Phil Starr

Most bass cabs are pretty coloured, the only way you'll do this practically is to DI through the PA and use another PA speaker as your onstage monitor. You'll have to choose carefully though and probably spend a bit. Many PA speakers have limited excursion because they don't really handle all the bass without a sub, though I suppose you could use a compact sub and a top if you really wanted to go for it. I used to use the basschat 12 in their PA version with a fairly decent horn and it is the best sound I've ever achieved, the problem is knowing which PA speakers have high excursion bass drivers, though if they are active speakers with DSP built in at least you won't blow them.

You guys are making me so jealous

The reality in most of the country is that if you play covers you can gig regularly and get paid, but it can be a grind if you don't enjoy it. Playing 2-3hrs of songs means a lot of hard work refreshing the set and keeping all the songs in the air plus the 6hrs away from home for each gig. It isn't for everyone and not worth an average of £50 if you don't love it. For anyone playing originals the opportunities to gig live are more limited and pretty much something that the under thirties with hopes of success will do. If not then music becomes a hobby, and I'm not looking down of that at all. Lots of musicians a lot more skilled than I are playing at home, releasing music on the web and doing the odd cameo at open mics or other one off 'events'. Gigging dominates my free time and affects my family too, I couldn't do it if i didn't love it. One other alternative suggests itself though. Your musical tastes seem to be for the music of your youth. So many pub bands do the same stuff that you are giving up but there is a market for stuff other than 70's pop/rock. All the audiences want is familiar stuff they can sing and dance to, so you could try to put together a covers band to do the type of songs you like more. You seem pretty clear about what you want to do musically. The things you need to decide are; will I miss performing to an audience, and will I miss playing with other people. Good luck

Sorry I lost track of this because of the holiday period. I'm assuming you have a cab for the Delta as otherwise you wouldn't know it was mid heavy (the peak I mentioned) and the behringer is a new introduction to the thread. You seem to have a range of 15's and a single 12. It's just about impossible from raw data to predict how two speakers will complement or clash with each other. You just need to try all the combinations. My advice is to keep an open mind but also to keep notes. Try them in different rooms if you can and with different basses if these are available. Have a bass playing friend along too to do the listening tests if one is available. If you were designing a cab you wouldn't start like this but with a sound you were aiming for and the intention of finding a driver that would match your design. Mixing speakers isn't wrong in any technical sense but it's more cookery than science. You might stumble across something that tastes (sounds) great but it might be horrid, the only way to test is to suck it and see. If you end up with something that sounds good then it is good. It is fun to try things but most people who swap drivers and cabs around like this are still doing so in twenty years time looking for the elusive perfect match. For most people the best thing is to find the cab that sounds the way they like and buy two if they want it louder. If you are a born tinkerer though you'll have more fun just trying every combination under the sun. Have fun

[quote name='CamdenRob' timestamp='1441021846' post='2855362'] I wouldn't worry about it get out there and get playing in a band, its great fun and for me what it's all about I've never had any complaints about my playing and my isolated bass tracks are full of squeaks and strings slapping the fretboard etc... It's inaudible in the mix and if you tired to cut it all out the track would probably sound dead and lifeless. Also, you learn proper muting techniques etc as you go. Go for it, you're probably just as good as the rest of us [/quote] This

Good luck tomorrow.

I'm a live sound engineer turned bassist and backing singer. It's shifted my opinions on mics. First i'm assuming you are looking in the £70-150 sort of price range. The Sm58 isn't up to it any more in terms of sound quality, just not enough detail. People like it because it is what they know, and you need to know a mic almost as well as a guitar, and just like a guitar/bass some people will get more out of a s*** instrument than a poor player gets out of a good one. There's one other good thing about an SM58 though and that is that it is a cardioid, what this means is that you don't have to be so tight to the mic to get a decent sound. From the point of view of an engineer the tighter the mic pattern the better in terms of avoiding extraneous noise and feedback but as a performer needing to be 'on' the mic all the time is really distracting and if you move a lot when performing you'll get a lot of poor vocals as you constantly move off the mic's sweet spot. Drummers move a lot so I'm suggesting you look at whether this is an issue. It's all compromise but the ease of use may be a bigger factor than the need to avoid drum bleed through the mic. I've ended up with the Sennheiser 935 http://en-uk.sennheiser.com/vocal-microphone-dynamic-cardioid-e-935 which is very tolerant and neutral sounding. FWIW the Shure Beta58 is described as super cardioid by Shure but is pretty nearly cardioid and sounds much better than the 58. I've also used the AKG D5 which sounds great but needs good mic technique, it is a real bargain though at it's low price. I grabbed it by mistake last night though and struggled to dance, play bass and sing at the same time

As indicated this isn't expensive for a neo driver, replacing it means the combo is 'original' and will get a decent price if you ever sell. The sort of replacement you might go for is something like the Celestion http://www.bluearan.com/index.php?id=CELBN12300S&browsemode=category at £115 or something similar. You won't know what it sounds like until you have spent your money and time. It may be better, but probably not as good and certainly not the same. I'm fairly optimistic you could get a speaker to work in the cab, re tuning may be necessary but someone here will help with that. So, you could save yourself £50 maybe. If you sell the cab it might be you'd lose that and more. There may be some fiddling involved too both to tuning and the mounts on the driver may vary. Only you can decide what is best for you. I'm not recommending the Celestion by the way, I haven't modelled it so I just don't know if it is right or not.

As above, accept the booking but when doing so let the landlord know it will be very similar to your last set. The LL may have good reasons for wanting a band he likes to fill an open slot at fairly short notice. Most decent LL's understand this much about bands, use this as a way of getting booked through the year at even spacings so you can bring him a freshened set each time. He/she will probably appreciate your professionalism in wanting to do the best for his/her venue

[quote name='dood' timestamp='1440668893' post='2852780'] Good morning folks, Firstly may I apologise for being away from this thread for a bit, I know you are all waiting for information from me. I fully intended to be able to spend lots of time working on a description of the cabinet as well as being involved in the testing through independent review. Unfortunately, as life has a habit of re-directing my energies, I've had to contact Phil to say that, at least for the foreseeable future I will have to pull out from being able to deliver the write-up to you. Indeed, for now I'm even finding it difficult to 'just be a musician'. Hopefully these ups and downs will be temporary and I can get back to doing what I should be!! I will of course try to keep dipping in and offering any experience with the cabinet as requested, though I won't be on BassChat in an active capacity certainly for the next month or so. That said, I have to sell a load of kit, so at least expect to see that... This is a brilliant thread and really enlightening. BassChat really is the best [/quote] Dan thanks for the insights you've given us. I completely understand where you are coming from and I hope everything works out for you so that you are back with us soon. Keep on playing that bass.

Of course the frequency will rise, and ideally the speaker would be mounted off centre in the baffle to minimise this effect. In practice there is little evidence though to suggest that the difference will be audible and in any case with a small cab and a 12" speaker practical considerations mean there is little opportunity to reposition the speaker or to resize the baffle without making the speaker an impractical shape. For small gains there is probably nothing much that can be done and to be honest I haven't considered it in this design.

If it is infrequent sudden cracks then it is more likely to be a connection, either at the plug/socket joint or in the soldering where the wire joins the plug. It may be a loose bit of wire shorting inside the plug. Insulation breaking down inside the cable tends to be a more constant noise with the cable being microphonic when you move it. If you are absolutely sure it isnt happening with other leads then what I do is cut 15cm of cable off each end and replace the jacks. Removing the bit of the cable that gets the most stress is sensible and new plugs should restore better connections. Once a cable starts playing up however I won't use it live except in emergencies.

Speakers are much easier to test than amps and are usually rated 'thermally' that is a measured amount of electrical power is passed through them for a few hours and if they don't burn out they pass. There are a few different standard tests using slightly different frequencies and slightly different time limits but they yield similar results. Peak ratings are usually given as double the 'RMS' or thermal rating. You'll see all sorts of stuff about small amps being more likely to blow speakers than big ones etc but there's a lot of nonsense and only a little truth about this. The rule of thumb is fairly simple though. For a PA engineer who is monitoring the peak levels and knows what frequencies are going to a speaker you can use an amp twice the rated speaker watts. For most uses matching the watts (RMS) is good enough. For extreme uses (synthesisers and Bass if you use a lot of bass boost/effects) it is a good idea to use twice the speaker watts if you want reliability.

4.15am, you must sleep less than I do! I'm pleased it has worked out for you, it won't be long before I repeat your experience as I go to work on a 2x10 design, those Beymas still look like the best value for money available in the UK at the moment.

Yes, I've been wondering if reducing the size of the cab would give the sort of bass peak people have come to associate with a bass cab and perceive as neutral sounding. Reducing the size would obviously make it lighter and more manoeuvrable. That would sacrifice a little bass extension but subjectively increase the bass. We can test this out easily enough by inserting 10l of bricks into the cab and re tuning. If we get time and Stevie can run measurements then I'll try it.

[quote name='JTUK' timestamp='1440239050' post='2849257'] An observation... and IMO.. most people can put cabs together with just a little basic engineering. The trick is to reconcile a cab on paper and a cab in the flesh. You are probably going to make and tweak quite a few things to get it where you want but your success will be down to how well you know what you want to hear and what others want hear. So paper stats in the grand scheme of things don't really add up to much ... if the end result isn't pleasing. With regard to a few cab makers, this is most pertinent, IME [/quote] That's completely fair. We've been transparent about the design spec and the cab meets the spec. It's flatter than most cabs up to 4k with good power handling down to 40Hz due to the extended Xmax. It works well in a gig and responds well to eq tweaks which is what you would expect from a cab with a flat response, but the test of any cab is how it sounds and whether users like it. That's why I'm delaying releasing the final design until a few more people have tried it. I've been consistent in my advice over the years. A cab can be technically challenged but still sound great. You won't squeeze the best out of a driver if the cab is compromised but if it sounds great and you can live with the restrictions it's a great cab. Ultimately sounding good with bass is the test of any bass cab.

Well you'll see by my signature we use it. Run by a musician it pays for itself several times a year. The proviso is that it does depend on where you are. It's really strong in the West Country and around St Albans where it started. We get about 20-30 approaches a year out of Lemonrock. It has the ability to have a fairly decent band profile which runs for you, pics, recordings, videos reviews and a diary. You can join as a music fan for free and it will email/text music fans with a gig list once a week. Our gigs each get about 5-600 emails sent out without us needing to do anything unlike Facebook this is to people who may never have heard of our band not just those who are already fans. Any venue looking can see who is available and when, listen to the band, look at their set list and in areas like here that's how the more professional venues do their bookings. You can go onto their site and look at the site statistics where there is a map of Lemonrock Venues. If it's a dense area or on the fringes of a dense area then I'd sign up. The site is a little old school, not least because all of the links work properly. It's pretty strictly pub gigs though, a few other venues but it's the semi-pro pub scene it does well. What we need as musicians is one place where people looking for a gig can go to find out where they are which links into a booking system for venues. That's what Lemonrock is and its the biggest in the country with over 52,000 gigs a year. If Lemonrock closed down we'd have to reinvent it. If you are outside the Lemonrock area then you just have to work harder. Feel free to view our LR site on the link below

I've used the Stagepas 300 in the past. Now upgraded as the 400i and I'm using the Wharfedale Titan 12 actives. You'll pay more than £300 new for them though. Both are great, the yamaha will only reach 113dB, loud enough for an acoustic act or as monitors for a band. Really neat, easy to set up system with a decent tone and just the facilities you want. The 600 will give you a little more volume but think loud acoustic act rather than rock band. Yamaha reliability is fantastic. The Wharfedales are better sounding and will go a lot louder though they don't handle bass particularly well as the soft plastic cabs resonate at high levels, great vocal sound though. I use them with a little Alesis mixer though you could get something like a Behringer 1204 or any no of 'me too mixers. the Wharfedale EVP12 cabs are basically titans in a wooden box and much better but heavier as a result, they turn up at good prices second hand. The Titans are an easy one hand carry. There are a lot of plastic cabbed 12 +horn active PA cabs around too so plenty of choice but beware although the sound isn't usually at all bad a lot of them don't go very loud without distorting so don't buy without listening at high levels. I'm recommending the Wharfedales because I use them myself. For your use I'd strongly advise matching active speakers with a passive mixer. Failing that an active mixer with passive speakers. Keeping it simple cuts down any chance of things going wrong and keeps it easy to set up and take down. Don't buy the Peavey's, they are reliable but the vocal sound is so poor it disqualifies them IMO. Nothing wrong with the Black Widow bass drivers but those horn drivers are truly awful.

The coils in your pickups act as inductors and this limits the high frequencies. For any inductor the resistance of the coil effectively rises with increasing frequency, the more coils in your PUP the greater the inductance and the lower the cut off point comes in. This is why the heavily overwound PUPs sound 'dark' However our hearing is very sensitive in the kHz range and you will hear a difference between a cab with the tweeter on and off even at 5kHz unless you have rolled off the treble elsewhere. Remember though that we are talking about bass cabs, there are all sorts of technically 'incorrect'/non flat designs that work well precisely because of their frequency irregularities. Bass amps rarely have flat responses, try playing an iPod through your bass amp if you don't believe me , and I've just fitted a J-Retro pre amp to my bass which sounds lovely precisely because it isn't flat either. Having said that anything over 8-10k is pretty pointless, I suspect this is a cab you would choose because of it's looks.

Just bought a J-Retro from Richard. He delivered it in person. Lovely guy, great to deal with and the J-Retro is fab.

That'll be another thread, but in the words of Blue Peter once the 12 is published i'll be saying, 'and here is the one I made earlier' Just to tease a little more we also tried out a 1x15 with the 3015HO and a Deltalite today

[quote name='Thunderpaws' timestamp='1439996354' post='2847400'] Any sound clip comparison for this most recent test. I am particularly interested having a 210 focus providing the sound for my Genz Benz Streamliner 600. [/quote] Well the Streamliner sounded amazing through the 2x10 design I have here. I recorded the sound on a little Olympus recorder I have here, if they are any good I'll put them up.

[quote name='dood' timestamp='1439987491' post='2847271'] I think - no, I am pretty sure I know what it is we are hearing. It's not 'mid peaks' we are hearing, more mid presence. Its a lack of deep (sub) lows and rounded off top end that gives the sense of a prominent mid range - especially when the lil' chap is placed on the floor and we stand over it. The effect I have found to be similar on the odd cabinet I have reviewed that allows the ability to turn off a tweeter. This appears to be less prominent on a cabinet that has a naturally baked in scooped tone (either through speaker, cabinet design or both.) So, I'd suggest that this speaker is actually doing a good job of reproducing frequencies throughout the mid lows, mid range and low mids, but it's natural roll off gives the impression of having a mid boost. This would seem to support my feeling that this speaker would be great as a mid-bass driver in a multi-driver set up. This is of course outside the remit of this project. Thumbs up for the sensitivity through the mid range though. I do like that this cabinet and speaker combination offers a really nice fatness all the way up the G string of my bass, rather than the notes disappearing in an EQ's scoop. [/quote] I'm hoping that this is about right. A lot depends upon what you call mids of course, the two octaves from say 250-1000Hz or from 1000-4000Hz. The cab I sent you had the lower tuning so the bass rolls off long and slow which would really exaggerate that sort of effect. The 50Hz ports should improve things a little I hope, nothing toodramatic but a little more warmth. Glad you like the fatness on the higher strings, that's the advantage of the extended high end but cutting out the tweeter.

[quote name='dood' timestamp='1439987604' post='2847273'] Sorry, just felt the need to say that. [/quote]

Quick update, just spent a couple of hours playing with speakers and basses with GrahamT of this parish. What a lovely guy. Anyway amongst other things we compared the Basschat 12 with a Genz Benz focus 12, the first time I've been able to AB with a commercial cab. Volume levels were very similar. Surprisingly the Genz had a prominent upper mid compared to the Beyma loaded cab (with the tweeter turned off by the way) as well as a bass peak in the 100Hz region the Beyma going deeper and tracking the bass more accurately but the Genz having a pleasing warmth to it. The Beyma was much more even in sound across the strings and frets. We tried the speakers with a Harke HA3500 and a Genz Streamliner 600 and the influences on the sound of the two cabs were pretty clear with both amps. I'm not sure where this thing about the mid prominence of the Basschat design is coming from, I've heard it and so have Stevie and Dood but it doesn't show in the measurements and didn't show in this test either. I'm hoping to get back to the measurement room with Stevie to work out what we are looking at.