Phil Starr

I've used the Zoom H4N for just this purpose and it was the experience that sent me all the way to IEM's I wish I'd done it earlier and my hearing loss would have been less. I bought the H4 as a recorder so I already had it to hand but any small recorder would work I tried my old Olympus WS-650S dictaphone thing and that works just as well, at the cost of having to record everything and then erasing it to free up the memory for next gig. I'd look at something like the Zoom H1 if I was buying something to do this now though, the H4 is bulky and over the top for this purpose and you could wear the H1 on a lanyard. Plenty of other rivals to the Zoom also, look at Tascam and Olympus too. What was stunning and should have been obvious is that I simply plugged myself in and could instantly hear everything on stage much better than without them. That was entirely down to the reduction in sound levels. to make this work you need to concentrate on getting the best for possible for your headphones, the more of the over-loud drums and backline you can cut out the better your experience will be. Using a personal mixer can be just as good. Think of it as a system in three parts Microphone>headphone amp>headphone. You can use an ambient mic and a mixer as your headphone amp or a mini-recorder as both mic and headphone amp. Using a recorder assumes that you have a decent monitoring sound where you stand anyway. If you want control over levels and creating your own monitor mix then a personal mixer is the way to go. I know at least one bassist with a mixer fixed to their pedal board for their own monitoring.

I wouldn't be too bothered about buying this. It would depend entirely upon price and what you are expecting to get. What you effectively have is an Ashdown ABM 15 in a home made box. A 15" driver of equivalent quality would set you back £120 new so if you pay sub £100 for it you'll probably have a perfectly serviceable working cab for rehearsals and practice. If you are handy you can probably smarten up the cab and you could even re-house the speaker in a new cab you build yourself. My first cab was a Peavey 15" Black Widow I picked up for £30 from a repair shop that was having a clear out. It did me proud in a home made cab for around four years. It still works If it's tatty but working when you've finished with it you can still sell it on when you've saved up for something better and you'll get most of your money back. Just don't spend too much. My guitarist, also a tight wad, had a Marshall combo with the amp missing but a decent Celestion speaker in it. I got fed up with him turning up to gigs with something so scruffy so I built him a cab for that and he is still proudly using it.

That makes it an easier choice go for the orange.

Well done @Balcro really good information. Of those two responses I'd go for the Faital The LaVoce has a 2db peak centered around 110Hz which will give a noticably warmer less focussed sound whilst the Faital clearly has a stronger magnet giving a tighter bass. That's not by a huge amount but it will be noticeable. That's not to say @TRBboy that you might not prefer the warmer sound and it might well be what the original Trace speaker sounded like. It's not uncommon for commercial speakers to be created to be artificially warm and many bassists like that sound.

This does sound like something that might be fixable, certainly worth investigating as it will cost you nothing but time. It could be the cab or equally possibly the speaker so the first thing to do is to remove the speaker from the cab. Almost anything in or on the cab can buzz, a loose screw somewhere or a bit of wood that is no longer glued. cables can buzz against the speaker cone if they can touch it or against a panel, torn bits of vinyl covering can flap and resonate and you can get all sorts introduced through speaker vents. I found a load of hazel shells inside one cab which some mice had dicovered. cabs are wood and everything can be fixed and reglued. Check handles, corners, the grille and even the input sockets. Bad news is if the speaker coil is rubbing/buzzing. that's not repairable by you and a professional repair will probably cost as much as a new speaker. You can check for this by gently pushing the cone in a few times and listen for any scratching noises. This takes some care. If you push from one side the coil will rub against the magnet and you will cause further damage. Use a pint glass or similar and push the cone with that so there is no sideways pressure and be gentle. Now check the speaker magnet, anything made of iron that has come loose will stick to the magnet. That means any screws or other fixings will probably end up there and can cause buzzing. Old speakers often fail because the glues used in their manufacture break down over time. Favourite is the dust cover, the dome in the middle of the speaker particularly if it is dented or mis-shaped. Ive also seen speaker cones come away from the metal basket. Go right around the corrugated surround and check it isn't coming away from the metal frame. If it has a separate pleated surround that can also come away from the cone. Also look for any tears in the surround which will also buzz. look for tears in the cone itself. All of this can be re-glued, I use a latex based adhesive to do any repairs, it sticks well to paper and remains flexible when the glue has cured. biger tears I have repaired by building up layers of ordinary tissue paper though Japanese Tissue is stronger if you can get it. Artists suppliers may stock it as it is used to repair paper and canvasses. If you find nothing try putting a signal through the speaker out of the cab on your bench. You can get online signal generators that let you put a pure tone through the speaker so you can scan up and down a couple of octaves and look for any resonances try 50-200Hz. Don't go too loud though, the speaker cone will move further when out of the cab and a long way with really low frequencies, you don't want it moving more than 5mm but it will probably buzz most at particular frequencies and that might help you find the buzzy bit. If you can't get the speaker to buzz outside the cab then its the cab or the way the speaker was fixed. Put the speaker back in the cab and fix it down firmly. If the gasket is damaged or absent then you can use an insulating foam strip to replace it. Mke sure all the fixings tighten down properly if one screw or bolt is loose that may cause your buzz. Good luck and don't jump to conclusions if you find anything, it may be lots of little buzzes on an old cab and speaker.

You've tried a lot of options then I think whether a 15 will cut it for you depends upon the quality of the midrange, It's hard to believe that sitting on the floor the bass efficiency won't be sufficient. I quite liked the tonal balance of the Eminence Kappalite that Barefaced started off with. As you can try your own cab without spending and you already know you are happy with the tone you don't have a lot to lose by trying it. It sounds like you are in a good place really. You know exactly what you want to achieve and are in no rush as your 2x10's will go on doing a job for you for the foreseeable future. It looks like tone is the most significant thing for you so take your time and audition the cabs thoroughly. Good luck with the search

An interesting problem for you and I'm not sure what you are looking for exists as a commercial product. That in itself is slightly odd as you aren't really looking for anything very extreme or technically impossible. Just to summarise: you find your 2x10 is an ideal speaker in terms of form but they aren't quite 'enough' for the gigs you are playing so not a single cab solution. You have tried a TC112 but that isn't 'enough' either. You like a coloured cab with a bit of mid scoop. You aren't keen on the 'Barefaced' sound. You are finding the majority of 2x12's too bulky and an awkward carry. So technically you can get better efficiency and a louder sound for the same speaker excursion by increasing the cone area of your cabs or by having long throw drivers and increased power handling. Interestingly to me at least is the high tech long throw drivers aren't reall available in a 2x10 format at the moment. The TC's you are using at the moment are really pretty unexceptional designs but neither are many/any of the rest. You've rejected a 2x12 as too bulky so far and most of them are 500mm+ width. There are some like the Darkglass that are narrower. Of course carrying anything is a mix of physical dimensions/weight and things like the handle position and balance. If you go for more speaker then you are left with a couple of 3x10's or you can draw up your own shorlist of 'portable' 2x12's. I simply don't believe a 2x10 is out there that you would be happy with for volume. I think it might be worth having another look at the 'hi-tech' 12's as there are a feew available. because they use a dedicated bass driver (essentially their own sub) they can be driven much harder and louder. The top end then has to be driven by a horn and they tend to be FRFR but some siple tone shaping by a decent pre amp can soon restore your favourite tone. Because the horns give better dispersion than a large cone you will get to hear more of your own sound. The best of these cabs will go louder than a drummer with the right amp. I don't now why anyone would want to go louder than that as it implies the drummer would be miked up to match you and you therefore have a PA that will also cope with bass. It might be worth asking @stevie if he still has a demo model of his Monaco you can try so you could try it for portability and volume. For me it is my one cab solution and i've sold my second cab as I've never needed one. It's genuinely as loud as any drummer. The only other solution I can suggest is the original Mk1 Barefaced Super Compact with the 15" Eminence driver in it. It is more properly old school sounding than the tweetered cabs which you don't like and a properly lightweight and portable single cab solution.

I have a BD121 also, it's similar to the SansAmp but dare I say this; it actually sounds a little better straight out of the tin. Much easier to get that little bit of fairy dust sprinkled onto your sound with the Behringer. I had some problems with instability with it though when using it with batteries which it also eats enthusiastically. My SansAmp lasts ages on rechargeables and the programmable one which I have offers switchable eq's so gets the use.

I'm trying to find if Snugs will make something moulded that will work with Sennheiser IE100's, still waiting for them to get back to me but I'll let you know if they will.

When you start a thread with "not feeling it" with IEM's then all those people who don't like them will jump in, and that's what happened. A lot of the comments here I would attribute to poorly fitting IEM's or ones where the sound in their ears hasn't been sorted properly. @Al Krow asked if there is a 'halfway house' the answer is no, if your in ears fit properly they should cut the outside sound to almost inaudible. The whole point is to cut out all the distorted unbalanced sound mess you get on stage and only hear a studio quality mix in you ears. If you can't get isolation or a good mix you aren't doing it properly and you won't like it. People can and do use in-ears half in and half out so they can hear the on-stage sound but that just increases the sound level and the in-ear sound from the buds is nasty and tinny because they aren't sealed. We've even had people who only put them in one ear. Honestly can you remember seeing a major touring band who don't use in-ears. Do you think every single band are just going through the motions or are 'just not feeling it' when they are closing the main stage at Glastonbury (other large events are available) All the excitement coming from the crowd is still there, all the excitement of playing your music and seeing the response still happens, you are still doing the thing that makes all those people have a great time. I'm not pretending there are no down sides to in ears, it takes time to get used to them. Longer for some than others. It takes as much effort to set up properly as any new skill, you have to put in the miles. If you go wired then you are tethered. It starts feeling very different and 'wrong' but ends up being a new normal. On the plus side you won't lose your hearing, your band will sound better, you will play better, your audiences will have a better time. I don't want to invalidate anyone's personal experience, we all like loud sounds, plugging our first bass amp in and turning it up to maximum is a great experience and it is exciting and adrenaline pumping but going out night after night without hearing protection is going to damage your hearing, limit your experience of music and in the end give you a sense of isolation from friends and family and ultimately life as you hearing fades and the tinnitus rises. Choose wisely.

Getting a matching 2x12 was aways the best idea both in terms of sound and looks. You'll get an extra 6db out of the stack at everything other than full power, the speakers will run and look cooler so it's win win. You'll never need them at full power but was that ever the point? You'll get tired of carrying them in the end and they are completely over the top but if you are young and fit enough then that's a whole lot of fun for £150 and you'll have change for some good earplugs

Hi all, just to say I haven't forgotten this design but I've not been well. Recovered now, but I've lost a couple of weeks and I'm behind with everything. It's going to be a few weeks catching up before I get time to re-visit this. I know a few people are revving up and ready to go but if you are patient it is still coming

And for anyone else interested. Follow the link people, there are a series of sound clips showing the sound before and after the technique. Really interesting even if your desk doesn't have that facility. If nothing else it'll make you think about your drum mic placement to get that mix of the 'click' and resonance.

Thanks Russ this is really helpful, I haven't mixed seriously since the 1970's so this is a new technique for me, though I had noticed the kick on some bands is a bit 'one note' as well as suspiciously tight I'd put that down to a sample or even very hard compression, now I'll have to see if I can spot it, another obsession :). Fortunately I'm saved from most of this because my drummer has an E-kit and sends me the signal she wants the audience to hear. Takes her sound very seriously too. We've also used a dep who sets up his own mic's and uses a trigger for the kick. First time I saw his band I couldn't believe the kick sound he was getting. They were on the bill after us and just blew us off the stage. That kick was giving a lot to how they sounded and the audience response.

If you are having clarity issues in your IEMs try listening to the sound you hear with them switched off but still firmly in place. To me it’s muffled but the real bass is still getting through. If your bass is going through the PA loud enough to reach the back of the room and you are only 2-3m from the PA then you are always going to be swimming in deep bass. Having as little of the sub frequencies in your monitoring as possible is the only way of coping with that.

There’s no doubt that there’s a little fairy dust in the SansAmp sound and I love the blend control in terms of getting a good sound quickly, but I don’t go for extreme sounds, just a touch of drive. It seems to even out the sound across the strings and saving me from having to eq for that, having said that once you’ve set up the zoom once you don’t need to worry about it again. The thing is that you can always hear a change but tweaking for a good sound seems to be more down to how you mix and what you do with the other instruments. For clarity I use HPF and shelve the bass down at around 150Hzin the mixer.

I’ve got a SansAmp programmable and a Zoom B1ON. I use the Zoom mainly but sometimes use the SansAmp with my P bass as they seem to work well together. The Zoom works with anything. Honestly I’ve never had concerns about how either sounds in the mix, I’d prefer a balanced output from the Zoom but am happy with the sound I’m getting.

It's often surprising how you can do things 'all wrong' and get away with it. In a way the possibility of PA behind the mics is what Bose were selling with their first stick systems. Although they advertised that this was due to the wide dipersal of line arrayed speakers the directional response of horns would actually help here in terms of feedback suppression. With both drums and keys between the PA speakers you could potentially point them either side of the front line mics which would help a little. The partial success of this arrangement (it doesn't work above certain levels) was more due to a smooth frequency response from their 'sticks'. One of the best things you can do to get a good sound is to reduce your overall volume on stage, and sometimes in the room. I can imagine a band who produce good but not excessive volumes will pick up extra gigs at some venues for that reason alone. Accepting a lower volume might be a commercial decision. A sound decision, not a sound decision I think not enough of us understand the concept of 'gain before feedback' Feedback only occurs when the sound from the PA (or any other speaker) returns the amplified sound at the microphone back louder than the original sound.* For any given system in any given room there's a level of gain which will give you feedback whatever you do. Set just below that point and the feedback from the mics can never build up and cause howlround. This band are just accepting that this point exists, turning up until they know where that point is and then working within that limit. You can change the gain before feedback in lots of ways, moving the speakers would be the obvious one, but if you are happy with the limit to your volume then what they are doing is perfectly sensible. Most of us I suspect don't line up behind the speakers in a rehearsal situation becaue we turn the gain down and don't need to. *Imagine a singers voice at the mic is around 90db it's then sent to the PA which adds 20db of gain and comes out of the speakers at 110db (90+20) Sound drops with distance so when it gets back to the vocal mic it's probably lost most of the 20db of gain ar maybe slighly more. This is crucial to feedback though. If it comes back at 89db then it's quieter than the voice and the sound will die away, if it comes back at 91db it will be amplified another 20db and come back at 92db which will be amplified again and again deafening us all with feeback. Anything slightly less than the original sound -no feedback, even the slightest fraction louder feedback every time. The gain before feedback is 20db in this case and you cannot use even a tiny fraction more.

Well I for one found that very interesting, though I still didn't get the "sine wave" bit. That was in the second part of @EBS_freak's answer, Thanks Russ Posted Friday at 13:14 (edited) On 11/04/2024 at 12:34, Al Krow said: Can you talk us through your thinking and how you would go about applying "a sine wave on a gate" please? I'm not familiar with what you have in mind here! This one will need a quite feature rich digital desk or outboard (however, I will drop in an easy alternative once I've talked you through it) Basically, kick drums on mics can be quite a pita in the live environment because they tend to pick up not only the kick drum but all the low end rumble crap on stage. So theres a number of things you can do to address this. The common one, is to use two mics. One which is getting the all the beater frequencies and the other which is getting the lows - but the gain can be a lot lower as you don't need to boost the gain on that mic to capture the beater frequencies. Lower the gain and closer proximity to the drum means higher signal to noise ratio without all the bleed. OK what else? You can also apply a gate. The gate stops any signal from the mic getting onto your mix bus. Once a threshold is exceeded (e.g. a kick drum is kicked), the gate opens and lets the sound of the drum through... before closing again. All this means is that you get the sound of the drum but the ambient mush which is present whilst the drum isn't being kicked doesn't go into your mix. However, the low end you are getting may be that fundamental plus still quite a lot of mush. So how can you get all the low end fundamental without the mush? Answer? Fake it. So you use a mic to capture the beater and roll off all the low end and associated mush. So how do you get that low end thump of the kick? Easy - that's where the sine wave comes in. So lets choose say 60Hz. Set up a sine wave (some desks have sine generators (usually labelled oscillators) - other desks without the functionality, you'll need to plug in a sine generator onto another channel - however, if you haven't got an oscillator, it's unlikely it will support the next bit). Of course, what you have now is a permanent sine wave present on your mix bus. What you need to do is configure it to be side chained and triggered when the gate on the kick drum channel opens. When you've done that, you'll end up with the kick drum with the inferior low end being augmented with the pure sine wave. That will give you purest bottom end - and with some big subs, you'll be pinning people to the wall with the most precise sounding kick drum you've ever heard. BUT>>>>> as I said, not every desk can support this. Whats the alternative? Drum trigger. I always carry around a Roland TM-2 with a RT30K trigger. This gives you the opportunity trigger a sine... but if you are going to do that... you may want to trigger the complete kick drum sound completely. Whats not to like about a lovingly crafted studio quality kick drum sample in a live setting? And that's it! PS this is a cheat which is also used on more studio recordings than you would think. Gives you that low end precision which a mic simply can't deliver. Edited Friday at 16:51 by EBS_freak

Thanks, I've been aware of the Mic Mechanic for a while, it's one I've actually seen people using. The D1 looks interesting too in doing the delay +de-tuning (though de-tuning my singing seeems an unecessary step ) I've promised to record some basslines for my mates solo act tonight but I'll trawl You Tube for informative videos of the TC stuff tomorrow, Thanks again. Used would be good too

I've been looking at the TC Helicon stuff too. Reviews of the sounds produced are positive but to get similar functionality I'd be looking at the VoiceLive 3 at £600+ which is a lot to spend on experimenting. I did borrow a VoiceLive 2 a while ago but couldn't get the sounds I wanted at the time, though both my needs and hopefully understanding has changed since then. I also owned the VoiceSolo personal monitor which had some nice reverb and so on as part of the package. Single pedals for each effect are appealing in terms of simplicity when playing and singing live, but once you get to three pedals it starts to look expensive. However it would mean I could buy and learn to use one effect at a time and start the learning curve without having to commit huge funds up-front. Thanks @Mykesbass and @naxos10 food for thought certainly. Which TC units were they? They make a lot of different options.

And please don't tell me not to. I want advice on how to, not on the artistic merits. Preferably from people who have done it or worked with people who have So, I sing backing vocals for a very cheesy covers duo with the emphasis on audience singalong. Believe me it's as awful as it sounds but people are loving it. Bass/Guitar and programmed drums. Basically I sing the audience bits so they know when to come in. Mainly what I want to do is add in things like reverb and delay without touching the mixer and using my feet to switch between songs. There's a few songs where I need to sound like more than one person so doubling would be one effect I'd use and maybe a subtle octave shifted third voice. I might experiment with harmonies but the idea would be to fill out the sound rather than to slip into the robotic sounding stuff some over enthusiastic harmonisers serve up. At the moment our vocalist adds harmonies to the backing tracks for three or four songs. I'm trying to steer a route so that we are live in the room though, not some sort of karaoke act. I'm seeing using a processor to fill out my voice as being preferable to an increasingly rich backing track even if the backing is all us. Ultimately I'm just looking to fill out my vocal sound without the audience noticing anything artificial going on. I'm currently looking at the Zoom V6 SP as the right balance of features and price combined with ease of operation but I'm open to other suggestions

She looks good to me.

This has the design drawings

I've been wondering about this question again, could we have given a clearer answer? It's tough for someone with no technical background to follow some of the more technical answers but that is what anyone asking willl be offered.It's equally tough for someone who has a technical background to give a partial answer, something they know is almost true but leaves out some important detail which could end up with someones hard earned money spent on something that won't do the job. There was a one line answer available here all along: buy a decent quality 12" system with 300W a side going to each speaker. My guess it that most of us who are regularly gigging either own or have successfully used such a system for many gigs. I see a lot of covers bands, I rarely see anyone using anything else in pubs. Two 12's on poles are on display at at least 80% of pub gigs. Why did we make it so complex The analogy here might be asking three different 'experts' about how the heart works. A primary school teacher will give a different answer to an eight year old from the answer a secondary science teacher will give an eighteen year old Biology student different again. A doctor has a different problem when they talk about the heart it has consequencies. If they aren't clear somone might die, if they fail to get the message across, then catastrophe. If they over simplify and miss out what later turns out to be an important detail they can end up in court. I wonder if we aren't all pretending to be thoracic surgeons here carefully picking words and refining arguments when the real doctor inside them wants to just scream; "lose some effing weight, stop eating crap, get some exercise and enjoy the rest of your life" as they propose surgery or prescribe pills with side effects that will make their patients lives miserable. I wonder why we didn't say; "get a couple of decent 12's on poles and get on and enjoy playing"?