Phil Starr

You beg the question of: what are you trying to achieve by sitting this cab on top of your Ampeg cab? If you are simply trying for more volume then a second ampeg 15 would be a better bet. It may also be that the Peavey cab on it's own would be louder than the Ampeg. Have you tried the Peavey with the Ampeg? The results of merging cabs is a bit unpredictable for good technical reasons. If you are trying to aim for a particular tone this isn't the way to get it. The probability is that there is no way you can run these two cabs together. You could try running them in parallel (both cabs simply plugged into your amp) this will mean both of the 12's and the 15 will each share the power equally.The problem then is the amp will be driving into 2.67ohms and not all amps will do this. The extra current demand may well overheat the amp leading it to shut down if it is well protected or to burn out if it isn't. If you re-wire the two 10's to make a 16ohm cab then this will reduce the output of your tweeter and your crossover to the horn will be all wrong as it is designed to work with the 4ohm speakers. in any case the two tens will be getting a lot less signal than the 15 which will mean they won't be as loud and your sound will be dominated by the 15 . Dozens of people have asked how to mix an 8 ohm cab with a 4 ohm cab and the answer remains the same. If you want to change your set up then the minimum you need to do is to buy another 8 ohm cab. Don't buy this one, it just doesn't match.

For anyone who doesn’t know them the Wharfedale Titans are little gems. 12” tops that only weigh 10kg, go as loud as anything and with a lovely clear vocal sound. They use the same horn driver across the range so this bargain basement speaker benefits. They make a great vocal PA but the lightweight cabs aren’t good with high bass levels. Not a problem with a sub. You’d expect to ‘hear’ the bass apparently coming from the tops. Your brain takes the information from your ears and creates the picture of a band playing. You can pick instruments out of the mix and with stereo even place them in space but it’s all illusion. The brain takes the signals from all four speakers and ‘tells’ you there is a bass guitar just to the left of the drums. It’s wonderful when you are listening to music but the brain constantly confuses you when you are trying to be objective about sound.

My wife is going to love you

From a theoretical point of view a vertical 4x10 makes much more sense than one where the drivers are side by side in pairs. There are good reasons for this, the speakers are raised to something approaching the height of your ears so you will hear yourself playing more clearly. The second is a bit more technical; speakers are more like a torch beam than a floodlight in terms of how they radiate the midrange and higher frequencies. Off axis the sound from the side of any speaker furthest from you arrives a split second later than the part of the cone nearest you. This leads to cancellation if the difference in the distance travelled is a fraction of the wavelength. In practice you lose most of the mids and have a very lumpy frequency response off axis. Putting speakers side by side halves the frequency at which the response falls off. This is all well known and so the builder of this cab has done something about it. A line of speakers like this has a broad flat radiation pattern which will be better for you and for the audience and other band members. The only thing I would comment on is that it would have been better to put the horn at the top of the cab and the tilted speaker won't make that much difference. Thje port looks a bit small for a 4x10. In the end you need to treat it like any other cab, take your own bass and amp along and have a listen to the cab. You will be getting a lot for your money and if it sounds great it sounds great. It won't be identical to the original cab but probably like a Trace Elliott but a bit brighter and cleaner. Paint the cab up with a couple of coats of Tuff Cab and find a grille and it'll be quite a cool looking cab

I hadn't seen that. Damn you, I feel a hi-fi design coming on. My current speakers; based on a 5" Focal driver and the Scan-Speak 2008 needs some attention to the crossover but that looks like a better mid/bass driver. If I hadn't seen this I wouldn't now have the itch 🤣

I'm loving the thread de-rail. Back in the 70's I built a couple of cabs with the 15" Monitor Golds for a friend, at the time my memory is that they sounded as good as anything I'd ever heard. They also did duty as disco speakers so they would go quite loud by the standards of the day. Just the bare drivers with the crossovers cost several months wages though. I also used some of the Fane Crescendos to build some two way speakers for a friend who was a sound engineer who worked on film sets. He wanted something to provide music for the dancers at Shepperton and Elstree studios, I pictured a good commission for something huge until he told me he needed a pair to fit in the boot of his Ford Cortina!. I built him some two way cabs with 12"Ccrescendos not unlike any common or garden modern PA speaker. Forgot all about them and went off to train as a teacher. I'd just started working at my first school and he came back with an order for 10 more pairs as apparently all the other freelance sound engineers wanted their own. One of those sliding doors had been crossed though and I'd given up my workshop, teaching was my life and speakers were just a hobby. I wonder what would have happened if he'd come back to me a couple of months earlier.

I'll be there, I'll certainly bring along all the various BassChat designed cabs and I'm happy to run a shootout of some sort if that is wanted.

Oh I asked for help on using reverb and delay when I was setting up my mixes and got this advice from @VTypeV4 It's now my standard set up for live vocals with the sends and returns adjusted to suit, basically quite a lot applied to my own bvs where I'm just filling out the sound and a bit less to the lead vocals. I find the delay particularly helpful for the bv's. "My personal starting points are usually a short-ish plate or hall reverb of around 1.2s - give or take - and then in addition to this a short delay with 180ms (or thereabouts) time with around 30% feedback. These are approximate settings and won't work on everything all the time (plus different fx units have their own sound too) so you'll no doubt find some vocals will lean towards sounding better with less of one / more of the other and vice-versa - adjust to suit the sends / returns to suit. Good luck. 😃" Here's the original thread

The general principle with live sound is to make sure the sound going to your mixer output is as good as you can get it and then send that sound out at every gig, then the only thing you would have to do at each gig is to set the overall level and use the graphic eq on the output to compensate for the room acoustics. Your approach is textbook so not only can you set all the levels eq and fx at rehearsals you should aim to do this. There are a couple of assumptions here. The first is that everything is miked up and that any backline is for on-stage monitoring only and the audience are hearing only the FOH though the PA. If, say, a guitarist is setting their own levels with their AC30 cranked to 'give the right tone' then you have that to compensate for. Backline bass is even more problematic as bass is very susceptible to room and stage acoustics. The second assumption is that you are mixing from on stage and don't have a sound engineer sitting permanently at the desk. You can't tweak FOH from on stage so set and forget is going to beat fiddling every time. If you have a jockey riding the board then they can potentially tweak for all sorts of reasons possibly from song to song if they really know your set. Monitors are slightly more tricky, space considerations come into play and you may not be able to measure out their placement exactly as you want and a boomy space may lead you to want to adjust the eq but in principle I'd aim for consistency set to set. Of course you can hear the monitors and poor monitoring won't affect the audience so you can fiddle with more effect, even so I will set and forget for most gigs. The sooner you get to using in-ears the sooner you lose this problem. One word of caution, I never use compression on any of the mics, that will guarantee you less gain before feedback at most venues. If you are using pre-sets on mic channels you might want to turn any compression off. You'll also want to be aware of any boosts to frequency you have applied to the vocal mics in particular as stage acoustics will vary venue to venue. If one mic in particular feeds back check it isn't at the frequency you boosted in the rehearsal room. so basically yes to both questions and when you get that perfect sound at a gig make sure you save it

Hi David, I'm sorry to hear about your dad. I hadn't crossed paths with him but he sounds like a generous spirit as are so many on BassChat. I would strongle advise you to go onto theBassChat marketplace. There's a whole community of folks there buying and selling treasured gear where you will get good advice and a fair price for almost everything bass and music related. You'll need to take up an annual subscription to sell there but you'll know everything you sell there will be going to a good home and will be treasured or at leased used to make music. You can also search for items and see what they have sold for in the past which will give you a really good idea of what they are actually fetching. There is even a 'what's it worth' sub forum where you can ask other members to price up what you have to sell https://www.basschat.co.uk/forum/121-wotzit-werth/ It might also be worth putting something about your father passing away on the General Discussion thread as people who know him might miss your post in the introductions https://www.basschat.co.uk/forum/13-general-discussion/ Its not uncommon for 'In Memorium' posts to be put up there and other friends of your father might see that and offer help. Good luck with everything and I hope one day you will find time to learn to play something on that Rickenbacker.

I'll have a go though I've just been reading Colloms (High Performance Loudspeakers ISBN 047197091) and I have to admit this will be a simplification on what I'm reading.. The conventional theory around loudspeakers treats them as being rigid pistons The original transducers used in the classic experiments on beaming were done with very small metal discs mounted on the end of long tubes which avoided diffraction further complicating the dispersal patterns. The irregular dispersion of real world speakers at high frequencies is to a large extent due to the fact that loudspeaker cones are very far from rigid. To a large extent means that there are many other factors at play which cause frequency irregularities. but I'll keep it simple and stick to the cone.. So speaker cones are flexible, at low frequencies and power they are stiff enough to move as a whole and approximate to a piston. At high frequencies and powers they will start to flexand the outer parts of the cone will lag behind the movement of the coil, some parrts of the cone may be moving backwards as other parts are moving forwards and the phase difference will cause cancellation . It's fairly easy to see this with a strobe light with concenrtic rings in the cone moving independently of each other even as the cone itself moves backwards and forwards. You can also find laser interferometry pics of this which illustrate the process.This means just calculating of axis cancellation on the basis of diameter will not describe the off axis frequency cancellation by itself. This is often described as cone break up and you'll see this in the frequency response curves of just about any cone speaker. You can see this below in a typical 12" speaker The response in red is fairly flat up to just above 1kHz and then you can see a ripple in the reponse due to the cone break up and the treble response shows a rising response between 1and 4kHz because the centre of the cone is moving faster than the outside as it becomes decoupled from the heavier outside parts of the cone. The ripple is because the cone has resonances of its own. You can also see the off axis response in Blue is falling off initially due to the off axis cancellation but then due to the resonances as the cone flexes. Designers know about all of this and many instrument speakers take advantage of that midrange peak in the kHz area. Almost any Celestion or Eminence guitar speaker will show hage peakes in this area. So will something like the Eminence used in the Barefaced one10 or indeed the Ampeg 10" speakers. A cone can be made more or less rigid by changing the fibres in the pulp, by changing the shape of the cone, introducing ridges changing the cone surround or by using a metal cone or a plastic or even a composite . Adding a hard dust cover or a whizzer cone will also allow you to adjust the treble output of the speaker and another technique is to introduce a damping material into the cone or even treating the cone after it is formed. It's worth noting that it isn't unusual to have considerable off axis output from 15" speakers and it is possible for them to exceed the off axis response from a 10" speaker. The simple explanation is that a small cone is going to be more rigid than a bigger cone made of the same material.

This is the kind of conversation you should be having. It avoids tears later on. It's fine for a singer to say they don't want to be in a blues band. I played briefly for a mate's band Strange Brew, . He is a great singer (sang for Jools Holland Big band) and front person and a good friend and the guitarist was pretty good too but it was a bit of an Eric Clapton tribute band and frankly not what I wanted to spend my evenings playing. I played along with them whilst they got their set together with the promise I'd drop out when they found another bassist which they fairly quickly did. It was fun but just not music I wanted to gig every other weekend. Equally I love a good blues band and there is absolutely no reason for you to change if it's what you know and love, you just need to find a fellow traveller. That's kind of what I mean about honesty in your advertising, maybe clarity would be a better word. Find a way of clearly describing your music and make sure you get a set list to potential singers early on and it saves time auditioning people who are looking for something different. You know your set will have to change with a new singer. You'll want to do the songs they perform really well and in turn they might want to lose a few songs that don't suit their voice but within your genre there are probably hundreds of great songs so you'd be looking to evolve your set not just trash it There's no harm in looking at a range of people to try and find your best match. There's also no harm in them looking at you and maybe mutually agreeint the fit isn't quite right. I hope you find your singer, good luck.

When I started on BassChat i used to obsess about all the technical things but over the years I've realised music making is far more about the human elements. Recruitment is about being positive of course but also about being honest. Recruiting someone who is 'wrong' for the band can be hugely disruptive and can easily loose you six months of hard won progress, equally if the band is 'wrong' for the recruitee then you are wasting their time as well as your own. First of all band dynamics; who is in charge? How do you make decisions? I've tended to be the band leader in most of my bands, a not quite democracy where I've done all the physical things like getting gigs, providing PA, organising rehearsals and puling a set list together but trying to make sure everyone has a say. One of my happiest experiences though was with a band led by a married couple where I was just the bass player. Turned up played whatever I was asked and got paid. I think a lot of friction I've seen in bands is down to misleading expectations starting with the recruitment process. That also extends to genre/repertoire If you are an originals band then you need to be sure your new singer is happy to sing what you have written. If your music is mainly Ska you probably don't want to have a singer whose taste is for power ballads. Most of my bands have been covers bands, usually with 10 or so gigs booked at any given time. Any recruit would be expected to get on top of the set within a month so we don't have to cancel gigs and let our regular venues down. That usually means that the incoming musician will have to already know a good proportion of our set or enough of the cover band standards to allow us to keep gigging. We wouldn't be looking to comletely overhaul our set to make way for another musician however good they might be. You need to get together with the rest of the band and decide exactly what you are looking for, what is essential, what is desirable and what is just nice to have. A new singer/front person is the most disruptive thing to recruit. You can't ask a singer to re-tune to drop D or capo them to convert a Tenor into a Soprano They are limited to songs that suit their voice and frankly songs they are happy to sell to an audience. What do you have to sell? If you've been together for a while you are probably quite tight musically and have good relationships within the band. That's the band we all want to join. If you have gigs booked or regular venues then that is a real selling point. There are thousands of start up bands that are going to do 'great things' but a band that played everyother week last year and intends doing the same next year is a much better bet. Is your PA sorted? Do you have rehearsal spaces organised? There is no point in lying, just be clear what you want and what you are prepared to compromise over. Be prepared to walk away from recruiting if you have reservations but be aware that you will have to make compromises too. Check the new persons ego by all means but check your own too. Remember the auditions are just the first date and a blind date too, you don't have to go all the way if it doesn't feel right

Early days, how many bands are still going two years after forming/re-forming. I'd be running with both, giviing them my all and enjoying the ride, it'll be a long ride before you get overwhelmed. If both bands are popular and successful well there are worse problems for a musician.

A snapping sound doesn't sound good, it may be the speaker coil hitting the back of the magnet assembly If you hear this you need to back off the gain/volume and maybe roll off the bass. If this is indeed what is happening then your speaker will break fairly soon. Speaker watts and amplifier watts are measured differently and I doubt that many if any 10" speakers could 'handle' 300W at low frequencies without distorting or hammering the coil to destruction on the back plate of the magnet. More watts aren't an option with this speaker I suspect. Getting a second matching 10" speaker should give you nearly 6db extra sound and help a lot. With DB you may get feedback issues though. Where is your speaker? if it is on the ground then it will be pointing at your knees or your calves and not your ears. Raising the speaker or tilting it to point at your ears with a stand will improve matters a lot. Turning the bass down a little and turning the midrange up will also help. Turning the bass down will decrease the excursion your speaker is failing to cope with and the midrange is what we need to hear any detail in the bass above the rest of the instruments. Pointing your cab at your ears and re=eq'ing will help you in the short term and give you time to think about next steps. Good Luck

I liked those two songs and it's easy to see why you have a hunger to do it again. Good solid playing too so I can see why you wouldn't want the standards to fall there either. I absolutely don't think your expectations are unreasonable but they are quite high which means your odds of achieving them are reduced. You are asking foir a high level of creative input into the music that means you would also expect to be one of the bands driving forces and effectively a band leader. You've been co-writing songs so you are obviously a co-operator but also quite driven and demanding which probably comes with being creative. Your tastes are probably more niche than you think, I had to google all the bands you listed, the 90's not really being my decade. You've been playing for nearly 40 years so you are probably late 50's so the people you want to hook up with are probably a similar age. You are fishing in a diminishing pool. Your contemporaries will have their peak of work and family commitments and many will no longer be playing, those that have continued throughout will be in established bands playing sets they are happy with. Many will have succumbed to the lure of covers bands and regular paid gigs. Existing bands looking for a bassist will want you to play their sets at least initially. I'm not saying thai to be depressing but it's a bit like dating in later life; by this time you know what you want, there's no point in an unsatisfactory relationship but at the same time dating is more demanding than when you were younger and more pliant. It's worth thinking about what is really essential and what you might be prepared to compromise on. I suppose if I've any advice it's maybe to look for a creative partner you can work with. Two of you are halfway to forming a band and between you will be a strong driving force. There are plenty of fine musicians who are not particularly driven but like to play with a properly organised going concern. Anyway good luck with your search, I hope you find your people.

I haven't read the whole thread so apologies if this is repeating information you have already. You need some searchable web presence IMO I'm not sure any particular source is 'best'. If you are canvassing venues or handing out business cards most people will want to check you out so a website they can be directed to on your card is kind of essential. A lot of people who aren't web savvy still use Facebook and that includes an awful lot of pubs and other venues. It is still the most widely used media for pubs and covers bands. You are kind of stuck with it useless though it is. On the plus side Facebook Marketplace is a good place to pick up secondhand kit The biggest problem with Facebook is that it is swamped by people with great social media skills and good looking pages for mythical bands that rarely or never gig. Nobod visits unless they know you already. Sound and fury signifying nothing! A dedicated website with a band specific domain name is really professional looking and gives you lots of control. Most function bands operate that way. Booking agents often insist on these too so if you have multiple agents this is a way to go. In a few areas Lemonrock.com is a great place to be as it is a dedicated site where venues will go looking for bands, I pick up a dozen bookings a year that way. It depends upon a certain critical mass however. In the West Country is is great and around St Albans and surrounding areas it is equally good, the rest of the country you'd have to check. Whatevcer you do make sure you have good quality sound and video for people to see so anybody genuinely wanting to book a band can check you out. A set list of other indication of what your music is probably a good idea too.

I'm looking for a big favour. Is anyone regularly travelling in my direction who could pick up a bass sub from Bedminster and meet up with me somewhere this end? Taunton or Yeovil would be good but I live in Chard. I can't get up to Bristol in the next couple of weeks. I'm happy to make a donationt towards petrol if that helps.

All cabs are 'designed' in that the cab is matched to a particular driver and if you swap that driver then it will be in a sub-optimal cab. In extreme cases you can seriously reduce the power handling of the driver and any sub optimal cab will have the bass response compromised. Fortunately most bass drivers of a given size and made for bass or PA use will cluster around a similar set of specs and work (sort of) in the 'wrong' cab. The crazy 8 has a tweeter and is a flat response design. The BassChat 8 has a single driver and hopefully is a 'musical' design. I did look at a wide range of other speakers for the BC8 and the Fane 225 is the best option for this design. That's not just the Thiele Small numbers but frequency response sensitivity, excursion and even price. The other thing is to be wary of shopping by spec. Partly because adverts lie. Also you probably don't want any output below (arguably) 50Hz or so, particularly if it is in a domestic environment where room dimensions are probably smaller than the 30Hz wavelength. The BC8 has -10db @ 45Hz which is pretty good, more importantly it is fairly flat though the whole of the bass range giving good rendition of the crucial second harmonics of the bass. Rather than thinking about the specs think more in terms of wht you are trying to achieve musically and practically.

Still the recommended driver. Here's the 8" cab

Sorry I haven't found time to model the two speakers but @David Morisonhas modelled the bass response and it is just as you would expect from the changes they've made. I'd say that for bass guitar the 12CMV2 is the better speaker of the two for bass. It's also increased in price by 60% since I recommended it and is now in a price bracket where there are quite a few rivals. https://www.bluearan.co.uk/index.php?id=LAVWSN12250AF is a lightweight Neo speaker at a surprisingly low price https://www.bluearan.co.uk/index.php?id=FANSOV12300_2 currently looks a beter bet than the 12CMV3 and there are a few more speakers which are possibilitiesThe Celeston Pulse 12 looks promising. I note that you ay this is for home use mainly. The advantage of the 12CMV is that it is a high excursion speaker and will threfore go louder than some of it's rivals. The spec of this design was to build a single driver cab capable of live work with a loud drummer on it's own. For home use it is overkill. The 8" design would be better sounding and have a deeper bass at the expense of a lower but still good maximum volume The 110T would give you a really clean sound and isn't far short of the 12 in volume. I've a wide range of cabs here and it is the 110T that I gig with most frequently. It's full range flat response, really compact and portable and loud enough for 60% of gigs and pretty much any rehearsal

PS this probably belongs in the Amps and Cabs section rather than PA Welcome to Bass Chat btw.

I've had a brief look, they've changed the cone a little lightening it by 10g there's a corresponding increase in sensitivity and they've changed the suspension as well a little. the coil and magnet remain the same so power handling and excursion limits remain unchanged. The HF response of the speaker has changed with more noticable HF breakup in the older version. That's to be expected with a different/less stiff cone and a smoother response might have been what they were aiming for, though it may be a cost saving thing and they may just be rationalising so they can stock fewer cone types by sharing across different models. I'd probably go for the Mk2 if you are building without a tweeter as the cone breakup gives you a boost in the high mids which will help you cut through a bit more in the mix. The differences aren't huge though. I'll have a look later and re-model the system in WinISD to see if there is anything unexpected going on Thanks for the heads up, this is still a good value for money driver so I'll check it is still suitable. Are you planning on building the 50l or the 30l cab?

I think you'll find that settings are saved to the mixer so you will need to be connected. The tablet is just a control surface and that makes sense, otherwise you would lose everything if you used a different tablet.

If you are using an x32 then this looks like a great way to go. Never having used one (and apologies if this is a false steer) the behringer offers a digital snake/ultranet system with loads of add ons to send individual channels to a DAW or their personal monitoring system and I'd be looking to see if that might be utilised too. If you can send 32 channels to a DAW you ought to be able to send them to FOH. I almost always find provided PA's a problem. It's usually at an event where there are multiple bands and only the headline act gets much co-operation from underskilled techs who are reluctant to change a system they don't fully understand because it has been hired in and set up by the hire company. You may of course find that the better ones already have split the feed between FOH and the stage monitors. I suspect whatever you do will involve some negotiation but most should cope with the simple 2x8 splitters you propose and the loom gives and extra option. I'd love to see their little faces when you suggest unplugging 5 mics and 6 instrument feeds, some of them stereo and relying on someone elses snake for the FOH sound