Phil Starr

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

I'll have a go at the frequency response thing since both Bill and Stevie have brought it up. Since we have started with the Beyma and looked at the Eminence beta I'll look at these primarily and maybe take a sideswipe at the Eminence Delta [url="http://profesional.beyma.com/pdf/SM-212E.pdf"]http://profesional.b...pdf/SM-212E.pdf[/url] [url="http://www.eminence.com/pdf/Beta_12A-2.pdf"]http://www.eminence..../Beta_12A-2.pdf[/url] [url="http://www.eminence.com/pdf/Delta_12A.pdf"]http://www.eminence....f/Delta_12A.pdf[/url] Now the frequency responses of all speakers up to the point where the wavelength becomes shorter than the diameter of the speaker is better described by the computer descriptions than the measurements as these are affected too much by the measuring technique. Eminence tell you exactly the size of their anechoic chamber and the mic they use for example. Up to a certain point the sound is produced by the whole cone moving as a piston but as the frequency rises the cone will start to do two things, it will start to flex with the middle reacting immediately to the force from the coil whilst the outer edges lag behind. At the same time the cone will start to resonate as sound emanating from the coil cone junction reaches the outer edge of the cone and is partially reflected back across the cone. This all results in an uneven frequency response above this point which is about 360Hz for a 12" speaker. All three plots show a little dip in response at this point and unevenness above. Now this mess is a good thing for a practical speaker designer as without it the speaker would soon run out of hf response and would radiate high frequencies in an increasingly narrow beam. By controlling the thickness,shape and flexibility of the cone a designer can control the frequency response to a fair degree and even the join between the cone and the surround contributes to the response. On to the three frequency responses then. The Beyma shows a very flat response, on the frequency graph the response stays within the 2.5dB division from below 1kHz to about 4k. It is about 6dB down at 6kHz just about supporting the manufacturers claim of 45-6kHz. This sort of response is typical of a driver designed for PA use with a tweeter and I bought mine for this purpose as it makes crossover design easier. I tried mine with bass because, well I have to try bass through everything and found I liked the sound better than any of my bass speakers. Moving onto the Beta you can see the response is flat up to 600Hz and then rises up to a 7dB peak at 2kHz and is 6dB down at the 3.8kHz point. There isn't evidence of too sharp a rise in frequency response or a lot of peaks and troughs so the cone breakup is well controlled. This sort of peak is typical of many 'made for instrument' speakers and I think just about all of the Eminence bass speakers. So what does it sound like? Well it is going to give the midrange a lot of extra presence, it will cut through better on stage and I'd describe it as punchy. The trouble is for some people punchy is a slap round the ears and for others it is the gut wrenching sound of your stomach contents vibrating in sympathy with an Ampeg fridge so it is hard to know that you hear what I hear. Bill is probably right about it being part of the Berg sound and the Beyma doesn't have that sound The Beyma sounds 'cleaner' less cluttered, rather neutral sounding. I practice with headphones and that is the sort of sound you will get. It will go a little deeper than the Beta (and maintain the bass output at higher powers) but without a peak it won't jump out at you. The well controlled frequency response up to 6k is plenty to cover anything the pickups are likely to put out so you won't need a horn but the lack of the usual peak might not immediately appeal, of course you can eq it back in. Finally my sideswipe at the delta this has a ridiculous peak of 8db between 1.5 and 5kHz with a really sharp cut in and out and this will totally dominate the sound of this speaker. I suspect whatever you play through this you are always going to hear the Delta sound! Essentially it comes down to taste, if you like a bit of presence at the upper end of your bass and a little mid scoop, a speaker with a character of its own, then you may well get on best with a speaker with the sort of response shown by the beta. If you like something that is more neutral then the beyma is a good bet. Hope this helps and that the experts will let me off the couple of oversimplifications I've used

Sorry I posted thick with cold, I should have said I set the bass to 10 o'clock. Because I'm lazy about tone and because I'm a nervy performer I use the shape button quite a lot. I find I can change tone quickly and accurately with it. I tend to use it about 10 o'clock but roll it right round to get something like a Jamerson sound if the song needs it, That and switching it out gives me three tones I can find quickly in the gaps between songs. I quite like my little Hartke, which sounds awesome at rehearsal especially the 10 o'clock setting but I'm saving up for an AER amp one as the ultimate little solution.

You're getting some great support here! I'm rather boring in that I just follow the instructions on WinISD. What is interesting is that it kind of shows what the program is doing, Mms and Cms for example are the weight of the cone and the bendiness of the suspension and this immediately gives the resonance fs. Add in the SD, Bl and Re; cone area, force the magnet exerts on the coil and resistance and you can pretty much calculate how much air the speaker is going to move for a particular input. The other thing is the 'errors' that are thrown up by WinISD, the usual discrepancies are Vas and the efficiency figures. They almost never match the manufacturers spec. Not this time because they cheat, most manufacturers give measured figures from finished speakers. Vas depends upon atmospheric conditions and is horrible to measure consistently, efficiency is measured over the whole frequency range usually so often midrange humps boost the efficiency a little over the theoretical. Win ISD's recommended procedure. [color=#0000cd]The suggested procedure for entering driver parameters is following (check first that "Auto calculate unknowns" option is checked):[/color] [color=#0000cd]1. Enter [b]Mms[/b] and [b]Cms[/b][/color] [color=#0000cd]This gives [b]fs[/b]. If either is not available, then enter [b]fs[/b] and other parameter.[/color] [color=#0000cd]2. Enter [b]Sd[/b], [b]Bl[/b] and [b]Re[/b][/color] [color=#0000cd]Now, you should get all but [b]Qms[/b] (and [b]Qts[/b]), [b]Vas[/b]. Please note that Vas may not match exactly what is specified by manufacturer, because exact value of Vas depends on environmental parameters. See [/color][url="""][color=#0000cd]FAQ[/color][/url][color=#0000cd].[/color] [color=#0000cd]3. Enter [b]Rms[/b] or [b]Qms[/b].[/color] [color=#0000cd]Either one will do, although I tend to prefer [b]Qms[/b] over [b]Rms[/b], because it can usually be measured in driver measurement procedures.[/color] [color=#0000cd]4. Enter [b]Hc[/b], [b]Hg[/b] and [b]Pe[/b].[/color] [color=#0000cd]If [b]Hc[/b] or [b]Hg[/b] or either is available, then enter [b]Xmax[/b] and optionally either [b]Hc[/b] or [b]Hg[/b] if available.[/color] [color=#0000cd]This procedure is most accurate. Also note that it also calculates true SPL (1W/1m) value. So it might not match the marketing SPL value, which is generally somewhat vague. Not in all cases, though.[/color] [color=#000000]Hc is the height/length of the coil and Hg the size of the magnet gap. This is where the discrepancy between Eminences Xmax and others like Celestion and Beyma comes in. WinISD will calculate Xmax as if the moment the coil leaves the magnet gap controlled movement stops. In practice if you remember your iron filings experiments with magnets the magnetic field will extend quite a way beyond the magnet. Some manufacturers measure Xmax at a certain percentage distortion and others use a fixed proportion of the gap depth. Beyma are using the most conservative method so don't worry about this.[/color]

Hi Stevie I've looked at the Celestion and I agree it looks like a perfectly decent speaker, [url="http://celestion.com/product/39/bl12200x/"]http://celestion.com...ct/39/bl12200x/[/url] Like you I do wonder why they make the orange label drivers. The only reason I tend to refer to Eminence speakers a lot is they have probably the clearest data sheets, they produce a wide range of drivers and because their design philosophy seems to be stick any coil on a cone with all the magnet sizes they have lots of examples of poorly thought out speakers. I'll try and write something for 6v6 on frequency responses soon.

Stevie is right about the frequency response. Most of what we hear is midrange so that bass response is actually less important to the overall sound. What I've done so far is trawl through a few speakers to see if they will do the job. If Xmax is too small you will struggle to get good clean bass at decent sound levels. If the magnet is too small then it is likely to mean the cabinet will be too big to be practicable and so on. The next thing is very definitely to look at frequency response which gives you some idea of how it is likely to sound in a cab. I didn't mean to exclude the Celestions but there are a couple of things that concern me Xmax is low though confusingly they use a different measure to Eminence who are more generous in what they quote. Some of the Celestions also have a high cut off point when put in a cab but I've never modelled the 12's, just the 10's. I'll have a look at the Celestions tomorrow. Stevie is pretty knowledgeable about these things, he caught me out in my formulae on BC once I try to be accurate but the more you can learn for yourself the better.

[quote name='JPS' timestamp='1360918885' post='1978233'] I have used a Hartke Kickback 15" for a few years. Great amp when it's not being pushed, however, I've found that anywhere above about halfway and it struggles and the sound becomes overly harsh (perhaps it's the nature of the aluminium cone). I'm now back to lugging my Trace Elliott amp and Warwick cab/s around I'm afraid [/quote] If you are going through the PA this shouldn't be a problem, just roll off the bass on the Hartke. You can see how hard the speaker is working through the grille and I imagine the amp is using all it's power to do that. I find turning the bass back to two o'clock cuts the excursion dramatically and the distortion goes with it. Then I use a little bass boost on the PA to compensate if necessary. Since the bass from the PA is clearly audible on stage it doesn't sound unnatural for me either.