Phil Starr

It's a bit sad that RCF are no longer making the M18. I'd buy another tomorrow if mine ever went down. We've recently switched to a Behringer and set up time is much longer as the control software is so much less intuitive. Our guitarist runs the mixer whereas I ran the M18 which is so simple to use. There have been a few mutterings from the rest of the band about going back to my mixer as it 'sounds better' if it's true that is down to simplicity because said guitarist is every bit as competent as I am, probably more so. Having it's own reliable wi fi is a blessing too, the M18 was designed from the start as a live mixer for small bands and it shows. Let's hope it's reliable as I won't be able to replace it. I guess the CQ20 would be my choice of the current crop of mixers.

Our guitarist uses an Alto TS410. He looked at the Headrush and found very little difference between it and the Alto, but he wanted a 10" cab. He didn't feel any difference in sound was significant.

I'm in the "just in case" bracket. I don't gig with backline but I keep my options open with backline that stays at home most of the time. My experience so far is that the gear is more reliable than bands which tend to run for only a few years so I keep back line just in case I need to dep or audition again. None of my three current bands use backline and two of them use an electric kit. I'm lucky enough that I don't need to spend the income from gigs on anything other than music so I can pretty much afford what I want. I also design and build cabs as a passion so I'd find it hard to give up backline completely even though it stays at home. My backline is an LFSys Monaco and a Bugera Veyron. The Monaco is IMO the best 12" FRFR bass cab on the market and I chose the Veyron as the most neutral sounding of my amps. I've also got a BC110T which I use more often as it's even lighter and smaller and more than enough as a stage monitor. The Monaco will go conveniently louder than any drummer so my initial thought of one 12 for smaller gigs and a second for bigger ones has been shelved.

This ^ It distresses me a little that people pay quite a lot of money for an isolation pad that doesn't do much and might fix a problem that only exists in really exceptional circumstances. It's so much more likely to be acoustic feedback and may not be the bass cab at all, it could be set off by the PA or any other source of low frequency sound.

There's no panacea to all this. IMO the best thing is that the audience don't hear your cab. If you are playing to 50 people then for them to hear the instruments from the backline means the sound levels on stage would need to be so high that your hearing is being damaged. On top of that it would also be bleeding into the vocal mics. On stage should be just for monitoring and the audience should just be hearing the PA. However most of the time with live music you have to compromise especially if you are a bunch of weekend warriors on a limited budget. Tilting the cab is unsurprisingly all about angles. If your ears are 1.5m above the floor and you are only 1.5m in front ot the cab then it would have to be tilted 45deg but if you are at the end of a 6m guitar lead that angle woudn't need to be so acute. If you are on a 1.5m raised stage then your backline may well be pointing at the audience's ears but if you are at their level then tilting the cab a little might improve their experience, but only for the front row, anybody at the back is going to find the sound had been absorbed by the bodies in front of them and some of the sound is reflected off the ceiling and walls anyway. The other thing is that whilst speakers do 'beam' the higher frequencies it isn't all or nothing. We use the analogy of a torch/flashlight but sound isn't focussed as sharply as a spotlight, there is loads of 'spill' off axis. Even if your speakers were perfect pistons driving the air they just aren't pinpoint spotlights, more like floodlights. 15deg off axis you might not really notice any huge change and neither would the audience.

My favourite monitoring was an old Hartke Kickback10. I rolled off the bass quite hard and pointed it at my ears, which picked up more than enough bass coming from the FOH. Not a nice sound on its own but in the mix with the band going hard it sounded great. It got ditched in the end as the drummer wanted more bass so it was back to drowning in a warm bassy mush until I went in-ears. Your best bet would probably be to tilt the combo back to point it at your ears, that gives you 'more-me' but won't change things too much for the audience or the rest of your band. I've got a stand that will do that going spare if you want it.

True bass sound is an interesting concept Like so much in life it's 'whose truth' is the truth? What you hear and what the audience hear are very different Bass frequencies are omnidirectional, they are reflected by the floor and by any nearby walls and ceilings. Bouncing round the room they take multiple paths creating valleys and peaks where the bass is quieter of louder so even different bits of the room et diferent bass sounds. Meanwhile the treble and mid ranges are beamed out like a torch beam very bright/loud stright ahead but with little sound leaking out at the sides. If any of your bass is going through the PA then you'll hear all of the real lows just the same as the audience but just about nothing of the mids and tops So it depends upon what you want to hear, If you want to hear what the audience hear then you need to point the peakers at your ears. If you want to hear every nuance of your playing then again you need those mids and to point at your ears. If you want to warm yourself in lovely bassiness that you don't get any other time than on stage then that's just your preference and f you raise the speakers or tilt them you'll hear something different.

Yeah it's a good stage tone, most of the top end will just end up competing with the guitarist and vocalists part of the frequency range, so with a bit of high mids added in you'll sit nicely in the mix. Who needs extra string noise anyway

Just in case people don't know @VTypeV4 has been a professional sound engineer for 24 years and counting. The sort of quiet experience that we should all listen to. I'm going to be busy every evening next week taking his advice and tweaking the results in the studio. It's worth visiting his long thread and seeing what he does. It's a real eye opener about how touring shows operate their sound and a festival of great mixers, not just the Yamaha he started out with. You will have mixer envy.

Thanks for this, I've been hoping you would come along, I've been stalking your long Yamaha mixer thread for years. I'll give that a try as a stating point

Hi Dave, most of the 'hot' pickups are going to have a lot more windings in the coils. You'll often see this in the specs with the higher impedance or DC resistance of the PUP's. More wire and thinner wire=more resistance. This has a secondary effect, coils have something called inductance where the impedance (resistance which is frequency dependant, sort of) rises with frequency and acts as a low pass filter. More turns means less treble and a darker sounding pickup. That may be what you are hearing.

So how to go about getting this sort of sound, any ideas?

That's what I do, to be fair it's the monitor feed he worries about.

I can see the attraction of building a cab inside this case, it's a convenient size for a cab and you wouldn'tneed to worry about the finish as it already looks like a bit of pro gear. A 2x8 would work and so would a 10 maybe even a 12. youc ould easily build a bass cab or a guitar cab based on this. If you decide to go ahead PM me and I can help with dimensions and tuning. The only problem I have that is if the vocals /guitar are sounding a bit thin it's the low mids not the bass that needs addressing.

Funnily enough, I'm helping someone else out with a disguised built in cab. and i was also thinking of advising your to damp the rack cab with expanding foam. A lot depend supon what you mean by: There isn't really any significant 'low end' in guitar/vocals so perhps you could explain a little more about how you picture using this.

I have loads of presets available and started up with the most basic of them in place. I got terrible feedback issues and realised that all of them applied quite a lot of compression which isn't really helpful with my sort of pub gigs where the complete set up often has to be done in 30 mins, there's little time for a proper sound check and any mixing has to be done when I can get out in front on a wireless connection. It would be great to hear what you have done here when you do copy the settings across.

Are you mad? Or was this suggested by the singer? 😁 Great songs though, your audiences will love you. I've always fancied doing Filthy Gorgeous, proper party song .

So how do you go about this? I could do with some helpful pointers to what is practical and what works for you. It's not been an issue for me to date given the limitations of an analogue desk small enough to sit on stage and mixing for other bands has just been a matter of small adjustments to whatever echo was available until it sounded OK, tweaked throughout the set and on the rare occasions of repeat gigs marking the desk with bits of tape to recall last weeks settings. I'm old enough to have used a WEM Copycat 🤣 Now I can set up scenes as well as save 100 different gig settings it seems sensible to explore this a little and do things a bit better. I play with three singers: a man who hates any hint of echo but sounds better with it, a female singer who loves and demands it even in her monitors and a second woman who is happy to let me do whatever sounds best but doesn't like a lot in her monitor. So you are in a typical pub with a female vocalist, pop/rock covers and it's packed so not a lot of natural reverb in the room and you have both reverb and delay available. Where do you start?

I've had a couple noise problems off my BD121, it has picked up some electrical noise from some cheap lights somebody was using at a private party and also made some odd high pitched noises just once at a pub gig. Again it might have been some radio pickup from something faulty in the room. I swapped from 8.4v to 9.6v rechargeables and the problem never recurred but the BD121 is clearly more susceptible to radio pickup than the Sansamp. Both can be quite noisy at the extreme setings but shouldn't be when set straight through. If the noise is mainly high frequency you don't need anything above 8kHz from the bass so you might be able to reduce the noise by filtering or just easing off the treble. I tend to use the SAnsamp nowadays as it is more resistant to old batteries and has been totally reliable but dare I say the Behringer sounds just a tiny bit better to my ears. Most sound engineers much prefer to take a feed before the fx units or modellers as they are often a source of noise particularly when chained.

I can do simple DI is actually Direct Injection. It is just a way of getting the cleanest possible signal to your mixer whether that is on stage or in the recording studio. Your microphone, amp and speaker all colour your tone (hopefully in a good way) and your guitar lead probably adds in a few crackles a bit of background noise and even maybe some radio pickup. Your amp also probably adds in a little bit of hum and some noise of its own. Any sound engineer wants to start with the cleanest sound possible and they can add in any colouring they want later. Microphone leads are noise cancelling so plugging the shortest possible guitar lead into a DI box means a clean sound from then on. Some amps have a DI box built in. An interface is just a way of converting the sound in your lead into something a computer can understand: analogue to digital. You'll see terms like A/D converter and so on, it's all the same thing. Fortunately almost all interfaces have a DI built in so you can plug your guitar lead straight into them without needing an amp or a DI box. Some mixing desks have an interface built in, I've got a really old Alesis four channel mixer and it has a USB port so if you have a USB port on your mixer try plugging it in and see what it does. If not you have to buy an interface like the ones suggested DAW is Digital Audio Workstation. It's basically an App or computer program that turns your computer into a recorder and a mixing desk. There are loads of them out there ranging from simple to really complex. Plenty of them are free and really good but for a few hundred pounds you cn have more power at home than the best recording studios could dream of even just a few years back. There are even apps that will process everything for you online so if your computer is old and slow you can still mix tracks down Soundtrap is one I used during the lockdown to work with friends when we couldn't meet. They've never shut down my months free trial If you do go down this route then it's worth knowing that one trick is to record from your amp and through a DI at the same time and then you can mix the two signals and have a mix of clean and dirty sounds. Hope that helps

I knew someone would sell them

Remove his stool and make him sit on the monitor Failing that buy a vibrating butt plug that will accept audio.

Please don't even whisper that near any of my band 😨

Hot Stuff; Donna Summer What was I thinking? five minutes of almost unbroken octaves, my pinky hurts!

The B&C ME10 mk2 is good. and the Celestion H1-7050 or the H1SC-8050 would work well though the latter would need an adaptor for the specified compression driver as it is a screw fit horn