Phil Starr

I feel the pain, though as you both say it makes for a more interesting song but I curse when someone wants you to play one of these with a couple of days notice. One thing that always trips me is where there are maybe only two or three chords and in just one or two parts of the song where the chord sequence changes but the rhythm doesn't.

I guess it's personal to an extent but playing with three covers bands I learn a lot of songs, mostly at fairly short notice. With Christmas coming up I'm getting suggestions for songs we'll only play a couple of times a year and a lot of them are written by 'proper' musicians and have a lot of arrangement going on where they look superficially simple but have a lot going on musically. We've also had a run of illness and had to use a lot of deps so they prefer to do simpler songs for what are one off gigs for them. It's a given for me that I don't have notes in front of me when I play. More or less in order I find these make things more difficult Songs I've never heard, it's so much easier if it's a song you can hum along to. Complex arrangements. Rhythmic complexity (took ages to get the Steve Harris thing) Chord changes part way through a bar. Every verse is different Stops So what makes your heart sink when the singer says 'Let's learn three new songs for a one off gig'

It all sounds promising. Our '30l' cab is actually around that size, I prefer to be slightly over than under and I found with your speaker that going down to 30l and below was where the performance fell off sharply so 34l looks good. I did try 55hz tuning and thought it looked a little better but that to an extent is about taste. It's worth remembering that winISD is only as good as the data you enter and that the manufacturers specs are sometimes not entirely accurate. The program also makes some assumptions about things like leakage from the cab assuming Ql is around 7 for example. so calculated tuning is not always the same as the actual tuning. With drainpipe being so cheap I've often made up a number of ports so I can swap them around quickly and try different tunings. It's all about what sounds good as well and ideally you want an iterative process of designing and testing. Have a look at excursion and maximum power handling too once you have programmed in the tuning as this will change at 55Hz too. This is the point where it gets exciting

I've had a quick look and Bill is spot on 40l is about right for your speaker. Any smaller and you lose a lot of bass response which you will definitely hear in the result. This is the bass response of your Deltalite in a 25l cab in red. The green line is the Celestion Pulse in our 30l cab which has a fairly light neutral sounding bass. You can get that sort of response if you go to 35 litres with your driver and I think you'll prefer the extra bass. You'll get even more of you go up to 42l but i personally wouldn't go down to 25l with that driver, for me you'd be squeezing the life out of it

When I designed the first easy build cab I wanted it to be something that someone with minimal tools and experience could build on the kitchen table with the minimum frustration and the maximum chance of success. I wanted to use materials that are available not just in the UK but around the world and not likely to disappear. I've 50+ years of experience building cabs and access to my own well equipped workshop but I wanted something somebody could build with the tools I started out with: screwdriver, drill, and a couple of saws. Using screwed and glued battens makes it all a lot easier with no need to wait around for glue to dry, no fiddly clamping and very little chance of failure. Happily lot's of people have been encouraged to build their first cabs and are happy with the results

But if you have found the amp that get's the best out of your speakers you have to buy one for demonstrations, that makes it a business expense The colours match too!

TBH if you have PA support then you don’t need 1000W or a 4ohm speaker. Indeed it is a positively bad idea. If the PA is what the audience are hearing then you need them not to hear the bass amp and even more importantly you need to turn down as much stage sound as possible to keep it out of the vocal mics. You’ll never get a clean sound if you and the other instruments are drowning the vocals and distorting the feed to the PA. Go for a really good 112, it will serve you better than a cheaper 212 and if you absolutely need volume when you don’t have PA support you can add a second. A decent 112 with 500W through 8ohms is already way more than you need for stage monitoring.

My computer is down at the moment, fixed now but I won’t have it back today. I’ll have a look at the delta lite for you some time. You can use two 68mm ports. There is a marginal gain to bo had from a single port of the same area in reducing turbulence in the port but in practice I’m not sure if it is significant. Using what you have makes sense and if you have a holesaw that size it’s a no brainer in keeping construction simpler. If you want a ready made design then the 30l easy build cab we used in the BC 110T and the Easybuild 12 would work well with maybe a slight change in tuning needed.

Good questions. Properly specified cabs are given a cut off frequency, but that is the point at which the response starts to roll off, anyone designing a cab will use the point where the response is 3db down but it doesn’t stop producing bass there bur rolls off the bass at 12-24db per octave. As Bill has said that -3db point is often around 60 Hz, you can still hear it a bit but it won’t be very loud and isn’t important for a band. Speaker diameter isn’t important in determining f3 (the roll off point). There are lots of 10’s That go lower than 15’s and I’m looking at my 5” monitors that go lower than any bass speaker. The cone mass and stiffness of the suspension determines f3. There is no magic. God does not play dice 😀😀 Most cabs are ported or bass reflex cabs. In a plain sealed box a speaker may go down to 60 Hz but in a ported cab the port output take’s the response down lower and gives you an extra 3 db of bass. It is really hard not to want that extra free bass. The port and cab work like a bottle when you blow across it and resonates at a particular frequency which is tuned to come in just where the speaker starts to struggle. So the tuning frequency is the resonant frequency of the cab. In practice the speaker and cab interact which is where the real action is in cab design and there is the possibility of tweaking a design.

Yes you will need to subtract those volumes😀

I believe the Super Steel is epoxy based with a filler. As described I don’t think you’ll have too much of a problem. The teeth of the t nut are only there to stop the nut turning. They shouldn’t need to be very strong and the epoxy or filler should hold it. If you check the thread isn’t binding and make it finger tight before you use any pressure you should be able to tighten it enough and the strength should be unaffected

Work is the curse of the musically inclined.

Ha ha I read 8” too 😀 Crossover design done well is tricky so it depends on what you are trying to achieve. You can make a simple high pass filter to protect the tweeter which will add a bit of tizz at the top end. A simple capacitor will do that and that is all you sometimes get with commercial speakers at the cheaper end. At the other end you can carefully roll off the midrange of your woofer at a target rate and carefully bring in your tweeter to take over the upper mids, correct for phase irregularities and peaks in the response of both drivers. you’ll need to decide on the best crossover frequency, match the sensitivity of each driver and decide upon how steep a slope you want at the crossover. You can copy an existing simple filter as in th BassChat 110T or buy a commercial two way crossover and tweak it with listening tests which will work after a fashion and maybe give you a sound you like. Beyond that it’s a question as to how far you want to go.

I switched recently to the Lekato from a Line Six. Nothing wrong with the Line Six but I prefer the simpler form of the Lekato. Both sound better than a lead. I did have one gig where I was picking up some electrical noise. A private party where someone had set up some cheap led party lights next to the band. I switched to a wired connection but have had no problems using the Lekato since and can’t reproduce the fault. I could probably have switched channels if I’d had time.

Glad it is working, I’m still slightly surprised by mine when I crank it. Another outing for it tonight as it happens. I need to get on with the Eight and a finalised design.

Welcome to BassChat. Whereabouts in Devon are you.

Jefferson Archive are really very good

That’s a lovely offer John. They are fine drivers.

He's a lovely guy IME I'm really pleased he's stuck with it and he's great when you have a problem. Lemonrock is such a useful resource when it is strong in your area. I'd hate to see it go under. And yeah I'm sure you are right Sylvie. In the end the forum just got too time consuming and stressful.

That's the truth

It wasn't any worse than BassChat but there were a few heated posts when some of the venues cancelled gigs at the last minute or refused to pay bands. Mac was trying to get the venues to join at the time so he obviously wasn't comfortable with that. I offered to be a moderator and I may have 'volunteered' a couple of other people like @skidder652003 as others who might have helped. Coming from the not-for-profit sector I'm predisposed to think its a good way of organising a small venture like Lemonrock or BassChat. The people doing all the work can be paid the going rate for the job and volunteers can add value. The collective nature of the enterprise means that in difficult times people are more willing to donate to keep something they love alive and thriving. It also offers a way of the organisation surviving when the initiating group moves on.

I did get agreement from Ped and Kiwi to do something like this a while back but life and gigging have got in the way of my compiling all the information, it's quite a mammoth task and I've made a couple of false starts. Apart for the BassChat 112T Mk 3 they all use the same "easy build" construction technique so it makes sense to detail the technique once only. I was thinking that each cab would merit a couple of standardised posts, the first with pics and a description of the cab along with its specs the second with a set of drawings and a parts list and then a reference to a standard construction guide. The other complication is that some of the original drivers are no longer being made and even things like handles, corners, ports and connectors are changed, more crucially some of the horns are no longer available. This means a re-design and potentially further testing as all the designs so far have been thoroughly trialled before we release them. If you need some help then start a build diary and i'll give you all the help I can on there. PM me when you start in case i don't pick it up

Also good in Devon and Somerset where I think they took over another website in their early days. It’s a shame they’ve lost a bit of their ‘community feel’. When I joined years back it was because all the other local bands urged me to join and we all urged punters to join at gigs.

We get a steady trickle of gigs from Lemonrock. I'm a big fan of the Lemonrock model. It was started by Mac who was/is a gigging musician and starting with local bands. Basically the model is that it is a gig guide for the public to find live gigs. No advertising or data mining it is paid for by bands and venues with gigs to plug and bookings sought and found. The thought was that if it achieved critical mass and most of the local live music gigs were on there then it would become the one stop shop for pub bands and local live gigs. Membership is £42 a year for bands, free for punters looking for gigs. For that you get a Web Page with mp3's videos pics and details of your band. If you fill in the calendar you turn up in searches when the venues look for bands and anyone can have a look at you and listen to what you do. Any local music fans get emails and texts etc about any gigs your do. If I'm bored on a Fri and Sat I can find a choice of about 20-50 local bands to go and see in this rural area. It's quite useful as a research tool as well, you can look for bands like yours and see where they are getting gigs and who is working hardest. Technical support is good too for what is essentially a cottage industry. It used to have a real community feel about it with a lively forum which probably rivalled the activity on BC a few years back. Unfortunately that was lost. it works well in areas where the majority or at least a sizeable minority of local bands have joined. It was growing steadily right up to the covid outbreak, gradually spreading across the country and building numbers. In areas like this chunk of the West Country or the area North East of London where it started it is pretty strong. There are enough bands on down here that many of the pubs only book through Lemonrock and a lot of others g straight there if they have a cancellation. I'd pick up about 6 bookings a year via LR when I did the bookings which if you turn them into repeat bookings is pretty much job done after a couple of years. I also turn down quite a few as they tend to be last minute . You get regular reports too on traffic this is this weeks report for my Duo Hits - all current gigs :0 Band page hits this week :71 Band page hits this month :204 Band page hits this year :9,835 Total Band page hits :12,194 We are a fairly new and I haven't a gig booked in the next couple of weeks. we've only done about half a dozen gigs this year and a couple last year so that's 1800 hits per gig which is extraordinary. With no gigs this week the 70 odd hits on the band page will be potential bookers . How effective Lemonrock is though depends upon presence, if every band in you area joined it would be perfect for you, all the punters would visit to find gigs and all the venues would look there for bands because all the bands would be there. It's a properly maintained site so the information is reliable and searchable unlike a lot of social media and as it is a subscription site it is all semi pro and pro bands. The down side is that if there are only a handful of bands and venues it misses most of the gigs so the punters don't look so it depends for growth on early adopters and a gradual spread out from the places it is strong. I think it made a mistake by ending the forum, it lost the community feel so there was no loyalty when covid struck and all the gigs were cancelled. £42 seemed like a lot of money and a lot of bands cancelled. I'd suggest anyone looking just searches for gigs near them this week, if it's only a handful then LR isn't strong near you, if there are enough to fill a couple of pages you are probably missing out on bookings.

In the years BC (before covid) we averaged £320 with our 4 piece covers band. We did a few cheaper gigs for a couple of pubs when it restarted in recognition of how tricky it was for all of us and we are back to a standard £300 fee now. My duo go out for £150. functions and NYE are double our normal fee. We are discussing a price hike next year to £320. With a different band we were getting £300 a gig 15 years ago so it hasn't really moved at all over that period of time.