Phil Starr

Hi Phil, I started from scratch at 55 and was gigging within the year, well six months actually. Five years on I'm now in two bands and doing guest spots with other bands and playing with anyone who'll have me. I've no talent but I work at it and I'm reliable. It is amazing how much progress you make with regular practice and I just love it. So will you.

if you like the bass tone of the current cab then make two cabs each half the size of the 4x10. The 4x10 may be technically undersized for the speakers (most cheap/mid priced commercial cabs are) so it is possible you could increase the size of the 2x10's. This would in all probability give you a deeper bass response but reduce the hump around 100Hz you probably have now. given that your intention was to have easier to carry cabs and you like the sound I'd go for two half sized cabs. Yes, you will have to change the ports. If you can get Ashdown to cough them up the Thiele/Small parameters of their drivers would really help us calculate the best size for you. Just a thought though, If you sell the ABM you could spend that money on some new drivers.

You'd probably be better off with the speakers in two 2x10's as a vertical 4x10 is just as awkward as a 'normal' 4x10. (PA speakers used to be this shape) Make each one half the original volume. Keeping them the same volume overall will mean that they will 'load' the speakers in the same way so the bass performance will be similar. If they are ported you will need to recalculate the port sizes but someone here will do that for you. what will change will be the mids and top. As Mr Foxen has pointed out any change in internal dimensions will change any resonances which will sound a little different, maybe better maybe worse. What will also change will be dispersion which will change from a narrow cone of upper frequencies to a wide flat fan. this means everyone will hear you a bit more clearly not just the people in line with the speaker. With the current arrangement the radiation from the four speakers are interfering with each other rolling off the upper/mid frequencies so you cab will sound a bit more open and less bass heavy, though there will actually be just as much bass. Finally by having speakers at nearly ear level you will hear yourself more clearly which will sound strange at first but is much better as a musician.

Fane have been going for years, originally based in Batley, Yorks I think. One of the original makers of Pro Audio drivers in this country. Their stuff was widely used in all sorts of cabs in the seventies. They still make stuff after a hiccup a few years back and I've used a few of their new drivers which are very comparable with Celestion or Eminence for quality.

[quote name='xilddx' timestamp='1362597422' post='2001979'] I don't have an amp or cab. I have a POD X3 LIVE that goes direct to the FoH desk. On stage I rely on whatever monitors are available (not always a big bass sound, but fine really), and if there's an amp with a power amp send / return I'll sling another POD output into the return for a bit of controllable stage pumping bass power. It's sometimes a bit hit and miss at unfamiliar venues with weak monitors, but as long as I can hear myself I'm alright. Most of the time it's fine and I can rest assured the FoH gets my same big old bass tones at every venue or studio. The only addition I would like would be a titchy but powerful power amp and a small cab like a Barefaced Midget. [/quote] I'm happy with my sound coming out of the PA but I use a Hartke kickback10 as my monitor, it's small, portable and points at my ears, Something like this means it isn't hit and miss as you have your own monitor.

You don't say if you DI or if you have a FOH engineer mixing for the band. If you are then your FOH sound is nothing to do with what you are doing and you can concentrate on getting the sound you want on-stage. Though if the audience hears a good sound and you can get enough of your sound to play then you might not want to disturb a set up that is basically working. If what the audience hears is your rig, or mainly your rig with just a bit of PA support, then you are just dealing with room acoustics and are limited by the physics of sound. Because of the long wavelengths of bass a lot of what the audience hears is reverberant sound reflected off the floors, walls and ceilings. By and large this will reinforce the bass for them, but in a large room not so much for you. In the practice room the reflections are completely different so your sound is different. If you spend hours in the practice room getting your tone settings right you will lose that tone as soon as you move your speaker to another room, Don't expect to set up your eq in one room and expect it to be right in another. If you can, get a long lead during the soundcheck and go out into the audience area and listen to how you sound to them. Use your eq to get it right out there, don't set it up for your own benefit and have the audience listen to a poor tone. Be aware also that as more people pack into the room your tone will change. Room acoustics are a real pain for bassists, you can never really be sure you are hearing what the audience hears.

Don't buy the cheap stuff off ebay. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with using active PA cabs for bass but you need seriously good drive units in well designed cabs for good bass and they are the same price whether you put them in a bass cab or a PA cab. If you want a cheap solution then I'd second the Peavey route making sure you get the cab with the Black Widow speakers in. They are a well made drive unit and really underpriced on the second hand market. You can buy a 115 cab for less than the price of the drive unit. The downside is that they are big and heavy. I've got a 115BXBW 8ohm cab for £90 and there are plenty of others around this price. If you are anywhere near Somerset then you're welcome to try it but I'd hate to think what carriage would be. Two of these for £180 would be a lot of speaker for your money. You probably ought to consider another matching Peavey 4x10 though if you are happy with the way they sound, there are advantages in sticking to matching speakers.

Well you won't damage anything and the 'kick' sound will be OK but you may struggle to get a good 'snare' sound out of a bass amp. Just try it.

Welcome. I too started playing late in life because of my kids learning.

Interesting topic, I'm glad Les seems to have found his guitarist. It always seems to be my responsibility to find new band members, we took years to find a long term drummer. In the end it was a casual ad in a music shop that found our man though I did find OK people on Joinmyband and Lemonrock. Lemonrock is good because it is all gigging musicians but the downside is it has limited numbers looking. Auditions are horrible, I organised ours and you just feel crap. You know how exposed the potential band member feels, none of us likes being judged, you try to be fair but you also know that you are going to be spending a lot of time with people so you have to like them then at the end of auditions you have to tell someone that they came up short in some way. I recently tried out with another band and that is no better. Even though this was a personal invite from someone I knew you are still turning up with a group of guys who all know each other pretty well. Nerves and lack of familiarity mean you don't play your best. In this case it was a country band and I'd never heard most of the songs a week before, never played country and they didn't play in the keys they told me to learn. I'm a very ordinary bassist at best and get by on preparation rather than any skill. With a bunch of strangers I'm not sure my bottle would have held. They must have been desperate because I got the gig. So my question is what is the best way to present yourself? I never offer more than that I'll play the root note in time with the band and that I'll go and learn the set and turn up when I say i will. Anything else is then a bonus. Equally some people tell you they are god's gift to music and I never take that very seriously either. However I've turned down auditioning people who claim to be professional musicians as being too good for our gigging hobby band and I've probably missed out on chances by under selling myself. So what's the best way?

The science of sustain is very simple. Any energy transferred from the string to the bridge will reduce the movement of the string. If the bridge moves over the metal plate then this would do it as would any flexing of the plate itself. The standard bent metal bridge of the traditional fender would appear to have several weak design features. The plate itself can be very thin and fairly flexible steel. The grooved roller bridges are mounted on very flimsy grub screws which finger pressure can move easily over the shiny chromed plate. The grooved roller doesn't seem to be the best mount for the string either as it runs through a length of groove rather than pivoting on a knife edge. Whether this adds up to anything significant compared to the losses in the neck and body I have no idea.

sounds like a plan though as you can see from the plots it isn't likely to be something you can hear very well, if at all. The only practical way to filter out sound below 30Hz (say) is to do it electronically in the amplifier. It'd be nic e if this were built in explicitly and switchable but this is rare in bass amps though all my PA amps have switchable subsonic filters as does my mixing desk. I'd not thought of this before but given most bassists use ported cabs it really ought to be standard.

Hi, the easiest responses to eq are the ones without a hump and a long slow tail off so the pink (I'm colour blind) plot might be better to eq. Having said that there are no problems with any of these. Looking at excursion limited power you can see the advantage in a smaller cab. Remember you are dealing with Xmax, which is kind of worse case. If you used method for calculating Xmax used by Eminence then this speaker would come in with an Xmax of about 10mm and the power handling would look even better. Beyma quote a maximum Xdamage of 27mm peak to peak or Xlimit 13.5mm. Have a look at the cone excursion charts on your models. You should find you only exceed these limits at very low frequencies. Almost all ported designs operate better with a LF filter on the amp. Eminence specify them on most of the designs on their web site. I always use a 40Hz filter on the mixing desk even on the bass bins. I quite like shelf ports, they help stiffen the cab, take up minimum space and are easy to construct, the advantage of a circular port like a drainpipe is that you can vary the tuning simply by sliding in a different length port so you could try both the 50 and 42Hz tunings to see if you can hear a difference and if it is important to you. Not much would be my guess. Anyway nothing to stop you finalising a design and getting the saw out. Looking good.

It's great to see this going ahead. I hope you are pleased with the result.

The problem is that a lot of these terms like Lemon oil aren't standardised descriptions of actual products. Danish oil contains a mixture of things like Tung oil but also alkyd resins, the basis of varnishes and oil based gloss paint. Over time you could build up enough resin to effectively seal the fretboard. I'd avoid Danish oil for fretboards. Even things sold as tung oil contain varying amounts of actual tung oil. Lemon oil can contain dramatically different amounts of lemon oil and can also contain tung oil, mineral oil any number of other natural oils, detergents, solvents and even lemon juice. Lemon oil itself is excellent for wood but there might be very little there. The best thing is to go and buy something made for fretboards, They charge ripoff prices compared with DIY products but you use so little that it doesn't make much practical difference. I bought some Dr Ducks 5 years ago, I'm the worst continual cleaner of things with six basses/guitrs and it only went down visibly when I knocked the bottle over. At current rate of usage it will last another 20 years. I'm off to clean my basses, it's been a week or two.

That's the surprise isn't it? It's why so many of the experts bang on about Xmax. Limited to 60W or below 120W for most of the bottom octave is significant. Of course you are using Xmax the undistorted output as the limit and you could use Xlimit which is how far the cone will go before it gets damaged but you will still hear distortion and the inevitable power compression. There are much more extreme examples than the Delta Pro but it is why I look for at least 4mm Xmax.

Yep Pe is 350W. Now you have the data entered you can start modelling straight away, it only takes seconds now for each model. I usually let WinISD calculate the cab size for the first type of vented enclosure it comes up with, usually an SBB4 or a QB3 and then run a second project using the same data so it comes up with an identical cab. Then click on 'plot' and change the colour. You can now start changing box sizes and tuning frequency and see what the effect is on the speakers low frequency performance. WinISD will display both plots on the same graph so by keeping one 'ideal' plot unchanged you can see how you are doing and what you lose by making the cab 'undersized' Have fun!

The Delta Pro was my original alternative to the Beyma when I built mine. It's a nice speaker which I only rejected because I'd had some failures of Eminence speakers where the aluminium voice coil joined the lead out wires on the earlier models I was replacing.

Arghh! where did all those codes come from? Hope I've killed them now