Phil Starr

Our vocalist walks in plugs in a mic and just sings along. The rest of us spend hours in the shed figuring/learning chord progressions making our fingers do things they don't want to do. I love the bass lines in a lot of MJ's songs and I dare say drummers and the others find things to admire. I doubt Jackson had much say in any of that. Do we lose all of that because the singer was (possibly) very dodgy. I'm also an innocent until proven guilty sort of person and there is a lot of money riding on a successful case in this instance with some pretty hot lawyers coaching claimants. Truly legal systems are distorted by big money of all kinds. We may never have truth. Equally for those of us playing covers I think we have to exercise moral judgements and also not offend audiences. I won't play Sweet Home Alabama because it is explicitly racist and I won't play Brown Sugar, I'm not sure it is actually encouraging us to 'whip the women, just around midnight' or that raping slaves means we are 'doing all right' but you can form your own judgements. I wouldn't sing it in front of my daughter so why play it in front of anyone's daughter? For each of us the lines are different of course but music has the effect of normalising things and I don't think we have no responsibility. fortunately we have thousands of songs to choose from. PS our singer is actually a lovely guy, and that mic is really heavy

You may be right about the neo speakers, I took that from a manual downloaded from the GK website but couldn't find an exact match for the SBX ii. However those GK drivers that Bill linked to look like good units at that price. If the OP's cabs are a similar size to the cabs these drivers come out of there is every chance they will work well. It isn't guaranteed without knowing the specs and doing the calculations but drivers tend to cluster around similar engineering solutions to the same problems of amplifying bass so you can often get away with swapping out drivers. Using these would at least mean the cab was all GK even if not original. the drivers Bill linked us to are described as Paragon 10's http://store.gallien-krueger.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=082-0460-C

OK so what you have is a box. If you put in different drivers it will sound different. how much do you want to pay to replace the speakers and what do you want to get out of the swap, just a working cab or do you have something more than this in mind? Is lightweight important to you, high sound levels, punchy sound, or whatever? Remember the more you want the more you will probably have to shell out? Are you handy and willing to modify the cab or do you just want something to drop in? Is this something you need up and running quickly for a gig or can you take some time? Finally a couple of quality 10's are going to set you back £150-200 maybe more, have look to see what else is on offer at that sort of price before sending good money after bad. If you still want to go ahead I'll start making suggestions and asking for technical information.

I was hoping that Bill might have known which speakers are fitted, but in the absence of that you need to find the best match you can. the first thing would be to contact the manufacturers https://www.gallien-krueger.com/ they may provide spares direct. If not an exact match is difficult, The Thiele Small thing just means it has to match the cab, the frequency response will be unlikely to match so the sound of the cab will change. The original speakers are 200W drivers with neo magnets, I couldn't find anything like that on the Eminence web site. Why do you want to change them?

Looks like you are out of luck, the cab is 4 ohms I think and the amp is 4 ohms minimum so won't run a second cab. If you really like the Aguilar then running a second cheap cab would change the sound and you might not find that as nice. I was going to suggest a second matching cab but unless yours is 8ohms your amp won't cope. Sorry

When it switches itself off what is the standby fault led doing? The amp has a feature which switches off the high voltage power if there are any faults with the power output valves. With any valve amp you have to suspect the valves first, they aren't components that last forever and they may need replacing. It's also possible that there are problems with the pin connections, you can pull them out and look for signs of corrosion and maybe try a bit of switch cleaner in the sockets. Don't poke around unless you are confident though and only do so with the amp unplugged and rested for a while, there are some nasty voltages in there.

Thanks Lozz this is more like the sort of response I was hoping for. I suppose I've graduated to being an 'intermediate' level bassist. My rhythmic work is fairly secure and I've always found that side of things fairly easy, well easier than thinking up and playing improvised melodic elements where I'm still firmly stuck in the pentatonic over one octave What I actually play rhythmically will depend upon the song and what the singer and Drummer are doing so learning new songs for me is mainly being familiar with the changes and structure of the song. I've been playing with a couple of new (to me) bands recently and a lot of our songs, all covers, have a driving eight beat. Killers, Stereophonics, AC/DC and so on. I suppose having to learn a lot of songs in a short time and being a new bassist with a couple of different bands who are focussing on their new bassist has made me a bit more conscious of how I am playing. Most of the tab you see is written as a straight 8 even when it patently isn't so I've been listening to try and work out where the original bassists are placing their emphasis and if they are dropping notes or just playing unevenly. I hadn't realised I had a rhythmic style, I've unknowingly dropped into playing 1-hold 2 and 3 and 4 and every chord change in my initial run through. Playing live I think I am putting in just the right amount of variation to fit the song and what everyone else is doing. (Straight eights when the drummer drifts off tempo ) Turns out I may be running in more of a groove than I thought, that may be OK as I say people find me easy to play with and audiences manage to dance without tripping on the rhythm. I suppose I wanted to know how other bassists approach rhythmic variations, we tend to talk about notes more than beats on BC.

You may be governed by the Consumer Rights Act 2015 providers of services have to do so with 'reasonable' care. There is an inconsistency in their answer to you. The tracking is done by scanning the bar codes as we all know. Telling you it has been delivered means it was scanned by the final delivery scanner. It can't have been down the wrong chute and delivered, one of those stories is incorrect, possibly both. Either their technology doesn't work or they are being dishonest or their tracking is compromised. Putting things down the wrong chute with no system in place to recover it doesn't seem reasonable to me, or saying it is delivered when it wasn't. You could try making a claim through the small claims court, under the act they have to show they took reasonable care, the burden of proof is on them not you. Worth googling to see if you could try that?

Nobody has ever said anything as specific as that. Generally the comments are that I make it easy for the band, I'd kind of assumed that was because I keep it simple but maybe I've been subconsciously laying the emphasis on the One for years. Go on what other habits have people developed, I'm surely not the only one.

I've just spent three years with a group of good musicians who were rubbish at rehearsals and who had disorganised over-committed lives. When everyone was there both physically and metaphorically it was the best sounding band I've been in. We did six gigs in three years. I wish I'd faced up to the issues way back and I could have those years again. the drummist was our biggest problem. It's probably too late now but my experience is that whoever brings the conflict into the light is the one who loses out, usually me It might have been better to have suggested a 'dep' for when he couldn't make it. The new drummer would either slot in and you could at least rehearse or the threat would make the old drummer focus more and he'd show a bit more commitment. I've rarely come across a drummer who understands rehearsal. Most of them think they can learn a song in minimal time and a setlist in a couple of days, and up to a point they usually can get through a set pretty much straight out of the box; if you don't mind the odd fill in the wrong place or the drums going on for a bar or two at the end of the song. I'm not saying drums are easy, as someone who struggles to move their hands independently but that it is different if you have no notes to worry about. I've yet to come across a drummer who truly enjoys rehearsal or who understands the need to repeat bits that didn't work, their bit did.

I've just had to learn a set list for a new band. Lots of straight eight beats in their songs (all covers) but because I'm comparing what I play with the originals I've noticed I'm more often than not I'm playing the first beat as a quarter note followed by six eighth beats. Pretty much every time there is a chord change but sometimes keeping that rhythm in. I've probably developed this habit with bands that don't practice properly at home as a way of emphasising the chord changes 'look guys here it is'. This band are great, they show up to rehearsals having learned the songs but they are saying I'm particularly easy to play with. Up to now I've kind of dismissed that sort of comment as people being kind, I mean I appreciate the kindness a lot but I know my limitations as a bassist Does anyone else have this habit, or any others they've noticed?

Hi Al, Frequency response isn't a good way to assess speakers like this. The figures are usually taken at the two extremes where the sound output has fallen 10dB. Speakers are never flat between these two extremes unless DSP has been applied and the brightness for bass won't be the result of the extremes, your bass pickup just won't have any response above 10kHz anyway so that is all irrelevant. Brightness is more likely to be due to a peak in the upper mids or maybe an over-enthusiastic horn driver. Have a look at the frequency response of the Eminence driver here, you'll see the sort of peak in mid response that is typical of many bass drivers. https://www.eminence.com/pdf/Beta_12A-2.pdf you'll also see that there are lots of ups and downs in the response curve, it's only smooth at the bottom because they've put in a calculated response, below 200Hz the design of the cab will shape the response so that may be lumpy too. this is one of the reasons for not mixing cabs. All those lumps and dips create the timbre of the sound your cab will make, any other cab will have similar highs and lows in response and they won't line up most of the time. Where they do the speaker will shout out at you where the peaks coincide, where they don't there'll be a blurring as peaks in one cancel highs in the other and you'll have a completely different timbre to either cab on their own. In your case complicated by the mismatched impedances. In practice I think the 4 ohm cab will dominate so much the other one might as well not be there. If you want to own these cabs just because you do then that's great but it isn't really a plan to use them together and certainly not without trying the combination out before you part with any money.

I think the whole thing about full range and flat response is that what you put in is what you get out. If there is no high end content in the signal then there won't be any hf coming out of the speaker. As to 'authority' I think that has two components; power handling, and how the system copes with the most difficult bass notes compared with the rest of the spectrum. If you stop to think about it the best PA speakers are designed to amplify the whole band with each instrument sitting where it belongs in the mix i.e. the speaker will handle all the bass if it (the whole band) is mixed as it should be. A pair of PA speakers should be able to handle all the demands of the bass and kick drum alone. From the technical point of view the limits of a driver are set by heat dissipation, the voice coil length/magnet geometry, the mass of the cone and the compliance of the suspension. These have physical/practical limits for all speakers of a particular size and the best bass speakers and best bass PA drivers are going to be approaching these limits, often they are the same driver so there is going to be no difference in authority between really good PA speakers and really good bass speakers. I'd happily use and specify RCF drivers for my bass designs but they are slightly more pricy than some other manufacturers offering the same specs. As to cost, PA speakers are a bit cheaper than bass speakers of the same quality. The RCF745 is pretty much top of the tree without going into the specialist area and available about £1100 the Barefaced £1250 (Brexit and exchange rate changes have narrowed the gap this year), lower down the scale the difference is probably greater in percentage terms. The 31Hz/5 string thing is a non-issue with this quality of gear. Most commercial bass cabs have little output below 50 Hz just like PA tops. Fortunately neither do bass guitars. You need to decide what your amp is for and how you will use it. A single 12PA speaker from QSC or RCF will be plenty loud enough for your stage monitor. It'll probably be loud enough for the rest of the band on anything but the largest of stages and TBH most bands need to reduce their onstage volume quite a lot. No single 12 is going to address a large auditorium with authority, whatever the manufacturer says. If you want bass authority with backline only you probably do need an old fashioned multi speakered stack. Assuming all else is the same two 10's have roughly the same cone area as one 15, so you need two 15's to make a 4x10 level of authority. IMO that is way too loud to be on most stages. The FR800 has DSP. Barefaced will even customise it for you.

If you are looking used the Fender American Deluxe P is worth a look. Humbucking bridge PUP on mine, a couple of extra frets to play with (I get vertigo above the 5th fret, so not used much ) and a lovely neck, J like neck but with just a little more wood on mine

I'm happy with the Studiospares ones. My duo partner has the K&M and next to each other you'd be hard pushed to tell the difference. Apart from the rubber feet both are all metal construction. the finish of the K&M is better there are nicer bolts in places and the screw threads on the sliding grip is better cut, just attention to detail mainly. The clamp on the tilting grip of the Studiospares has a better grip if anything than the K&M, that may just be personal preference though. I've never broken my cheapies the oldest I reckon is 15 years old. Other band members have battered theirs and they are looking a bit wobbly, but that is after years. If I was in a big touring band I'd pay the extra £20 a stand for the kosher stands but for the average pub band I'd just have the Studiospares. I suppose it's a MIM versus Custom shop thing if you want an analogy.

Konig and Meyer https://www.k-m.de/en although I use Studiospares mic stands which are kind of clones as they are about a third of the price. You can get spares for either.

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.