Phil Starr

My test is that it should sound the way it does through good quality headphones, and you are right, use your ears and if the combination sounds good to you then you have found the cab for your set up.

[quote name='Bill Fitzmaurice' timestamp='1499737702' post='3333252'] Leather. [/quote] Brilliant I build cabs. I've got about half a roll of vinyl left but after a couple of years of using acrylic it may never get used unless someone asks me specifically. It's just hard/impossible to invisibly mend and you've then got to treat the cab with kid gloves or accept the road worn look. The acrylic is much tougher than I expected and is wearing well, I haven't needed to touch it up yet but knowing I can is a bonus.

I started at 55. I was performing live within 4 months and gigging regularly a year later. Ten years later I'm still learning and still ambitious to improve. I honestly don't think age is a problem unless you let it be, and from my angle you are a young man anyway The only problem is making time when you have the responsibilities of an adult and physical fitness. I was lucky, some friends wanted a bass player and were patient enough to wait for me to come up to speed. If you aren't already friends with musicians then start to look for them. My experience is tht they are pretty much all as encouraging as people are here. The first time you play a song all the way through with someone else is a magic moment. The first time you look out at a gig and see a sea of people dancing in time with your fingers is just ecstatic. Play with other people whenever you can and join a band as soon as an opportunity arises. Good luck and have fun!

For once I'm going to restrain myself from another over long technical explanation and say 'Al stop worrying'. Yes the type of wood matters and so does the construction method, but can you order one of these cabs built out of the other's wood? Both claim rather over enthusiastic power handling if you take into account all frequencies and expect them to handle continuous power but both will probably handle all you throw at them in practice. Power handling is largely down to voice coil diameter for the upper frequencies and excursion for the lower ones as BFM hinted. Anyway the designs have been finished and the speakers made, you can't change anything but you know both are quality products which you'll be proud of. All you need to do is decide which sounds best to you. Go and spend some time with each. It's like test driving a car, you've done your research, narrowed your choice down and now it's time to sit in the drivers seat and find out if the designs suit your needs. The design features are all interesting but you'd never buy a car without a test drive and neither should you spend that much on a cab. Enjoy your day in Brighton and make sure you check out the opposition

Obviously we don't know what you sound like but any change in your on stage sound is going to feel a bit odd until you get used to it. You'd be better off worrying about your FOH sound for the audience so why not record your rehearsals and listen to that afterwards before trying to redo your eq. We did one gig with our rhythm guitarist missing through family commitments and it sounded really thin at the gig. The recording of the gig sounded great afterwards, it may not be what you expect. Are your band members missing cues from what your second guitarist was playing or maybe rhythmic drive? It may be they just want a little push at times and you may have to change what you play a little. Having said all that when i've played with a five piece I've generally ended up cutting the top end and boosted the low mids so I can sit in an acoustic pocket without muddying the overall sound. Again listen to recordings.

I do wish people wouldn't use the term musician as a way of criticicising anyone with less knowledge/skill than themselves, it's one of those 'irregular verbs': I'm a musician, you are a 'player' and he's a total amateur. OK hands up those people with nothing left to learn. I'm glad to see people mentioned fatigue as a factor for vocalists and amazed it took so long before someone talked about the crossover points in someone's vocal range. There's more too, a song has points where the vocal line needs to be strong for the words to convey meaning or have emotional impact. Think of Harry Nillson singing 'Can't live' in Without You if he couldn't do the big lift at 1min 20, it would be a very ordinary song wihout that (see what I did there) There are situations where transposing songs is easy and sometimes almost impossible. If you are using an open string to give yourself time to do a hand shift in the middle of a run then you aren't going to welcome a key change. Sometimes you can just play a note an octave higher sometimes that won't work. For a guitarist chord inversions sometimes work and sometimes not, playing with the capo above the 5th fret is often really awkward as you are trying to jam four fingers into a very small space. Eb is always troublesome unless you re-tune but a 'nice' key for brass instruments. The reality in the end though is that it is the singer most of the audience will notice and remember. A good singer with a band who are doing little more than keeping time and marking the chord changes is going to be blow away the tightest most technically accomplished band with a singer who is struggling, so until someone perfects the neck capo for vocalists.......

I'm with Ivan on this, I played brieflly for a country band, it's a real education in timing, economy and control apart from anything else. Improved my rock playing no end. It was what I had in mind when saying give the R'nR a go.

Unless you really hate the music give it a go. I think the future is in genre bands. Audiences go along because they know what they are getting and you'll generally get an audience that likes your brand of music. It's dance music so you'll get lively audiences. Bookers know exactly what the offer is so you'll probably get steady bookings, there's nothing like regular gigs for sharpening your act. There's a benefit for you too, all genres have their tricks and really nailing a style of bass playing will mean you've incorporated a whole range of tricks into your own playing. That will inform a lot of your playing from then on. You've got to respect most/all forms of music, the musicians then were inventing something new and investing all their skills in what they did, just like people in the 70's, 80's and so on. If it's not your thing long term then you'll eventually move on but it'll be something you can go back and dep for when gigs dry up.

I can do a week's worth of reading It is moderately complex and because there isn't a good mathematical model of cabinet damping you'll get some disagreement even amongst experts. Even the word damping is confusing because it is both a properly used English word and also a mathematical term used to describe the nature of a resonance. I'll keep away from that for the time being. As a musician I'll guess you know a little about resonances. Assuming your bass is in tune you'll know that if you play the E string fretted on the fifth fret then the A string will start to resonate by itself. Well in a speaker cab if you play all the frequencies some notes will jump out louder than others. All the bits of the cabs have their own resonances, frequencies which they naturally vibrate at and they will wobble away if you play those frequencies, just like your A string. Sometimes the vibration of the cab can be as loud as the speaker itself making a muddy, distorted sound. Stuffing the cab is an attempt to kill those resonances and make the sound cleaner, as is a lot of panel bracing. There are two sources of resonances, the air and the panels of the cab and each of these can resonate in a number of ways, so stuffing is used differently to kill different resonances. I'll deal with three of these. The first is the air resonances often referred to as standing waves. The speaker sets up a pressure wave in the cab which reaches the rear panel and is reflected back to the speaker. Now if you soften the back panel with some wadding the sound won't reflect so well and the wave is damped. The conventional thing is to put a bit of wadding on three panels, the back, one of the sides and the top or bottom. This damps all three standing waves. Unfortunately the thin white flimsy pillow stuffing isn't very good at this, and that's what a lot of people use. Some experts (Martin Colloms) recommend the wadding hung in the middle of the cab to break up standing waves there. The egg crate stuff is usually there to do the same thing. It's denser and the shape is meant to absorb sound and to reflect it randomly. Stating the obvious it can't reflect and absorb at the same time and the dimples are the wrong size to do much good. The second technique is to fill the cab with wadding. This helps kill standing waves but also affects the behaviour of the sound in the box, done properly it can increse the effective volume of the box but you are talking about stuffing with densities of 1lb per cubic ft and upwards (16kg/cu m) and at least half of the volume filled. I've never seen that in a commercial pro audio cab. You do see it frequently in sealed hi fi cabs. The third technique is heavy wadding used to damp the panel resonances. The black sticky stuff you see on your car door panels. In speakers it's usually some sort of rubber loaded with sand or stone to make it heavier. The problem with this is obvious, the most effective system is to use something which has the same mass as the panel you are damping, so you end up doubling the weight of your cab, fine in hi fi cabs but not if you are carrying cabs to and from a gig. You'll have detected that I'm sceptical about a lot of commercial cabs approach to damping. They put it in so that reviewers can say 'the cab is well damped' but without extensive test gear it is hard to say if it is effective or just decorative.

Well done, I left it even later than you 55 before I played my first note. Go and start looking for people to play with, if you haven't already. I started jamming a few songs with friends and within a year was playing at my first gig! Nothing complicated as you can imagine but it's surprising how many great songs have really simple bass lines, just as well with my skill levels.

I started with Rotos I hated the clank when first fitted, loved the sound week old ones gave and tended to change them every six weeks or so when I was gigging regularly, they just tended to go dead on me. This worked out quite pricey so I tried Dean Markley Blue Steels which I thought were an astonishing price but they lasted months and just fade over time 6 month old ones sound as good to me as 6 week old Roto's. A couple of years ago I changed the strings on my Jazz and at the same time put some Elixirs on my P-bass so I could compare them both aging. Two years on both still sound OK to me, though I've probably tweaked the eq. I'm going to change the Blue Steels I think to see how much they have gone downhill. You can't be too confident over your ability to detect gradual change so it'll be interesting to see how old ones compare with the new ones. Anyway in terms of value for money I'd be confident in saying either will last way more than twice as long as Rotosound stainless strings, maybe even more than five times as long, so cheaper in the long term.

[quote name='paul_c2' timestamp='1498781258' post='3327061'] It occurs sufficiently often in classical music that it has a name - hemiola. Its 6/8 but there's definitely 3 over 2 polyrhythms involved. [/quote] thanks for this, just had an interesting read of the Wikipedia entry on this. [url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiola"]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiola[/url] I found the only way to count this song was 1-2-3 2-2-3, for most of the song the empahsis was on the first beat of the triplet and you could almost class it as a quick 3/4 (you could almost hear it as a waltz or end up swinging it) but there were some ambiguities which is where the 3 over 2 comes in I guess. I love these ambiguous rhythms. Didn't know about hemiola but now I know why Bernstein's America is so catchy

I've also been told about the three injections thing. My belief is that it is about NICE guidelines rather than an absolute rule. Fortunately any problems I have are in my knees which don't affect bass playing. However can I recommend exercise as one of the few things you can do yourself to help out. I recently got a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. Bit of a bugger because I'm a biologist who has followed all the dietary advice all my life and been fairly active and slim(ish). Anyway as a result I decided to lose a little weight and cut a lot of carbs out of my diet. I love my grub and cook a lot so decided I'd rather lose weight by exercise than going on a diet for the rest of my life. This was entirely about blood sugar for me but the result is that many of the little aches and pains that I thought were down to inevitable aging have disappeared. There's a lot of research going on at the moment into inflammation which is implicated in everything from dementia, diabetes, arthritis, depression through to cancer, what we do know is that exercise, especially load bearing exercise reduces inflammation and a sedentary lifestyle and overweight increases it. I know it's easier said than done and I'm lucky enough to enjoy activity but it's well worth knowing about. It's an iron rule of speakers that you can't have loud, lightweight and cheap, maybe there's one about being old, unfit and healthy.

6/8 http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/mtd.asp?ppn=MN0055856

A 400W amp turned down noticeably is a 200W amp. The only problem is noticing. Most speakers can handle the power from an amp for a long time before overheating, the real problem is more likely to happen in the low frequencies where speakers have problems with being pushed too far. It's just the deep bass that does that so listen to advice about watching your lows. Roll off the bass a little and certainly avoid bass boost including from any fx and you'll be fine.

If you are getting feedback problems then you have a simple choice, turn down or sound s**t, in this case sounds like your guitarist needs to turn down. There are a couple of things you can do to curb feedback generally. Often there are resonance spots in the room, so just moving to a different part of the stage can solve problems Also moving your bass as far away from the speakers will help. You don't need any deep bass in the monitors so cut the bass there. Try filtering any bass out of the vocal mic and the guitar. You'll probably have an 80Hz filter for each channel on your mixer

[quote name='Mykesbass' timestamp='1498669183' post='3326261'] Luckily, Ambient comes across as a good guy. Can't see him scoring out Agadoo as a cruel joke!! [/quote] Ouch!

Make sure it's right. My son works in Japan and obviously speaks Japanese. There's a trend for Western free spirits to have 'Free' tatoo'ed in Japanese. Unfortunately the tattooists aren't fluent and have branded them free, as in cheap/good value. The Japanese are of course too polite to comment, but have some fun at our expense.

[quote name='Danuman' timestamp='1498594471' post='3325795'] The technical nature of their specialisation I suppose leads some of them to be a bit set in their ways, but I bet bass players are no different! [/quote] Don't forget they have to deal with singers and guitarists too

Thanks everyone. I'd pictured the side fills on the subs and I guess the proof of the pudding is in the eating so I'm going to give it a go. I'll take a floor monitor for the singer as well, just in case. I'll let you know how I get on. Any more personal experiences welcome.

Speakers just don't do anything by themselves. They move because they have an electric signal of some sort. Pop when you turn on is usually a power supply issue and in old amps is often a result of ancient capacitors wandering off spec.though it could be something in their charging circuitry. Most components in amps can produce some sort of white noise which the amp will amplify as some sort of hiss. I can't think of any real reason why it would happen in one speaker and not the other. It may be that the 15 has more bass so the pop is simply louder and more obtrusive and may have a little speaker resonance that makes the hiss more obvious. Most power supplies store a second or so's worth of energy in the supply caps. so they will go on making sound for a second or so after you turn them off. If you turn off the amp and get a few seconds of 'clean' sound then the power supply is the prime suspect, but it isn't likely to be user fixable unless your electronics is pretty good, there are simply too many possibilities to eliminate. It's off to a tech I'm afraid.

I'm not clear from your description what you have but in the UK we have something called blockboard, it's strips of wood about 2-5cm glued together with the grain reversed in alternate strips, then laminated either side with one or two plies. generally it is made for furniture manufacture and is stiffer in the longitudinal direction than ply so you use it for load bearing structures like shelves. I've used it for my kitchen cupboard carcasses as they are supporting a granite surface and were available with high quality veneers. you can also come across laminboard with much thinner plies which is also stiffer and more stable but finishes better than blockboard. http://www.design-technology.org/Blockboard.htm The stuff I have has a hardwood core.

There was an article in New Scientist a couple of years ago, if I can find it anywhere I'll post a link. It was re-reported around the rest of the British press so if someone else finds it feel free to put up a link. Some researchers had simply run chart music over the decades through some software that analysed frequency and volume. It showed certain frequencies appearing in the 50's then coming and going with peaks and troughs. A whole batch of frequencies disappeared in the 80's reappeared in the 90's and have since faded away again. When the researchers correlated it with what was happening in music it was the frequencies of the electric guitar. That's probably as near as you will get to an objective assessment, and yes it is way less important than it was. Music goes through cycles as each generation creates their own music. You'll never kill off human creativity, or probably young men showing off. The Jazz age would have been dominated by the sound of brass and drums. I'm old enough to have started with Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly running through the Trad revival, Folk revival, Blues revival, British Pop, Rock, Punk and so on. Even within that there were fashions in music. It's left a huge inheritance of great music which the kids can dip back into, hence they can sing most of Queen's back catalogue, or indeed enjoy the wrinklies in the cover bands strutting their stuff. Things move on though, as they should. The charts are dominated by female musicians and a lot of singer songwriters at the moment, as well as hip hop. Both reference what has gone on before but are applying things in new ways. Isn't that a good thing? I just don't get hip hop/rap but that's probably just my reluctance to engage. There's stuff out there that uses all sorts of unusual modalities and rhythms and some of the drumming is bloody fantastic. The good news is that bass and drums seem to be immune to changes in musical fashion. There's plenty of work for us all yet.

If only there was a simple solution. I'd love to be mixing for a bassist (or guitarist!) who came to me with all their fx sorted out along with amp and speaker sims. In practice they often come along with a collection of separate fx, don't even think about how they interact, have any idea about gain structure or even which of their interconnects was the dodgy one last week. Even with multi fx they can set thing up so the tone is what they want but the noise levels are horrendous. Not a problem with a band you work with regularly but in one of these multi band things you've got minutes to decide whether you are dealing with a sublime technician or a flaky ego. Miking up a speaker isn't ideal, ever. Moving the mic even a couple of cm across the cone will change the tone I'm picking up, I'm not going to get much sound from the ports and the mic itself will alter the tone so it's never going to sound the way it does to you. Even once I've got the tone close I've watched the musician who can't hear the PA decide they know better and move the mic, or just trip over the stand! Every mic on stage adds to the general noise floor and the risk of feedback from some weird resonance so most engineers try to keep mic's down to a minimum. The biggest problem though is always the human one. Drummers who will move an overhead to put in their favourite cymbal, guitarists who soundcheck with one guitar then use a different one for the gig, singers swapping vocal mics. People wandering off stage without a soundcheck. It's all a bit like herding cats. So, if you are happy with a generic (vanilla?) bass tone you're probably best served by a DI. If you use a variety of tones tell the sound engineer and offer them a post eq DI. Most decent engineers will be perfectly happy with that. Personally if someone has programmed in all their patches I'm going to be fairly confident they know what they are doing, if they are doing it on the fly with a load of gaffa taped stomp boxes then less so.

You probably need to choose between a dedicated floor momitor where the controls are on the front or an active PA speaker which will give you a greater range of choices but those knobs on the back can be hard to reach when the bass is strapped on. Not a problem if you have a separate feed from the mixer of course. I felt the easy access to the controls was important so I went for (embarrassed cough) the Behringer 1320. Sounds good if a little hi-fi and hasn't let me down in three years. Plenty loud enough and could double as PA speakers at a pinch. In fact don't worry about volume. I've yet to come across monitors which won't drive the PA into screaming feedback way before full volume. You did say cheap