways of implementing such things. If fused plugs were the best idea since sliced bread, why have they not caught on around the world? I understand your attachment to the regs but how are you going to handle a change to new regs that don't require fuses in plugs at all, which would harmonise us with the rest of Europe and pretty much all non-former-British-Empire countries?

[quote name='ironside1966' post='975401' date='Oct 2 2010, 08:44 PM']So for a gig like the prodigy where you want the sound to be felt as well as heard and by blots of big speaker he probably means the enclosure not the drivers[/quote] Nope, he's definitely referring to the driver sizes, although that will of course also mean a big enclosure. Here's a bit more on the 'infras' . . . [i]"They're a triple 21-inch; a cardioid box with two forward-facing 21-inch speakers and one rear-facing 21-inch speaker"[/i] I guess that's a big speaker in all senses of the word.

[quote name='stingrayPete1977' post='975392' date='Oct 2 2010, 08:32 PM']I suppose you could argue that an oversize 13A is better than no protection at all though too? And like I said most of these other countries dont use 32A ring mains so its normally 16A at the wall socket which is already half the problem we have but in this country we like our gadgets so we would need lot of radial circuits with fewer outlets on them to use all the equipment in the kitchen alone.Some electricians have adopted this now but everytime you run a radial its more cost as the breaker with combined RCBO is around £25 over a fiver for an MCB 10 of those in a large house and you are £200 out of pocket for a start. So its not that clear cut really is it?[/quote] No, it's not, which sounds like the very thing you were complaining about when you said [i]"The other problem is even the rulebook guys cant decide on a lot of these problems"[/i] Isn't the fact of the matter that there are many ways to design and implement an electrical distribution system? Each has their own pros and cons. Later implementations can incorporate knowledge gained from earlier implementations, together with taking advantage of new technology that didn't exist at the time of the original implementations. That's the world the design engineer inhabits and has to deal with, armed only with an understanding of the underlying science. They don't have a set of regulations to tell them what to do, they have to figure it out for themselves, then write the regulations for the technicians to follow. As you say, horses for courses.

I think you may have missed my point. I wasn't looking for a recital of the actual regs, more of an explanation about the merits of different regs in different countries and who would be the best sort of person to ask. Although, you probably answered it anyway. Personally, I would suggest that the whole fuse thing is ridiculous anyway and is, I think, a feeling reflected in many of the changes to the regs over the years. Whatever we may think of qualifications, I think we could agree that it's poor design to rely on end-users having any level of electrical knowledge in order to safely use an appliance. Giving Joe Public a fused mains lead is a wrongly-rated fuse waiting to happen. So why bother in the firstplace? This seems to be something that most countries of the world seem to have figured out and I'm amazed its taking the UK so long to figure this out. Perhaps that's why an electrican's qualifications are not quite as globally recognised as an engineers' ?

I know what you mean, but I'd like to think a band like The Prodigy could afford rather more than an idiot as their live sound engineer. Fair point about the audibility of the 'infra' subwoofers, and I guess that's implicit in the name, but I'm sure they add to the overall physical experience.

[quote name='Bobby K' post='965435' date='Sep 23 2010, 11:35 AM']Well, I was convinced that I'd knackered my tone pot with too much solder iron heat after first doing the job. This was after trying to unsolder the blob on top of it, having the iron on the pot for ages before realising it wasn't hot enough (but still heating up the pot!)[/quote] That's an important point when soldering. It can be as important to use a large iron as a small one when the circumstances dictate. It's not really a question of temperatureas such, but heat capacity. A small iron with a small bit will actually be cooled down by applying it to a large bit of cold metal, like a pot casing for example. For such things, you need an iron with enough thermal capacity so it won't cool when applied to large items such as pot cases and some connectors and will enable you to make the soldered joint quickly enough to remove the iron before the entire piece of metal gets too hot. But don't try to use such an iron to replace a surface-mounted component!

If, as you say, the rulebook guys can't decide on such things then how can anyone qualified and experienced in applying the rules be so certain of things? As you rightly say, domestic earthing regulations have changed over the years, so a person qualified and experienced in one edition of the wiring regs could be fairly accused of being completely wrong by another person qualified and experienced in the latest wiring regs. Even though the underlying science won't have changed. Anyway, the whole fuse thing is particularly entertaining when most countries in the world don't even have fused plugs in the first place. So does that make us more primitive or more advanced in terms of electrical safety and who would you ask to get the answer? The guys that write the rulebooks or the guys that are qualified to read them?

Next up, a Japanese, cross-dressing, bass-player . . . . .

Or replace my 1x15 with one of those triple-21s perhaps?

A fascinating and entertaining exchange and one I've seen similarly repeated over many years in the IT/electronics industry when engineers and technicians have, er, differences of opinions. The amusing thing was that the technicians didn't usually understand the science but knew the 'rulebook' whereas the engineer was often the other way around. At no time did anyone really consider who actually writes these rulebooks and regulations and who has to follow them. Much like MSL's comment above that he hasn't a clue about PAT testing even though he is actually qualified. Anyway, such debates rarely ended in total agreement and usually fizzled out as the protagonists became bored. Deja vu really.

According to Jon Burton, The Prodigy's chief live sound engineer: [quote]"There’s a lot to be said for having large amounts of loudspeakers, and big loudspeakers make proper bass noise. There’s no way you can get a good bass sound out of a small speaker, it just doesn’t work.”[/quote] The full article is in the October edition of Sound On Sound magazine and gives more details about his liberal use of 18-inch subs and, in case that's not quite enough, his use of triple 21-inch 'infra' subwoofers to handle the 15-50Hz frequencies. Might as well ditch my 2x10 cab then.