Phil Starr

To be honest I'm not sure they will be that much louder than your guitar amp. So much of the output of the guitar is concentrated in the frequencies of the human voice. That's where your hearing and that of your neighbours, is at it's most sensitive. Guitar speakers are more efficient at converting watts into sound anyway so that the overall effect is that a 20W guitar may well subjectively be the same volume as a bass amp of 200W. The only negative thing is that bass will pass through walls doors and windows better than high frequencies. Just limit your loudest practice to the sociable bits of the day and talk to your neighbours about when it won't matter so much to them. Then do the rest of your practice with headphones, which once you get used to it is better than playing through an amp. Playing at low volumes shouldn't affect your tone too much, use the volume on the bass to trim down as well as the amp. In any case you are probably practicing notes and timing not tone so it shouldn't restrict your bass playing, just the fun of making a loud noise

[quote name='ped' timestamp='1484745669' post='3217993'] To be honest I had no idea the email would go to everyone regardless of the setting. It's the first time I've used it - and probably the last! Anyway you know where I'll be on the 4-5th of March if you want to offer some physical resistance ped [/quote]by now you know what the concensus is but I was perfectly happy to be emailed. If it was four a week I might think again but once every four years? I think I can cope.

That's great, It's worth knowing that running high levels of distortion will usually end up with more energy going to the horn driver and this is often why they go. Having the second horn repaired then turning the top end down might be worth consideration. Pleased you got a happy ending.

[quote name='Chienmortbb' timestamp='1484147758' post='3213040'] I have just done a plot of the cone excursion of a well known, well loved driver the Eminence Kappalite 3012HO. The box is 50L and the tuning frequency is 50Hz The power is 400 watts, the stated power of the 3012HO. The red line is Xmax, the maximum excursion at which the voice coil is under the influence of the magnet. It is not dangerous to exceed XMax by a small amount. However the Xlim or XDamage (12.5mm) [url="https://flic.kr/p/R8Gr7e"][/url][url="https://flic.kr/p/R8Gr7e"]Kappalite3012HO Cone excursion 400W[/url] by [url="https://www.flickr.com/photos/149986878@N08/"]chienmortbb[/url], on Flickr [/quote] OK Tea break again So.... our computer model shows a typical curve which pretty much applies to any ported cab. Which isn't saying sealed cabs have no problems by the way. Cone movement increases as the frequencies go lower but the port controls any over excursion at the tuning frequency and gives you an extra 3db of bass. The problem for the cab is that there then isn't much to control the cone's movement below the port's area of operation. Below 40Hz or bottom E in this cab and at this power the speaker is at risk. +/- 9.5mm or 19mm of travel doesn't leave a lot of room for error. You won't destroy your speaker instantly but unless your the sort of wierdo like me that does calculations in your head during a gig it's a worry you don't want. So, what can you do about it? Well all the trouble is caused by too much power, so turning down is an option, turning down 3dB will halve your excursion but only be a little quieter. Better still add an extra speaker. With a solid state amp that will give you an extra 6db or thereabouts, that reduces your excursion to a quarter. Actually if the speakers run cooler you won't have that thermal compression effect either and your amp won't have to work so hard. Looking at the graph it's plain to see that all the nastiness is below 40Hz, If you don't know the frequency response of your amp it may not be filtering that out so get a high pass filter. We don't really hear most of the subsonic stuff so it won't make as much difference as you expect. Watch your tone controls. If you have a traditional bass/middle/treble set up then they usually give you about 12dB of boost. Just turning it up a notch to 2 o'clock will probably double your excursion below 40Hz. fine if you are bubbling along at 100W, not so good if you are already caning it. If you turn down by a notch of course you will halve your excursion. If I turn up to a venue with justone speaker and it needs a lot more volume than I expected that's what I'll do. Watch any octavers too, they may have subsonic filters in but you really don't want to boost the output down there without complete confidence in your rig. Push your rig into a corner or at least against the back wall, the reinforcement from each surface will give you an extra 3db in the bottom octave and you can then cut bass but retain as much of your tone as possible. Tea break over, I'm bound to have forgotten something so I'll wait and see what people add and then update that second post to save anyone from having to read the whole thread through.

I'm another who thinks that if the audience enjoy it then it's a good song but my heart sinks if the band want to do Seven Nation Army especially as they think they are doing you a favour with such a 'great bass line'. Never had the heart to tell them.

i used my Hartke HA3500 for the first time in ages on Saturday for a gig in a really difficult hall. I'd forgotten how useful that graphic can be, and what a nice sound it makes. I'm afraid it is nicer than my LM Tube, it just is.

[quote name='Chienmortbb' timestamp='1484147758' post='3213040'] I have just done a plot of the cone excursion of a well known, well loved driver the Eminence Kappalite 3012HO. The box is 50L and the tuning frequency is 50Hz The power is 400 watts, the stated power of the 3012HO. The red line is Xmax, the maximum excursion at which the voice coil is under the influence of the magnet. It is not dangerous to exceed XMax by a small amount. However the Xlim or XDamage (12.5mm) , the point at which the voice coil is in danger, is exceed at 36.7Hz, 5 Hz above low B on a 5 string. Indeed you have to reduce the power at 31Hz to under 200W to avoid exceeding XDamage. [url="https://flic.kr/p/R8Gr7e"][/url][url="https://flic.kr/p/R8Gr7e"]Kappalite3012HO Cone excursion 400W[/url] by [url="https://www.flickr.com/photos/149986878@N08/"]chienmortbb[/url], on Flickr [/quote] Apologies to those who got all this already but it seems a few people are struggling to under stand the graph so I thought i'd use a tea break to try and explain what it shows. The grey line shows how far the speaker cone moves backwards and forwards at different frequencies with 400W of signal passed through it. The speaker itself is rated at 450W so it shouldn't burn out with this sort of power. The horizontal red line is the limits to the excursion of the speaker called Xmax. If you look at 100Hz on the bottom line (kind of mid bass) you can see that the excursion at 400W is 6mm. At this point the speaker cone is going 6mm forward and 6mm backwards a total of 12mm travel. Below this frequency the speaker just exceeds it's Xmax limit, a teensy bit. At this point the speaker coil will just be leaving the magnetic field and distortion will start to rise. If the coil is outside the magnet for any length of time it will also start to heat up excessively because the magnet conducts a lot of the heat away. Going over Xmax isn't good, though it is not going to instantly destroy your speaker. Now if you look at the grey line at 50Hz you can see it has dipped down. That's the effect of the port, the air in the port is resonating and making most of the sound the energy to do this is damping down the movement of the cone which is now only moving just under 2mm Now if you go and look at 40Hz (roughly bottom E) the movement is 9mm well outside the magnetic field and at 30Hz (roughly bottom B on a fiver) it is 19.5mm which is beyond the mechanical limits of the speaker. At this point I couldn't tell you what is happening without dissecting the speaker. Some of them are mechanically limited by the suspension and some of them hammer the coil on the back of the magnet, Some of the experts will tell you that going beyond Xmax (6mm in this speaker) is dangerous to the speaker some will tell you Xlim (12.5mm) is where the damage happens.. I'm going to sit on the fence a little, you might get away with 10mm for a short while and don't mind a bit of distortion but don't go near 12.5 if you want your speaker to last. Now most people who play bottom E won't be playing it at 400W even if the rest of the sound of their bass in total is 400W. Most of their sound is made of higher harmonics but the damaging deep bass will be greater if they use the neck pickup, much greater if they use and octaver or they use a lot of bass boost. All of these are the booby traps which cause some people to blow speakers when most of us don't. Protecting us in the other direction is the natural bass filtering caused by the positioning of the pups and any filtering built into our amps. Playing 400w bottom B into the speaker and you can see you are asking a 6mm limited speaker to travel 19mm. Put another way at this frequency it can only handle 6/19ths of 400Watts, about 125W. There's another little booby trap here too. If you are pushing 400W through your speaker then it will get very hot, heating the coil will increase it's resistance and make it quieter, if you are struggling then you might be tempted to turn it up to compete with the rest of the band, which in turn heats it a little more. If you'd brought a second speaker you'd be pushing less than half the power (because two identical speakers are more efficient than one) and you wouldn't be getting any of this thermal compression. Anyway tea break over and I hope the graph makes a little more sense now.

Thanks for that link Bill, when I was experimenting with piezo's I had to work out the capacitance and impedances myself. For the OP the capacitor resistor circuit does work and takes out some of the harshness. Start with a 5uF capacitor in series and a 10ohm resistor im parrallel with the tweeter. I had some of the old Motorola piezos which sounded OK. Bill will know but I think CTS may have taken on the Motorola plant when they stopped production. They weren't widely available over here when I checked quite a few years back. The cheap Chinese made piezo's are definitely inferior both in sound and reliability. I decided in the end that a conventional horn driver and crossover were always going to sound better.

It's just a result of changing technology and an immature industry. Class D is new, the watts you can get for a £1 have increased and the new power supplies mean you can still carry the thing. Because it is new we all want it, if that's you in your avatar then you are probably old enough to remember when all cars had to have 100mph+ on their speedos even if they would only do it downhill with a following wind. It was about sales, bragging rights and customer demand. Now no-one probably knows how far their speedo goes up to. This is the first time in amp history that we can have as much power as the mains socket will supply for less than an average weeks wage. We'll get used to it, we will grow out of it, something else will come along.

[quote name='Lw.' timestamp='1484237779' post='3213865'] Whilst the numbers & that graph look great - I don't understand what any of it means. So - are we damaging our expensive ported cabs or not? [/quote] That deserves a serious answer. This was the whole reason I started this thread. Some people are damaging speakers, usually people who can ill afford it, others are using their gear well within their limits and won't ever have a problem. Some of us probably sail nearer the wind more than is sensible but get away with it. We get quite a few questions on BC about matching amps to cabs and sometimes the advice is better than others. There is an inherent problem with all ported cabs and most bassists will be unaware of it. If you know the problem of subsonic over excursion is there then it's easy enough to avoid. Basschat discussions tend to be pretty measured and by sharing information most people on here get to know their technical side pretty well. As a result the advice newbies get on BC is usually pretty spot on. Simply if there is a point beyond which you shouldn't go it is better to know where it is. It's also true that an educated customer will ask questions when making purchases and the makes manufacturers cough up more information about the design compromises they inevitably make. I'm sure the whole lightweight movement has been sped up by BassChat and TalkBass. Wouldn't it be great if amp manufacturers published details of any high pass filtering in their manuals and then started making a feature of it. That'll only become a selling point if we all start asking questions. So, the simple answer is a few people are blowing cabs, but it is easily avoided if you know what you are doing. I'd be pretty happy if I thought even half a dozen people avoided the heartbreak of a blown speaker as a result.

Showing how deeply uncool I am I'm on my second Fiat Multipla. With the seats in you can carry 6 adults reasonably comfortably. Take the seats out and you have a van, I carry two bass cabs, a full PA including bass bins and 15" monitors plus the lights. It will still seat three people with that load in. the 1.9 diesel engine is a real workhorse but I think it's common to a lot of the other van based people carriers like the Citroen. The only downside is all the rubbish Fiat plastic trims that don't last and the people laughing at the weird car as you drive past. They've both been reliable and incredibly cheap to buy. Generally though all the van based vehicles are a good way to go if you cart a lot of gear. The estates are always a little more difficult to pack as they don't have the height I find.

[quote name='Chienmortbb' timestamp='1484147758' post='3213040'] I have just done a plot of the cone excursion of a well known, well loved driver the Eminence Kappalite 3012HO. The box is 50L and the tuning frequency is 50Hz The power is 400 watts, the stated power of the 3012HO. The red line is Xmax, the maximum excursion at which the voice coil is under the influence of the magnet. It is not dangerous to exceed XMax by a small amount. However the Xlim or XDamage (12.5mm) , the point at which the voice coil is in danger, is exceed at 36.7Hz, 5 Hz above low B on a 5 string. Indeed you have to reduce the power at 31Hz to under 200W to avoid exceeding XDamage. [url="https://flic.kr/p/R8Gr7e"][/url][url="https://flic.kr/p/R8Gr7e"]Kappalite3012HO Cone excursion 400W[/url] by [url="https://www.flickr.com/photos/149986878@N08/"]chienmortbb[/url], on Flickr [/quote]Thanks for putting this up. The point for those that don't know about all this is that the curve is the same for all speakers in a tuned cab. Excursion rises steadily as the frequency falls but the tuning of the cab dampens the cone movement at the tuning frequency. You can see the dip in excursion at 50hz really clearly on the graph. At this point the port is doing all the work and the cone movement is damped because it is working hard to pump air through the port. The Kappalite was chosen because it is about as good as a driver gets, and has been recommended by several designers or used in their cabs. There's every chance your speaker wont behave as well unless you use very expensive cabs. Now moving beyond Xmax/the speakers limiting point doesn't mean instant destruction any more than running a cars revs into the red means the engine will blow up. It does mean you are taking a risk though. What happens next depends upon the exact circumstances but at this point the built in safety designs aren't necessarily going to protect you, and there is no red light on most speakers. More later, I have to practice

[quote name='Lw.' timestamp='1484151958' post='3213093'] Depends on the musical style you're after but some places to consider: Purple Turtle - local/unsigned stuff every wednesday. Gigs of slightly bigger bands on at least every other Thursday. Various genres. Oakford Social Club - weekly gigs of sometimes really good artists, other times more of the same unsigned local stuff. Pavlovs Dog - Fri/Sat they often have a band on for a bit around 9-ish. Does mean you have to go in 'pavs' though. Facebar - weekly gigs. Nearly always metal/heavy alternative stuff, occasionally D'n'B. Sub89/Bowery District (I think it's two venues in the same building) - your generic signed music venue, tickets about £15. It's either the bigger cover bands/tribute bands or older artists that are a bit down on their luck, Alien Ant Farm played in there the other week. The Butler - I think it's every Friday, generic rock covers bands. The Rising Sun Arts Centre - couple of gigs a week. Newish music or just band the promotor likes. There's a place called Global Cafe on the same street that I think is somehow related but does more world music or jazz type stuff. The Queens Arms - it's the local UKIP/Britain First/NF pub but is available to hire on the cheap so often has gigs completely unrelated to the normal clientele on. You can only really find out about gigs in there if you know one of the bands, even then it's a bit of a trek from all the other pubs. There are a few other less regular places that sometimes have gigs on but those ones should keep you going for now. [/quote] Thanks

Yeah, a lot of T-Bird players use a long strap and play with it resting on their right legs. I notice blue has a bass fairly low slung in his pic. It's a great rock bass and I suspect if I was a pick player that's what I would do, problem solved. As a fairly small framed finger player I don't find it very comfortable with a long strap. That neck was so gorgeous though. The EB looks to have a wider neck.

[quote name='la bam' timestamp='1484131216' post='3212850'] The 2 main things for me are... 1. Where are the mainstream guitar bands for the younger generation to aspire to emulate? 2. Without a Top of the Pops style mainstream weekly music show on the bbc no one over 25 has an inkling of what's in the charts or popular, so you've got the biggest divide ever of what is going on musically. Also this means the over 25s are less likely to buy current music and affect what is in the charts. So the chart is very youth orientated, and the people running the venues very older generation orientated. [/quote] Somebody has already said this but I think music really goes in cycles. You'll get a music scene building up somewhere and suddenly breaking out stimulating a burst of energy creativity and 'me too' bands. Think of Indie music bursting out of Manchester, Punk, Two tone bursting out of the midlands or even the Beatles and the Merseyside bands. At the moment guitar bands aren't really happening in the same way but there will be other bursts of activity in the future. I honestly don't think you can stop the kids making memorable music. It's also true that there are different circuits, at the height of the pub rock scene there were also separate circuits where the older generation listened to trad jazz or folk music. Apart from a few specialist venues that has died out as mainstream pub entertainment. I suspect classic rock is at that point. We need to do something new.

[quote name='Lw.' timestamp='1484067063' post='3212391'] I've just had a look at Lemonrock for my area (Reading) & none of the usual live music venues are even in there - it's all just open mic/jam nights. This is definitely not all that is on in Reading as there are several venues hosts live music every week. Maybe Reading is bucking the trend or maybe the problem in this instance is Lemonrock. The talk of people not being interested in live music/pubs any more is interesting as I can completely relate - I still enjoy going to the pub but I wouldn't go out specifically to see a generic rock covers band in a pub (in fact I'd probably avoid it), maybe I'm part of the problem? In regards to the under 18's thing - I understand the landlords issues; I went to a gig last year where the headlining band was very popular in Reading but the band themselves were 15/16 and by the looks of them their fans were even younger - the venue was packed (the busiest I've ever seen it) yet there were only 4 people in there drinking beer; my mate, me & a couple of the bands parents. Whilst we did try our very best, they can't have made much money on the bar. [/quote] Lemonrock is very localised. It started in the St Albans area and linked up with a site down in Devon so it is very strong down there. On good weeks I can get 50 or more gigs within a driveable distance. If we do a gig it emails 500 people or so to tell them about our gigs. When I was doing the booking for our band most of my new leads came through Lemonrock. I'd get about ten approaches a year from pubs who had found us on Lemonrock. I play with an old University mate as a duo and he lives in Burghfield and we are often looking for something to do in Reading. It's pretty hard finding anything going on in Reading via the web, most of the pubs websites aren't maintained and the wannabe gig guides don't have gigs in most nights. I'm sure Reading has to be livelier than Somerset but you wouldn't know it. It's all a symptom of one of the things wrong with live music, not spending 2 mins entering your gigs into your own website makes no sense at all. 20 mins promoting it on the free gig guides might bring some people in Any tips of where to look for music would be great. I'm also looking for places with regular open mics up there.

I'd find it very hard to move away from the 2 1x12 arrangement now. Each is a one handed lift, One is enough for small gigs and two enough for anything where you don't have PA support as you can be way louder than the drums. that's not to say other arrangements don't work but you'd need very special 10's to work as well and very compact 15's to be as easy to shift. I wouldn't buy anything I hadn't heard/tried taste is such a unpredictable and personal thing. I've had my first decent listen/play with a Barefaced recently, a fellow basschatter follows me in our rehearsal room and his with a Ricky sounds lovely. Just a nice clean sound which shows the character of the bass. Other cabs are available but there's nothing too demanding about the way they sound, very decent cabs.

OK thanks neepheid. So probably better to look out for a good used deal then for a 2013/4 model, but potentially a decent enough bass. I'll look out for one to try though and I'd be interested in hearing from anyone else who has played one. got to love basschatters

[quote name='Bill Fitzmaurice' timestamp='1483978441' post='3211629'] The vented 2512 should be about 2dB more sensitive in the lows than the sealed BP1525, without the hump that causes boom, giving it the advantage unless you have more than 250w on tap. Then the higher Vd of the 1525 gives higher output, though you'd need a way to contend with that boom, such as a parametric EQ. I don't care for the SM212, or for that matter most European offerings, as they lack a rising response into the midrange. That's OK crossed over at less than 2kHz to a midrange driver, but IMO only then. [/quote] That's all useful comment. The SM212 does lack the usual midrange peak and has a rather neutral tone, it wasn't really designed for bass guitar but as the bottom end of a PA speaker. It is a great cheaper option over here though, I use mine exclusively at the moment, they work best with a graphic where you can boost the frequencies you want and it was way easier to get a good tone out of my Hartke 3500 than it is with my MB Tube500. If you did want a cheaper option the Beta 12A-2 would work. All in all the Deltalite would be my personal choice.

Yes, that's the one. Gibson has released a 2017 model which is going for about the price the 2013/4's are in the used section here. EB just stands for Electric Bass which is utterly confusing when the others are EB with a number or based on a guitar. On the surface it looks like Gibson have produces a very playable bass designed from the bottom up as a bass and not a bass version of a guitar. Perhaps the first time they've really committed to bassists. At around £800 an American made bass with the Gibson name on it looks a bit of a snip. Swamp Ash, maple neck and rosewood fingerboard, proper bridge, humbuckers, it all looks too good to be true. I'm wondering why there hasn't been more of a stir..

The 15 you chose is perfectly good if that's the bass response you want, but it's towards one end of the spectrum. Are you happy using winISD? if so then model them both in your box and you can directly compare them. The Deltalite would work as a ported cab at that volume too giving you a bit of extra bass lower down, you might want to look at the Beyma SM212 as well. If not one of us will model it for you.

[quote name='Balcro' timestamp='1483923921' post='3211211'] Looks like you'll get there, but more by luck than judgement! See here, [url="http://www.eminence.com/pdf/Legend_BP1525_cab.pdf"]http://www.eminence...._BP1525_cab.pdf[/url] and scroll down to pages 19-21. It's loud, but.... Balcro. [/quote] I'd assumed Bigwan got the idea from the Eminence site. You can see what the bass response would be from the Eminence modelling. There are certainly cabs out there with this sort of response you might like it, you might not. Celestion will send you the TS parameters for their speakers usually if you email them, use the ask Dr Decibel service on their site. If it's something they only ever made for Ashdown you may need to go to Ashdown for the info though. I'd think about whether to look at other speakers at a similar price though, it's at the top end of what you could squeeze into a box that size and it might be that another 10 or a 12 would give you more sensitivity without the loss of bass. The Eminence Deltalite 12 is a similar price for example and would match your cab well.

Locking in is just about playing together. If you are playing the same rhythm and in time with each other then you will lock in. If you both play in perfect time you'll be locked but normally people make small errors, if you are listening to each other you automatically cover any minor timing errors and it makes the whole thing sound tighter but keeping proper time is the crucial thing. Once you've played with a particular drummer for a while you do kind of get to know each others foibles and it works better but with any new drummer it's timing ,timing ,timing. I'm not convinced by the bass drum thing. It'd be very dull if you only played the 1 - 3& - in every bar but you do need to know where the 1 2 3 and 4 are. Most songs are based in 4/4 time and the rhythm is usually subdivided into half beats, quarter beats or triplets. That leaves you playing a 4beat, 8beat, 16beat or 12beat. Neither you or the drummer are always going to play every beat and sometimes you will play the same beat and sometimes you try to fit together so the drum beat falls between your beats. you can make this as complex as you like. Very few people really think this through as they play though. Just make sure you count the four and tap your feet in time with the drums, much more stable than just thinking the time. Practice playing along with the original and a drum machine or metronome if you have one. It's much more instinctive than you think. Concentrate on what you are doing but keep tapping your feet along with the drums (I listen for the snare, the kick can be hard to hear sometimes) and it should all come together. You said you wanted to know what the bassist does.

You only have one way of finding out! The volume you have calculated I suspect is the external volume, I haven't exact figures but i think the internal volume is nearer 1.5 cu ft. That's right at the bottom of the Eminence recommended volume, it would improve power handling over the bigger box but would show a rising response down to 120Hz then falling at 12dB/octave after that. Little deep bass then but some nice solid punch. As to how loud it would be I haven't enough detail of the original speaker to say if it would be louder or not. A lot of that will be down to how it handles mids. The legend isn't mega sensitive but it does have a rise in response at 1-2kHz which will make it shout out a little. You'll have an old school smiley face response with little real top or bottom. If you don't like the sound you could always build a bigger box or sell the Legend on and get some of your money back. Mildly eccentric rather than mad

What are they like? I'm playing Fenders at the moment, one P one J but I used to have a T-Bird. I absolutely loved the sound it made and that wonderful slim neck and light weight. It was a joy to play for the first hour but at gigs I found the neck dive and the twist of the body away from you all the time just hard work. My personal Holy Grail would be a T-Bird that sat comfortably. I even considered taking a saw to my Bird and adding a body with wings which would make it sit straight. I couldn't do it to a vintage instrument so I sold it on. The EB looks to me like a conventional shaped bass with decent pups and a nice looking neck, a really competent looking bass. And it's a Gibson. I'm not that bothered about the look, I just want a nice sounding bass that's good to play. Anyone with any long term experience of playing one of these. There are a few great offers on them at the moment.