Phil Starr

I'm not sure About being totally disinterested in LFSys as Stevie is a friend but it would be a shame if there wasn't a clear answer here, as well as being available elsewhere. 'Hearing' yourself on stage isn't a simple thing. Everything you play is made up of a wide range of frequencies and you won't hear all those frequencies equally well. In addition there are lots of other sounds reaching your ears: the rest of the band, reflections of your own sound reflected off every hard surface in the room, the PA sound and the audience sound just to mention the loudest sources. Your ears pick up this jumble of noise and your brain interprets this the best it can so you hear what you want. Your hearing isn't an accurate map of whet gets to your ears it's the best your brain can do with the information it has. It's probably quite useful to think of signal and noise. Signal is what you want and noise is all the distracting stuff from elsewhere. If the signal falls below the noise you are still picking it up but the brain can't turn it into anything useful. It can be as loud as you like but the information isn't useful to you. Now to fully understand you'd have to look at each frequency seperately but it's more useful to look at three bands bass, middle and treble. I'm going to look at bass and middle as there isn't a lot of top end coming from your bass. So now we come to the physics of speakers, the crucial bit is that the way sound is radiated depends upon the relationship between the diameter of the speaker and the wavelength of the sound it is trying to reproduce. If the wavelength is longer than the diameter of the speaker it is radiated evenly in every direction. As the wavelength becomes shorter and shorter the sound is increasingly radiated into a narrow beam of sound and a big speaker is radiating the mid-rnage and treble more like a searchlight or torchbeam than the bulbs that illuminate the room. 10" speakers means searchlight for most of the midrange 2x10 doubly so and the midrange is where all the signal is that you need to hear what you are playing. With no tweeter your Two10 stands very little chance of getting the signal to your ears unless you raise it right up to ear level and point it straight at your head. Even raised on an 18" platform the mid range is going past your waist not your ears. So adding a tweeter and crossing over at lower frequencies mean they won't beam and using a horn directs and controls the radiation pattern to an extent. LFSys crossover slightly lower than any other specifiacally bass speaker so you'll get more mids going to your ears and they have one extra trick; the horn is rotated 90deg so that the widest radiation is in the vertical plane and not horizontally as you would get with a PA speaker. Hearing bass isn't an issue, on most stages you are swamped with bass. Firstly you will hear the bass from the PA and at the same volume as the audience as it is radiated 360deg, In fact since you are closer to the PA in most venues than the majority of the audience the bass can be even louder than the reat of the on-stage sound, secondly you'll hear all the reflected bass off the walls, ceiling and floors all with a slight time delay smearing the sound so you'll get loads of complaints about the bass being so loud whilst being unable to hear enough mid-range to really hear the details of what your bass is doing. The Monza and Monaco in particular have a really tightly controlled bass and this also helps.

This is how I use my Monza. I try to set everything up so I get the same sound from headphones, studio monitors, PA,and the bass rig. You’ll find that it is a little more complex than it sounds because of the room acoustics and because; well our ears are sensitive and speakers aren’t good enough to fool anyone. Functionally it works well enough though. DI is always going to sound better for the audience anyway as all mics just introduce added distortion and added stage noise. It may give you a sense of control in bypassing the sound tech but if they are determined enough to make you sound sampled then you won’t stop them with a mic 😄 You may want to mic up for recording of course. @stevie used a measuring mic in developing his designs so hopefully he will come along to help.

What @mike257 describes sounds like heaven, probably in more ways thatn one. For most of us the 'Festival' is a beer festival, a charity event or an overgrown village fete which has grown from one local band using their own PA to a multi band event with a hired in PA. Often the PA has been set up by a hire firm but the organisers have saved money by not hiring a sound engineer. Typically you come across a couple of blokes who have no idea of how the PA was set up and are scared to touch anything. They'll spend 20 mins plugging things in at random and line checking then huddle down by the desk with no sound check staring at all the scary knobs whose function eludes them. @warwickhunts 'can you start your set know' sounds very familiar.

Ain't that the truth! It's not unusual for the people who won't give you the information to be the ones asking "why there aren't more gigs?" or "why haven't you organised a reherarsal?" I've now used Rallly successfully once but still have one errant band member who hasn't filled in dates for three months on the second poll I sent out. I think I'm going to plug away with it for a while and see if it can become a habit

Funny you should say that, 😂

About 6 months ago I was playing in the Vintage, Wellington which is a decent music pub with densely packed and usually inebriated audiences. Anyone who has played there will know there is little delineation between the stage and the audience. One young woman, tall, willowy attractive but very drunk came up behind me an wrapped her arms round mine whilst I was playing and started a conversation about which songs she wanted. It's remakably difficult to go on playing and singing with 6 feet of drunken young woman draped over you with your arms pinned to your side. In the end her boyfriend who clearly though it was hilarious came up and politely asked if I would like him to take her away. What is the etiquette in this situation?

An ambient mic would certainly work and be cheaper but you'd probably have to compromise with how the drums sounded in the monitors. Given my experiences i'd rather have single mic drums than some of the IEM feeds I've experienced. The EAD10 is two ambient mics and the kick drum via a trigger and all the eq etc is sorted for you. Even at an ordinary gig it will probably give you as good as/better than you''d get with a 3 mic set up done in a rush. Talking to drummers they are marmite, some won't touch them and some swear by them.

Probably a good provision if you are doing enough of this type of event to justify the expense. I've had several episodes of the monitors being perfect at sound check only to be given someone elses feed during the gig, there's only so much 'can I have a bit more of this and a bit less of that' you can do, especially when you know at least one other band member is wondering why my bass and vocals are dominating their mix. It's reall tough to concentrate and play well when your mix has failed. Probably worse for the poor sod who gets my vocals I'm surprised nobody yet has offered the chance to mix your own monitors via a phone app at the smaller multi band events. IEM's are no longer really cutting edge technology and the apps can usually be locked so you don't have access to FOH. I've mixed these events myself in the past and with 10 min changeovers it can be hell to get everything done and not every band is co-operative or even knows what it is doing. Passing on the extra job of setting up monitors sounds great to me. I could always just feed them FOH if they eff up. On the subject of drums how about the Yamaha EAD10 here It's a load of expense but I've seen drummers use it to mic up their kits and It works OK compared to many people's version of mic'ing a kit.

Nice Job 😮😂 The grille looks to be in good nick and you'vegot corners and the sockets on the back. I can't tell what's underneath but I'd be looking to 'restore' rather than build a new cab. The BassChat 110 which @Stevie designed to fit the 30l cab I'd designed and built for another project would probably work fairly welll but was designed for particular Celestion speakers. they are probably similar to your speakers but won't be identical. Pull the sheet (!) off and see whats underneath, then clean that off then all you would need to do is paint it up with Tuff Cab and you have a restored Ashdown 2x10 which will be worth something. You might love it and if you don't someone else will and give you the cost of the components to make the BC110T properly,then youd have had two fun projects. I think you can make this look as good as new for pocket money

That's interesting, how long ago was that? I got the strong impression from the information I gleaned that it is still pretty much a beta version/under development. I wouldn't want to use something that crashes too often because the band won't use something they don't have faith in.

I do hate google with a vengeance, I hate that it invades everything you do after any engagement with it at all and i don't consent to it using and sharing my data. I've used Timetree and it is such a poor piece of software. Really clunky and counter intuitive to use. I mean it works but finding out how to do anything complicated on it is a nightmare. Ive also used Doodle to gather in availabllity data and liked the simplicity, it's got a lot more sophisticated recently and moved to a paid model but I've recently discovered Rallly which does look and behave just like the older versions of Doodle. You send out a survey with a list of dates/times and people fill in their availability. It's great for booking rehearsals and identifying dates the band are available for gigs. The bit it doesn't do is generate an actual calendar the band can see.

We are having problems agreeing on a calendar app for our band and one band member is suggesting this one. Anyone had experience with it, or tried anything similar?

I love a happy ending 💖

I think that pic is conclusive (though sometimes you can have more than one fault) You should be able to operate the swich manually (be gentle) with a pencil tip and get it to operate. The spring is to turn the stamp of a 16 stone bassist into a gentle push. You could try putting something soft on the bottom of the shortened spring to shim out the gap as a temporary fix while you wait for the replacement spring. A little rubber foot might work, or a piece of felt. Hang off with the Servisol until you've tested the switch. It doesn't so much clean the switch as move the dirt around so there are a limited number of times it will work in a semi-sealed microswitch

Hi John, thanks for offering to help out, they are non latching momentary switches allowing some basic programming. A double tap saves the settings

I opened mine up and gave the inside of the switches a good squirt of Servisol (switch cleaner) no further problems to date. I run mine on batteries, I find that if the batteries are getting close to dead the switches don't work as they should. Remember these aren't actual swiches, which are in the electronics, they just send a signal that you want to change something and if the batteries need changing then you don't have enough power for the programmable to work Paging @Chienmortbb

I did wonder if there weren't local names for playing styles. I really enjoyed the nostalgia of watching Rhiannon playing something I attempted so long ago.

Thanks Pete I was a self taught and not very successful banjo player back in the days when Scruggs was seen as not really folk music. My 'tutors' were Pete Seeger's book and another which I think was called the Art Of The Mountain Banjo or some such name. I spent hours trying to get the picking styles right but foolishly never really got on top of many songs. That three finger technique that she uses was one that I learned at the time. I never heard anyone at the time describe down picking or frailing as clawhammer but certainly now that seems to be common usage. It's nearer 60 years than 50 since I last seriously tried to play the banjo so I may have misremembered

Now can somebody tell me what that picking style is called. When I learned it (a long time ago) it was called clawhammer with the pinch being the 'claw'. Now i see internet guides callingthe picking that I call 'frailing' being described as clawhammer.

I probably need to go up into the loft, I'm not sure what is up there any more.

I'm going to miss the Bristol store, what else will I do when the family are hitting the shops. I'll miss Mansons in Exeter more though. It's been inevitable for some time that these stores would be in trouble. If we all trot off to Thomann and the like for our needs then they are bound to suffer. It's not as if the rest of the high street isn't in the middle of a huge upheaval also. I don't think the situation has been helped by the likes of Gibson and Fender forcing them to carry huge stocks either. The other reality is that the guitar has probably lost it's dominance in music and 'peak guitar' was actually back in the early 80's with perhaps it's own indy revival. On the bright side I'm seeing a couple of independent shops benefitting. Often by offering other services. In Chard (a small Somerset market town) we have The Somerset Music Academy, it's a guitar shop which also offers guitar and other music tuition combined with a repair and set up service. It combines a steady turnover of used gear with a range of um... lesser known brands. Even this has a twist, they are careful what they stock and every instrument gets a set up before they sell it. There are some very playable, nice sounding instruments at reasonable prices. Something you can't get from the warehouses. The tuition gives them a stream of customers for starter instruments and the kids get something decent to start their journey with. I believe they plan on running a rehearsal room too. There's so little competition out there that people will travel to go somewhere you can try before you buy.

If you want to design an amp driving into 2ohm loads then the first thing you'd need to do would be to double the power supply unless you are prepared to see the power produced by the amp limited by the current available. You'd also need to considerably beef up the heat sinking, although the basic design of most of the amplifier module would remain the same you'd also need to increase the power handling of the output componets to survive the extra current they would be carrying. There would be considerable expense involved in doing this right and it might well add 30-50% to the cost of production for an amp that would only appeal to a limited market. It's significant that historically a lot of 1,000W amps run parallel output stages mainly because it is as cheap or cheaper to do this than to create a 2ohm amplifier. A big beefy power supply does add funcrtionality to any amp and a well specified supply is worth having as it will also improve performance at 4ohms, to an extent you get what you pay for and power supplies are roughly as costly as amps, sometimes more so. An amp might well be advertised as 2ohm stable but if the output remains the same or is even reduced at 2ohms compared with 4ohms then what is the point?

That was just the RM, I used to have a MAG 300 and that definitely had the Ashdown 'sound'. It's been an interesting journey for me the past few years. You'll probably know I've designed cabs for folks on BassChat mainly to put something back in. I was a complete newcomer to bass when I first joined and people here helped me a lot with my playing. @stevie and I worked togetehr on the earliest designs but came from slightly different angles, he was always an FRFR man wanting the most accurate cabs he could make, no expense spared. I was more interested in finding out why people generally wen't for a cloloured sound and what it was they were looking for in their ideal cabs. It soon became apparent that Stevie's expertise was greater than mine particularly in crossover design and he was interested in making the best cabs possible with cost almost no object. I was lucky enough to be able to be around as he developed LFSys trying some early designs out, listening to a lot of prototypes and discussing loudspeaker design. I've finally settled on two of his designs. The original BassChat 110T and a Monza Meanwhile I've gigged more and moved towards using in-ears and no back line. Floor monitors for low volume gigs and the in-ears for everything else. The Monza is only used rarely when I've a drummer who wants a bass speaker behind him or at festivals where bad experiences with poor techs means I take backline as a backup. If the sound people get it right the volume stays at 0 if I can't hear myself I turn it up and leave them to sort front of house. I had a couple of experiences playing sets with no bass at all on stage so I won't use somebody else's PA naked, so to speak. Having gone FRFR by going direct to PA having the FRFR Monza is a godsend. Room acoustics allowing I get a consistent sound through PA/floor monitors/in-ears/backline and practicing at home through studio monitors or headphones. The surprise came when @stevie bought a Trace Elliott amp, it just spread some magic through the FRFR speakers. I tried my Peavey Minimax and it does a similar trick. There's no mystery, whoever shaped the sound in the Trace amp was very good at their job in tome shaping and I can't quite match their expertise. It isn't one sound to rule them all, I still shape my sound differently for different bands and songs and enjoy being able to get it whatever I'm playing through, but when I do use backline I treat myself to a little bit of colour from a definitely non-flat amp.

We did measure the response of an Ashdown RM once and it is pretty much flat with the controls set flat anyway. Go to Ashdown for after sales service every time, they even come on Bass Chat from time to time. I bought a Bugera Veyron as my neutral amp, I'm a cheapskate, what can I say They are 700W amps in real money but you can turn them down. If you want a cheap solution this is a good option.

Pre fader every time for me. As David says you don't want anything you do to FOH adjusting someone else's monitor mix, generally you want a clean feed to monitors anyway. A lot of singers are put off by delay or excessive reverb even when it sounds really good out front. Most musicians are happy with a clean version of what they are doing anyway. As I said above I keep the settings on the monitor the same as front of house and then globally eq the monitors to match the FOH sound as best I can. I'd also advise against tweaking the main mix during gigs if you are mixing from on-stage unless there is something seriously wrong, a mic going down or a guitar swap forced by a broken string and the like. You've pretty much no idea what the audience are hearing so are much more lkely to make the sound worse not better if you tweak in the basis of the on-stage sound. I use a radio connection for my bass though so I can wander out mid song in an emergency. It doesn't look very professional though IMO