Phil Starr

Heft as a word is about weight, originally about lifting things to test their weight. Hefting a spear or stone before throwing it. We don't have good words to describe sound, so we do it by analogy, and heft as a shorthand for a weighty sound is as good as anything but of course it means different things to different people. In Basschat terms it has become a running joke (h**t) after a long running debate about switch mode (class D) amps. Basically along the line of 'my old amp is better than class D, it has more heft'. With no definition of heft, or what a weighty tone actually is it is an unchallengeable assertion. Also interesting (to me anyway) it has been applied to amplifiers rather than speakers even though speakers probably affect/contribute to tone way more than amps. Heft is obviously a 'good thing' that we all want. People who have just bought a lightweight modern amp are quick to say it has heft and valve heads will always assert only valves or anything weighing above a sack of potatoes has heft. No-one has ever complained about too much heft I'd love to know what it is. If I knew that I could design it into a speaker system and feel the love. The truth is that it is completely subjective and it means different things to different people.

This is probably good advice but at a cost. You are talking about old school 'Thump' and by and large this isn't due to deep lows but a bump in the frequency response around 100Hz. This is the typical sound you get when you load loads of cheap drivers in a cabinet which is a little constricting for them. Think of a classic 8x10 sound. This is usually also associated with a nice peak in the upper mids and not a lot of treble. The classic sound of rock bass. Doubling up your current cab would probably get you close to that sort of sound but to get it from a smaller cab is expensive. You can have small loud and cheap but not all at the same time. The Barefaced two10 is designed to give this sound but it ain't cheap. Two 12's could give you more volume, bigger cones tend to be more efficient, but not all 12's beat all 10's by a long way. Again though if you want a lightweight and capable 2x12 it is going to be expensive I'm afraid

It's the usual advice but valid anyway; if you mix two different cabs then the sound you will get will change and the combination will not necessarily be a blend of the two sounds. In a sense there are bits of the frequency range where they will work together and bits where they will fight. That may be an improvement on the Epifani or not and only you can judge if it is to your taste. The practical advice is simple. Don't buy on spec, take your current cab along and try the two cabs together, if you like the way they sound you'll know what to do.

I know what you mean but my hearing loss and tinnitus says stick with it, yours probably will too eventually. There's a thread here on using the Zoom H2 pocket recorder as an ambient monitor. I've got the Zoom H4N recorder so I decided to give it a go at a rehearsal a couple of weeks back. Our drummer is a PITA as he doesn't get his walkies too often and overcompensates with enthusiasm when he does. he is really loud. So you plug your in-ears into the monitor output of the Zoom and press record. I shoved the recorder in my back pocket. It picks up all the sound around you and, you know what? it's the nearest thing to playing live with a volume control. I then tried it hanging off my mic stand through a wireless system and it worked as well. in fact sliding it up the stand meant I didn't need the vocal monitor, more me just by positioning the recorder a bit closer. I'm intending a bit more experimentation but if it works I might swap the H4 for the H2 which is smaller and make it permanent.

Another request for a dedicated PA/Live music thread from me. For anyone in a gigging band there are all sorts of experiences you want to share and practical problems that you need some help to solve. Having a home would be great.

Chienmortbb has it right, birch for toughness poplar is lighter. Beware though birch ply is widely specified for all sorts of things as a premium product, often as 'Baltic Birch'. My experience is that it is very variable quality with a lot of Russian produced timber being highly questionable. I've gone back to Wickes who sell a generic hardwood exterior ply which I've been quite happy with. Not the lightest but good to work with and consistent quality. Poplar ply is harder to source and often comes from the better suppliers who do a bit of quality control themselves. It will be more expensive than most other plies. How are you going to cut the panels? I have a table saw which makes it easy but if you don't I'd say go for a supplier who will cut the panels for you. Accurate cutting makes the whole build process much easier.

Hi I was just about to message you. Just to make it clear I was absolutely not saying BFM's preferred method of bracing was wrong, just that it is not categorically the only method of bracing or even necessarily the best method in every case. I don't like sweeping statements unsupported by evidence. I don't want to get into a slanging match any more than he does but I'll leave you to decide whether reading technical journals and books is a bad thing OK, I think your original bracing would have made a decent contribution to damping cabinet resonances and stiffening the cabinet, I'd have suggested adding a couple if braces across the cab, top to bottom, side to side. You could have fixed them between your splines in that design fairly easily. Your BFM inspired version would be as least as good, probably very similar in performance as your first design with the additional cross braces. That's a guess though, you'd have to try them both to be certain. Your second version is very similar to the bracing I used in the Mk1 Basschat design. I added splines to the end of each cross brace , just a single length of ply offcut, going up to roughly 10cm of the corner of the panel, as Bill says the edges are stiffened by the panel they are glued to at the edges. Each cross brace then was like a wide letter H if that makes it clearer to picture. That's kind of what you are doing in your drawing above but I used much cruder woodwork Having the splayed leg you've drawn or the longer spline I used will damp the panel over a greater area and give you a larger and stronger glue area too. I can't say my approach was particularly 'scientific' I just used the offcuts I had to hand and a bit of experience and background reading. (I have been building cabs for 50 years, including commercially for a couple of years) It was a rush job as I wanted something to take to a bass bash. I don't think you are far away in your thinking and any of your designs would make nice cabs with more bracing than most commercial cabs. The bracing in the second design based upon Stevie's design might be my favourite on the basis that you know some testing has been done albeit on a different sized cab. I think you really have two options, go ahead with one of your designs and try them, and be prepared to modify them if you aren't happy but essentially to take the empirical route, or be prepared to test for resonances with test tones and deal with them one at a time as Stevie did in the MK2.

I'm a little surprised that Bill is so categoric that Alex Claber of Barefaced doesn't understand bracing and that 2/3 of his bracing designs are adding unnecessary 'dead weight' to his cabs. Perhaps he is just grumpy because someone rejected building one of hi Simplexx cabs earlier in the thread. Actually bracing is moderately complex and to date there is no single mathematical model of what goes on inside a speaker cab. Most designs are a combination of the experience of the builder, trial and error, a bit of testing and only rarely extensive measurements of the cabs, and that tends to be in hi-fi speakers rarely musical instrument speakers. Even then practical considerations dominate, there isn't a lot of space in a cab and there are almost more places you can't fit a brace than ones where you can. Cross bracing which Bill clearly prefers is a perfectly good way of bracing cabs, I assume he gets his 24mm figure by simply adding the thickness of his two 12mm panels. I wonder how he derives his 30mm figure? The big advantage of cross bracing is that it is easy to do and it uses very little material so adds little to the weight. The disadvantage is that it stiffens the panel at one point crating an antinode but allowing the panel to vibrate elsewhere. The worst places to fix your braces are centrally, effectively the same as trying to kill a bass string by touching it above the 12th fret, you create harmonics an octave above the original problem frequency. A couple of Bill's braces are central but he does add more. I'm not really criticising, if you have a 2x10 then you have nowhere else to put your brace other than the line between the two speakers and I'd go for that spot myself probably. Spline braces are a perfectly valid way of bracing a cab. they effectively create a 'T' beam along the line where they are fixed. They also spread the damping effect over a greater area of panel. They take a little more effort to fix but as they are only around the edges of the cab there is more freedom to place them where you want. Most splines are made of the same material as the cab itself so they are effectively made from scrap left over from cutting the panels. Weight for weight you'll get more rigidity from cross bracing but Barefaced have designed their cabs from very thin material where simple cross bracing wouldn't work well. If you look at the rotating model you can see two of the braces are annular, running right round the cab, another accepted technique. This effectively couples all the panels to the two adjacent panels, as they will resonate at different frequencies they will damp each others resonances, the central brace has two members that run from front to back so an element of cross bracing is also included. There's nothing really new in this, you could probably see this sort of bracing in theatre speaker designs from the 1920's and 30's but it's a lovely neat solution for lightweight bass speakers. I don't honestly believe 2/3 of the material is wasted. Have a look at Stevie's 12" design, it's probably as far as you can go for a home builder. His technique was to build the cab then test it by passing low frequency tones from a signal generator (You can get apps on your phone or access these online) That enabled him to identify the points where his panels vibrated most. He then braced those points. Finally don't discount mass, the movement of the panels under pressure will be proportional to the mass. One way of reducing the sound coming from the cab is to use thicker or more dense panels.

I'll nominate Torn, my secret joy is playing the bass line, an example of a bass player getting it just right and lifting a song out of obscurity. I read an interview with Paul Bushnell bassist with the original band Ednaswap about how devastated the band were when the Natalie Imbruglia version became a hit. I had no idea it was a cover and listening to the original you can see why. Ann Preven doesn't sound torn, she sounds pretty angry and not someone you'd want to cross, the guitarist pisses all over everything and the light and shade doesn't fall right with the lyrics (which are great IMO) Bushnell is a bloody good bassist but the session man on the Natalie Imbruglia song blows him away this time. There's a postscript. I thought I'd see who the bassist was, Wikipedia rocks. Phil Thornally, who I suspect a lot of you know. Bassist with the Cure of Love Cats era. Grammy award winner and crucially co-writer of Torn. At least I recognised he was good I'm off to see if I can still remember all those little fills.

No, 15's are not 'wrong' as tops. Working bands don't carry a range of different PA's for different venues. Steve's RCF's are great speakers which are going to be able to cope with almost all of his gigs on their own, so he won't need the subs. For the odd bigger gig the mackies can be wheeled out to take a little out of the tops and/or add a little extra to the sound. Of course of you plan to use subs all the time then you won't need a lot of bass from your tops and you can reduce the size of the bass driver, Why carry something big and heavy when you can do the job with something light but this is about engineering something practical for live music in a wide range of venues.

I think you have your answer here but I'll add my tuppence worth. You really don't want deep bass on stage, or in the rehearsal room. If it is loud enough to reach the audience then it is going to be a real nuisance for the band, and of course if the audience can't hear it why would you do it? If you want it in your rig for personal practice then fill your boots, it might be fun and it's only you that's affected. We've probably all tried it out if we have the PA sitting around at home The problem is two fold. every extra sound you add into the stage mix makes it harder for all the band to distinguish sounds they need to hear to play well. Any band with drums in a small area is already making it tough for the vocalists to pitch even, let alone put in articulation and dynamics. Given that the dimensions of most of the places we play are around the wavelength of sub frequencies bass in enclosed spaces tends to be highly reverberant and therefore muddy. Making it harder for everyone to hear will produce the natural response to turn up and you have a volume war. Nobody wins a war. Secondly the stage is full of mics. They' re going to pick up that bass and pass it on to the desk, even if you filter at the desk a little will get through and you aren't going to filter the kick mic most of the time. If the stage is wooden then the transmission will be through the floor and up the stands. Uuurghhh! For me the best set up on stage is to gradually roll off the deep bass on your rig and to balance that up by rolling it back in at the PA. If you do it right you get all the upper bass/low mids delivered to your ears (the mids are more directional so you can have more me) the band get enough bass to get the changes right and can still hear what they need. The audience get a balanced sound and the singer gets a chance to deliver their best. Obviously in ears would deliver this differently but generally the lower the sound levels on stage the better and we ought to be thinking of what we don't need on stage, not adding to it.

because there is very little fundamental in what a bass puts out. The pickups are in completely the wrong place to pick up the fundamental, they'd need to be under the 12th fret to do that. Our ears are incredibly insensitive to sound below 100Hz anyway so we don't really miss the little bit of bass anyway. Well, not very much. most of what we hear as bass is the second harmonic (double the frequency of the fundamental) so 82Hz for a bottom E and up around 100Hz for most of what we play, 80-160 maybe. Bassiness is about the mix of harmonics rather than absolute low frequency content. To me an upright bass sounds 'deeper' and richer than an electric bass despite the fact that I know that the fundamental is pretty weak off an acoustic instrument. You can get a bassy sound out of your bass as easily by rolling off the upper mids as by boosting bass. I like a 50Hz filter on the bass, you don't really notice any drop in bass but it cleans up the sound quite a lot,

I'm pleased you liked the sound. I've been happy with one for gigs in small to medium venues but two do give you a lot more authority. You can cut the port holes with a holesaw which will cost you about £10. Most joiners or kitchen fitters would be able to cut you a hole for the speaker or you can do it with a cheap jigsaw. It's a shame I didn't see this earlier as I was up in Bristol visiting my daughter and could have cut something for you. I don't know if these people might cut something for you, worth a ring? http://www.avonply.co.uk/Default.aspx

John the way we design our cabs and prototype them is all done without a grille. @Alex Claber can speak for himself but I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't do the same. Obviously you are right to question how much a metal grille adds to the rigidity and I have to admit I've never calculated it. I don't know how the Barefaced grille is fixed. The options are: on a frame and velcroid/plastic pinned to the baffle, frame fixed to the side and/or the baffle or formed into a shallow tray and fixed directly to the baffle. It would only be effective on the panels it is mechanically fixed to and if it is the baffle it wouldn't contribute much at all as the fixings are all around the edge which is fixed to the side panels anyway, so intrinsically rigid. If it is a batten fixed to baffle and walls then that batten will damp panel resonances itself, unless the grille was tensioned in some way I think anything mechanical it added would be minimal. The main job is cosmetic and protecting the speaker of course and as you can't always control what happens in a gig anything sitting next to the drummist.....

Probably more a case of 'most of the right notes mainly in the right places' TBH I'm looking forward to learning it but need the kick in the behind of a band waiting for me to nail it. One more step up the ladder if I don't slip up.

I'm in the same position as you, just joined an existing band. Fortunately mine are better organised/more realistic and have given me time to learn the set. First gig with them is the last week in March. I really seriously doubt that they will play all 40 songs in one rehearsal 10-12 is more likely. I learned 17 for our first rehearsal ( I had about 10 under my belt already) The first list they sent me turned out to be an old set list with songs they'd dropped in recent gigs and they've now given me a 30 song set list for the March gig. Glad I hadn't wasted time on songs they'd dropped I made sure that all the songs at the first rehearsal were ones I was confident with and a mix of easy and more complex songs. I wanted them to feel relaxed and confident with me and chose to stick to a few songs I knew would work rather than under-prepare a greater no of songs. I printed off a list of the songs I'd learned and bless them they just played through that list, if they hadn't it would at least have showed I was working hard and that i'm organised. I'm just running through this weeks list now and adding another 7 songs, I'm leaving the stinker until last; Tommy Cogbill's Son Of A Preacher Man, oh dear Relax and enjoy it as much as you can, at a first run though with a new band just playing half a dozen songs that make you all smile will leave you and them feeling good about the world. Good luck

I was going to ask what you wanted to use the cab for. The problem with putting a speaker in any old cab is that you could get an unusual frequency response and that the power handling could be affected at low frequencies. It looks like the SWR Megiliath used some version of the Eminence Alpha 10, maybe just rebadged or maybe with a few tweaks and the original cab gave it about 45litres per driver or thereabouts. Here's the spec sheet http://www.eminence.com/pdf/Alpha_10A.pdf Putting a speaker into a smaller than optimal cab will do three things potentially, You'll lose some of the bottom end with the cab rolling off fairly high. To compensate you'll get a bass boost just above that point, if you are lucky it will warm up the sound and you may not miss the deep bass in a small room. Generally you get better power handling in a small cab but that is frequency dependant it will be better at some frequencies than others depending upon the exact tuning you achieve. I'd tune the cab to around 50Hz which is the resonant frequency of the bog standard Eminence Alpha but that's off the top of my head, I haven't modelled it. Two ports of plastic drainpipe around 15cm long will get you in the ball park, but if someone comes along to run winISD for you or you try inputting the Eminence specs and doing it yourself then take their figures as mine haven't been checked. I'm playing with a new band this week and need to get on and learn their set. Good luck, have fun and if you don't push it too loud you shouldn't go far wrong

For recording I'd think most people would pretty much DI for bass, just cutting out the room acoustics would be good. However you might just want the feel of an amp whilst you are playing. There are two ways of going about that, I've just spent a couple of hours practicing with everything going through my PA, a little Alesis mixer going into a couple of RCF ART310's (PA speakers) I can feed everything through that including backing tracks, my vocals, the lot. Normally I use headphones but I fancied making a noise and feeling like I was playing live. The alternative is a proper bass combo, a lot of little ones are just for practice when you get your first bass and they aren't very satisfying to play. If you are going down the 'proper' combo route then the key is for you to go and try them out. They don't need to go loud so it's just the sound quality you need, if you really like the sound then that's a great amp and you'll use it lots, if not then why buy it I've got a little Hartke 10" Kickback which suits me but that's just my taste.

My instinct was like everyone else it seems 'be careful what you wish for' If you are looking for a berth with a band think carefully what you want, just the rehearsal room with like minded people or a gigging band? Is genre important to you or are you just happy to play? Covers or originals? There will be plenty of other bands along so get ready in advance, get together any video, promotional pics (or at least decent pics of you playing) links to bands you've played with maybe a list of gear you own, anything that will make a band want you. Put up a web page if possible, I have one on Bandmix for example. With everything prepared you won't have to dash anything off in a rush next time. I'd give it a week and then ask them for a response, musicians are not very organised and I've just been offered a spot with a gigging band starting in March after a month in which they failed to get an audition together and I'd decided weren't interested. I know the band and they know me so it isn't quite as mad as it sounds but now I have four weeks to learn and rehearse 30 songs instead of a couple of months. After a couple of weeks you have absolutely nothing to lose by hassling them but it may be simple disorganisation.

Yeah the kappalite is an 'upgrade' compared with the deltalite and pretty much as good as it gets with current technology. Most manufacturers offer similar spec speakers with a decent excursion well designed cone and suspension and a decent sized Neo magnet. There are lots of tweaks you could design in to improve in one area or another but eventually as you improve one area of a speakers performance you start to compromise others. 'Better' then becomes a relative term defined by what your design spec is, lower frequency roll off, better excursion, less cone break up, higher efficiency, better power handling, lighter weight, it's hard to get them all. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I for one wouldn't ever argue that any particular driver is the 'best' but the Basschat two way design is very comparable with the best commercial designs. Having been involved in the early stages of the design (though the credit is all Stevie's) I know that there was little, if anything to be gained by using the Kappalite for example.

Sounds gorgeous, but high output is possibly where the brightness has been compromised. If it is something you can eq out then it isn't anything to worry about. looks like a lovely bass on their website.

There is much more to tonal differences than those caused by the fingerboard. in fact I would expect that to make little difference with a fretted bass. Many things are going to affect the timbre of your bass but perhaps two of the more important are the nature of the pups and their position. The closer to the bridge the pups are the less bass biased they will be and even fairly small changes in position will change that tonal balance. Not much you can do about that without major surgery on your bass. The windings inside the pickup act as an inductor and inductors will act as a low pass filter, they cut the higher frequencies, are they humbuckers on the Mayones?. The more windings you have the darker the pup will sound and the punchier the bass. Add in the choice of tonewood, bridge design, neck profile, how the neck and body are joined and so on and you can see why no two basses sound completely alike. The upshot is that you might find each of your basses works better with a different set of strings. In the end you have two entirely different basses so just enjoy that and explore to find out what strings work best with the chemistry of each.

It's been interesting to look at how different people practice, I wonder sometimes if I have it all wrong and a lot of bad habits, probably. I practice for about an hour a day fairly consistently sometimes more, sometimes less. I do wonder if I'd started with a more academic approach ten years ago whether I'd be further on now. Would I have a better grasp of harmony and be a proper reader? If so would that make me a better bassist? Within a few months of starting I was already in a covers band and I've been on a treadmill of learning new songs ever since. Every new band seems to involve learning 20-30 new songs over a 3 month period and once I 'learned' 30 songs in a fortnight. I stopped counting after hitting my 500th song. I'm guessing that a lot of us have a similar experience in covers bands and the practicalities of doing the job takes over from almost anything else. It becomes about short cuts though, check if there is a decent You Tube video? Download chord sheets and tabs. Anything to shorten the time between choosing a song and gigging it. How many root notes can I get away with? I love it but it ain't art. So practice routine? Load all the songs onto an Ipod (I know, how quaint) and listen to them on repeat in the car and out walking/working until the bass line is driven into my skull. Download any tabs/Chords, break down the song into parts and for any tricky bits make my own tabs. Then most of my actual practice is with headphones on playing alongside the originals. Nailing arrangements is usually more of a problem than the musical content of most cover band fare. I must admit I sometimes feel the need to break out of this cycle. It has given me a lot of pleasure getting out on stage and entertaining people and this was certainly a very quick way of getting there. There's always the next song though....

I have the Lidl one. Does the job.

Looking good, let us know how you get on at rehearsal.