Phil Starr

I'm finding this whole thing strangely affirming. All the nerves every time I have to sing (BV's only) Finding out you have to practice and learn to sing, who knew? I had the experience at school of the music teachers who either wanted you in the choir or didn't want to know. In my case they listened to me once, told me I couldn't sing and had to drop music, a bit hard on an 11 year old. Probably as a result of considering myself a non-singer I'm finding the embarrassment factor quite a problem. Particularly the thought of going to a tutor and having someone actually listen to my voice is slightly more intimidating than walking up Oxford Street totally naked. So it would be great to get as many practical tips as possible. The thing I'm having a real problem with at the moment is Elbow's 'One Day like This'. If we are to do this as a duo I have to sing the 'throw those curtains wide' bit. I can hit the notes but can't hold them for more than a couple of repetitions of the line. I get the build up of something on my vocal chords and my voice starts to make odd sounds. I need to cough and then can't sing a note reliably for the rest of the evening. It happens elsewhere but only temporarily and a quick cough clears it. Any ideas? It feels like something mechanical. My one tip for anyone starting to sing with a band, get a good personal monitor. Knowing you can hear yourself better than anyone in the band or audience really helps.

PS I was getting a bit bored with so many anodyne threads running at the moment. It's nice to have a topic to get our teeth into which is also informative. Nothing wrong with a bit of passion so long as people remember their manners?

Oooh that sounds interesting, well worth a drive for me too.

I love a happy ending, well done.

Still hoping this story has a happy ending, which is that you find a band that needs a bassist for a few gigs. It makes me realise how lucky I've been picking up the bass late in life and going pretty much straight into a gigging band. It's funny how bassists are like the hardened drinkers in the pub, we all want someone to share a drink with us.

Always trust the bloke in the pub Without getting too technical Watts are Watts so long as they are measured in the same way. It isn't to do with class A/B or D. However some amps do have bigger power supplies and that will enable the amp to produce it's full power for longer. A lot of early implementations of class D had poorly rated power supplies fitted so they didn't provide their maximum output for long. That was true for a lot of early solid state designs back in the 60's and early 70's too and cheap amps ever since. Given the weight of Trace Elliott stuff I'm guessing large power supplies and big speaker magnets were the norm and that's probably why people loved them. No magic, just decent engineering.

It does sound like a problem with the voice coil I'm afraid, speakers can be fitted with new coils and cones but it can be a substantial proportion of the cost of a new driver. Wembley speakers http://wembleyloudspeaker.com/ or Blue Aran do this sort of repair. Before you give up on this have a look to see if anything is loose on the speaker or if there are any tears in the cone itself, they could be repaired at home. Also look at the flexible wires that connect the speaker terminals to the cones/coil. I've had problems with them coming away in old Fanes. Yes pushing a speaker cone with a cup or a pint mug is safer as it spreads the load, be gentle.

There's a fairly simple way of looking at this. You need your system to allow you to be as loud as your drummer without distorting. The reasoning is simple, you are a unit, you need to match each other and play together. If your drummer needs miking up for a big event then you'll go through the PA too so you'll never need to drown out your drummer.. Volume isn't measured in watts it is measured in decibels. A drummer will generally measure around 100dB at about a metre away so you need something that will average that comfortably. That means the loud bits might be 120dB and the quiet bits 80dB. If your system of amp and speakers makes 120dB comfortably then you'll be OK 95% of the time. Speakers generally give you the decibels they produce at 1W. To work out what they will give at full power you need to add 10dB for 10x the power and 3dB for double the power. If your speaker gives a fairly typical 95dB at one watt then at 100W (10x10) it will give 115dB, not quite enough. Doubling the power would give you 3db or 118dB and doubling it a second time to 400W would give you 121dB. The most popular amps give 300W'ish into 8ohms and 500W into 4ohms. That's not coincidence, they'll do just about anything you need into the typical speaker and at a sensible price. You'll be just about able to cope with most gigs with a single speaker. Add a second speaker and you'll be able to drown the drums and/or fill a big pub with bass. You'll get away with a little less power with more efficient speakers ( a 4x10 typically comes in at 100dB/W ) or need more if the speakers are inefficient or you use an unusually bass heavy sound but for most of us the 300/500W amp is more than enough. I have no idea why this is in italics

This is the issue, until you've tried it you won't know how it sounds and then it's too late. It's true of any home build even from a tried and tested design. Including the design I carried out for Basschat. Some of us like the whole process of designing and building and you can end up with specs you couldn't afford otherwise and learn a lot. It rarely goes completely wrong in that you usually end up with a workable speaker but it isn't the best way of getting a sound you want. I also think it's a generous offer from Lean Audio to effectively customise the cab for you, by doing the design they at taking on some of the responsibility for the results so you should be fairly safe if it all goes wrong up front, and that itself is unlikely. Only you can judge if you want the fun of a self build but if a certain sound is what you are after you are better off putting the money towards something you've tried out.

Tuff Cab is a no-brainer for most of us. I've a roll of vinyl covering unused and I'm wondering if I'll ever go back to it now. It's so easy to use, economical as you have found, and it is genuinely tough. More so than vinyl.

I'm a big fan of these. I bought mine after comparing it side by side with the Mackie. Apart from some cosmetic differences they sounded and worked pretty much identically apart from the Behringer case being slightly better made than the Mackie. The sound frankly isn't great, think of a very loud transistor radio. It's a bit like a Precision or an SM58 though, it just sits in the right part of the mix to punch the vocals through. Way louder than it needs to be as well. Even using it as a floor monitor I got feedback before I got distortion. It's the perfect answer to anyone who wants 'more me' in the mix. My drummer kept borrowing it so I sold it to him and 'upgraded' to a TC VoiceSolo . It's got a better sound and a couple of useful vocal fx built in but the better sound is useless in a band situation, you don't need tops and bass just smooth mids. The hi fi sound just gives you extra feedback issues and the digital controls are less user friendly than a set of knobs to twiddle. To be fair it's better in a low noise environment like my acoustic duo but in a band environment I've been tempted to go back to the Behringer. Like Andy I often used the mixing in the Behringer and send that to the house PA especially at open mics and similar uncontrolled situations. Oh, one fault with the Behringer, it's really easy to switch/knock the little button on the back and send a line level signal to the PA instead of the mic level one you intended.

My wife always says 'don't put out your dirty underwear until you have clean'. In your position a couple of years ago I made the band have the ''talk' It didn't clear the air and any promised changes soon evaporated. I didn't back down and it all ended messily. They went on gigging and I've been sat at home most of the time until recently. I went to see them the other day and they were OK if pedestrian. Ironically another band plying similarly needed a bassist a couple of weeks before the final split and out of loyalty to the band I was unhappy with I turned them down. I should have taken my wife's advice. I missed gigging more than I expected. Relax about your current band, as long as you honour current gigs you won't be letting anyone down. Look for something else, when you find it hand in your notice. Let's face it you aren't spending a lot of time learning new songs, so it really is just the gigs. You can enjoy them once you know you are on your way to something better.

I was feeling guilty about that, phew. I don't use fx but a lot of the separate fx are noisy and it's hard to set up the gain structure to limit it. I spent hours in the past trying to sort out my guitard's board. Yeah you get a fair amount of hiss on a lot of the patches but all I use is the amp sims and a bit of compression so it isn't an issue for me. That's interesting though I'd assumed the patches would be the same in most cases. Can you update them on the B3?

Good to see you making sawdust. Hope you enjoy the process and there's nothing like the joy of making a very loud noise with something you've built yourself, I still get a big kick from the first time I crank up each new design.

You are bumping into the reasons for big old cabs. No-one really wants to carry an amp that weighs more than a speaker or to pay more for the amp than a Fender Custom Shop. So 100W is where people lose interest. In the good old days we just couldn't afford anything bigger. Now the efficiency of a speaker depends upon how powerfully the magnet drives the coil, how much you can jam into the gap where the magnetic field is strongest and how light the cone is. Well roughly speaking. It's realtively simple to make a 100dB sensitivity speaker by making a light cone and having a short voice coil. That works really well for guitar but rubbish for bass where the voice coil needs to be long for better excursion. Early guitar speakers couldn't handle much power anyway because the glue used in the coils melted and the coil formers would also distort and sometimes catch fire! The solution was usually just to use lots of speakers. You could use bigger magnets and longer coils for bass but with most of the coil outside the magnet gap they were inefficient until you reached magnet sizes that weighed as much as a minor moon of Jupiter. Doubling your cone area will give you an extra 3db of sensitivity but with a valve amp no extra power, that only applies to solid state amps. Modern drivers using neodymium allow you to make very powerful magnets that don't weigh too much, and that is the real breakthrough, it becomes technically feasible to build a long throw speaker with acceptable efficiency. Light weight is a secondary consideration really. Even so you aren't going to find sensibly priced speakers with much better than 96db sensitivity for a 12" bass driver. If you want to use a 100W amp you are really bound to either using multiple drivers or lots of PA support. You ought to be able to get to 120dB to be sensible. 100W gives you 20dB more than 1W so you need to look for something better than 100dB/W. So your single 96dB/w 12 is going to give 116dB with your 100W amp. Two 12's will give 119dB, not far short of what you 'need' Two 2x10's and you'll be there unless you go for something exotic.

The volume controls are in the patches. So for example my favourite tones are A2 and A3 from the pre loaded sounds, Select these then select the amp. That's a Hartke HA 3500 on one of those. You can then select the controls on those and adjust them as if you had the amp there. The only problem is that you can only adjust one at a time but for a simple change in volume it's quick and easy. I'm set up so all I do nowadays is plug and play. If I wanted to use something like this live I'd go for the B3 just to cut down on scrolling through the patches

Ha ha he'd have got a lot of maj7's and 3rds from me, since he'd made it clear he didn't mind . Or maybe a 'can't you manage a chord change?' comment. Are you sure he wasn't just doing the equivalent of the 'drummer joke'?

Zoom B1ON cheap as chips, built in tuner and drum machine, cab and amp emulation so sounds great and you can connect anything with a headphone output. All sorts of other features too. Runs for about a week on AA rechargeables which means you can practice anywhere without being tethered to a power supply.

Well done, bonding with the drummer is key but so long as you are competent the usual factor is personality. You've just met a bunch of people who like you. Some days are wonderful

There is such a device, in theory. It's called a transformer and there is one in every valve amp to match the impedance of the speaker to the amp. An audio transformer that handles 500W would be very heavy and would cost more than a second speaker especially as it's not a sensible solution and you'd have to get it custom wound. The other issue is that most of the 'extra oomf' you get from a second speaker is down to the extra cone area and raising the speaker closer to your ears. Just pushing one little cone harder won't give you a lot extra even if it is a long excursion driver and can handle that power

I'd think you wouldn't want to go anywhere too close together in time or more than three or four times a year. FWIW my last band didn't really ring the changes. We'd go down well the first couple of times and then it was a yawn from the audience and eventually no re-bookings. It doesn't do to rest on your laurels and one of the reasons I fell out of love with them.

Looks like I've joined this party too late! Who are the band, I might have seen you? Hold the Line and Jump, I was worried it was my band but then I remembered I'm the bass player

Looks like I'm committed then. I'm wondering how quickly I can do it. Maybe we should have a sweepstake

Moved to 2018, oops is it time to unpin this?

Yeah, it's kind of the tool for the job. A bit like a hammer if you just want to bang in a nail. It's not elegant or sophisticated but it does the job well.