Phil Starr

The SW Bass Bash in Taunton has been running for several years. Again it's a village hall but quite sizeable and with side rooms. We've had Luthiers and small manufacturers on display and I've run amp and speaker shootouts but the main event* is everybody setting up their favourite gear and people getting the chance to try things. It's wonderfully noisy and cheerful and reaffirms your faith in humanity. You can track all this in the Events section of BC. *Actually the main event is the magnificent buffet lunch, but the SW has Mrs Scrumpy and you won't 😁

Hi @ped I think this is one of the threads that should be pinned, it's a matter of operating legally or illegally after all, surely information we should all have available to us . I'm a heavy user of Bass Chat and had never found this thread until today. I do take your point about forums (fora?) needing to be organic places but Bass Chat has grown to be so much more than that and surely there is a place for the more considered 'Wiki' pieces where someone with expertise has taken the trouble to write a more cosidered post. Is there a way to have the more 'substantial' contributions available to newcomers to BC rather than some of the (ahem) less well informed kickabout that happens in the general debate that goes on. It's the nature of something this well written that we just need to read it and out questions and comments become less frequent and it disappears because even people as voluble as me realise there is nothing to add.

This is probably your best place for information Your choice is fairly simple; digital or analogue. The digital systems hava a tiny delay called latency, it isn't enough for you to hear or to put you off on its own but all the delays in the chain add up so if you have digital wireless in-ears and a digital mixer it might become a problem. Some people are more sensitive to this than others. Analogue loses this problem but then the problem is that the signal is compressed for transmission and expanded when it gets to the receiver, in the best systems you won't notice but cheaper systems degrade your sound a little. Some of the best systems work on frequencies that need a licence. You probably need to look at what other band members are using, wireless kit share frequency bands and you can run out of space and get interference. 2.4G will run out before 5.8G for example. @EBS_freak is our expert on all things wireless so have a look at that thread

It's insane just how much amp you get for your money nowadays. I use my baby Gnome as first choice amp nowadays as it sits in my gig bag. It was meant to be backup but the 'real' amps usually end up left in the van.

You should just use an ordinary XLR 'mic' lead to connect to your interface. If you are already using a mic and don't have a spare input you can use an XLR to TRS jack to plug into the guitar input on the interface but a mic lead is better. I use my Gnome's DI out at every gig and it's a good'un. Keep the volume down when you start but the output from my (non-pro) Gnome isn't very hot, much lower than that from my SansAmp so I doubt you'll have trouble. The USB is at the end of an inbuilt interface so it's a digital output and should work plugging into a USB input in your computer but won't work with the audio inputs on your interface. That speaker looks very familiar Have fun

Welcome to Basschat Bass fashions change all the time and as music changes bass tones change and manufacturers have to follow those trends and of course people like to use the same gear as their idols/role models.The cabs you mention all have a midrange 'suckout' so what you are hearing is the midrange being put back, nothing to do with the neo magnets. You'll also notice a tendency to add in horns and to give more at the top end which will add to the brightness. The theory is that if you start with an uncoloured sound then you should be able to eq any sound you want. Your choice is to add in a 'dull thud' effects box or to accept that you are going to have to just dial in your own midrange suckout. Having said that there are cabs out there that attempt to create an 'old school' sound with lightweight speakers. Have a look at the Barefaced 10's as suggested as the most obvious attempt at an old school sound from really lightweight speakers but if you just mean smaller and lighter rather than the ultimate in light then there are still loads of options in modern gear even if the tendency is towards less coloration. BTW it's nothing to do with neo magnets which are just magnets but smaller or with class D v's AB which are just amps with different 'sauce' applied in the rest of the amp.

And @EBS_freak knows a lot more about this than I do. I used his advice in that long thread a lot on my journey to in-ears. All I can do is summarise my journey and what I found helpful and give you some practical tips. I too have some hearing loss and tinnitus as well. My journey started partly because of that and was partly stimulated by my experiences in the studio. Everything about my playing in the studio was better to the extent that I believed someone had dubbed over my bass with theirs. All that had happened was that playing through headphones had cut out extraneous noise and given me my best mix so that I could hear myself clearly and play with precision, my ears and brain just took over and the sounds in my head were what my fingers were actually doing. I could also hear everyone else much more clearly. I'd strongly recommend you start at rehearsals with some tight fitting over-ears. You can get the mix right for you and know that is the sound you are going to feed your in-ears is spot on. Start off with that studio sound. Tip 1. make sure you get good isolation. People who give up on in-ears are going to do so because they don't do this. You have to block out as much as you can of the drums and over-loud guitar or whatever. If you don't you'll have to turn the in ears up loud enough to drown out an already too loud sound. The stage sound will also be out of phase (I can explain that if you ask) with the in ears and make everything even more distorted. Isolation is about fit: the better the fit to your ears the less sound will come in from outside. In order of seal best is moulded in-ears> moulded ear buds>self selected ear buds>the buds that come with the in-ears. You can get as much as 26db of isolation with moulded in-ears, 18db is the most you can get if you seek out the best fitting universal plugs and the provided ones will probably give you 6-12db isolation. 6db means a 75% cut in the power reaching your eardrums. Tip 2. Finding the right ear buds. I have boxes of plugs in all the shapes and sizes, they are dirt cheap and you can buy boxes of mixed sizes on Amazon and eBay. Everyones ears are different and most people's ears are different from each other. You know when you get the best fit because you'll hear the bass better. If there is any leakage the bass is lost, it depends upon a good seal. If you get better bass when you gently push in the headphones then they haven't sealed. Obviously if they drop out they haven't sealed and if the world hasn't gone quiet you haven't found your fit. I've ended up with triple flanged buds that push right into my ear canal but everyone has different ears so you'll need to go on looking. So the next thing to consider are the headphones, I've used some cheap domestic Sennheisers with success but you are limited in the volume you can get and live music is uncompressed usually so the difference between the average volume and quiet bits is much greater than recored music and domestic in ears are going to distort, OK to test the concept but you'll need an upgrade sooner or later. Fortunately there are reasonably priced options. The Linsoul ZS10 Pro X are probably the way to go as they are bargain of the century, they have five drivers a side and will handle everything you throw at them and are priced around £45 if you shop around. Moderately bulky but a good fit for most people. Shure's SE215's (around £100) are used by a lot of singers but can struggle with bass and drums, Sennheiser IE100's are similar, both are single driver phomes which limits bass handling but both handle mids well. Shures are famous for fitting well but everyone's ears are different so no guarantees. I have IE100's and I prefer the midrange to the ZS10's but use the ZS10's more often. If you are determined to make this work and money is no object then go for moulded in ears from the start. Otherwise I'd go for the ZS10's. The other thing you'll need is a headphone amp, something to put on the floor in front of you or to have on your belt to power the phones and give you a volume control you can reach. Most of us are using the Behringer P2. Reasonably robust in a metal case, runs on AAA batteries and has a bit of rudimentary ear protection £50. Or you can go wireless which is another can of worms. Now you have to get the signal from the band to your headphones. You have a problem here as your Dynacord only has one Aux so you are stuck with the front of house mix or the monitor mix. You can get round this in a few ways but nothing beats a mixer with at least one aux per person preferably with tone controls on each output. Since none of your band are interested yet you are probably stuck with a workaround. If you can cope with the front of house mix then you can take this from the Headphone out or from the Aux out which will give you the ability to have a special monitor mix if no-one else is using the aux channel. I'll come back and deal with work rounds for limited mixers

Calm down Actually not suggestions but just examples I'd picked out from reading the thread. The AER was just an example of something off the scale pricewise to illustrate the point and was in any case only mentioned on a You Tube video so nobody here is demonstrating their taste. The PJB is an example of something which would make a great practice amp but not a gigging amp. I also didn't jump to the conclusion that the OP might be hard up or that although new they were new to bass they might be an experienced musician on other instruments. The OP asked about small size and practicality not price and it is surely up to them to decide whether they want to set a budget or say whether they prefer a combo or not.

Wellcome to BassChat. I'm guessing from your name you play guitar as well as bass so may have some experience? I think the first thing which would help us all to home in on suggestions is your budget. The AER Amp One in the video would solve all your problems but at £1939 is beyond most of our budgets. No 2. on the list would be how you intend using your new amp. There are a few really nice sounding practice amps like the PJB's but they sacrifice sound levels for sound quality and if you intended jamming along with a drummer won't quite cut it. If you intend playing acoustic music something like that willbe really portable and room friendly at home. No 3. Combo's are great, grab and go and nice and tidy with fewer leads and boxes to trip over if space is limited. Separate amps and speakers are a lot more flexible and the Micro amps like the Elf and Gnome are tiny enough to fit in a gig bag leaving your hands free to carry a speaker. If you narrow it down a little then you'll get more relevant suggestions.

We've gone the same route which I think we've talked about on other threads. The thing is that when you get the fit worked out and sufficient isolation both can work well and of course the bass response depends more upon the seal than upon the drivers. The mid range on the IE100's is much cleaner though. When they are seated properly at the beginning of the gig both give crazily good sound compared with floor monitors, so far I've struggled to keep that sound for whole gigs. Hence the move to moulds which I hope will solve the problem of keeping the seal/isolation and the same response I have at the beginning of the gig. This ^ My hearing is already much reduced and I have constant tinnitus. Since wearing the in-ears I don't get the ringing in my ears the day after each gig. Any ringing in your ears after a gig is a sure sign of damage. I so wish I had started wearing them earlier.

Lugs and Snugs do moulds that fit generic/universal headphones. It's a bit cheaper than buying 'proper' moulded in ears but there's a lot of cost in taking the impressions so I'm not sure how much you might save. Equally spending hundreds on in-ears without being able to give them a proper audition first scares the pants off me. At least using your own earbuds means you get to hear them before the big expense. I'm about to try this route too so fingers crossed.

I had no idea such things existed, I've never seen one.

Welcome to BassChat If you have time look out in the events section of BassChat for a bass bash, annual events where you can go along and try everyone's rigs in one place. You've missed them for this year but it's the best place to try out a wide range of gear in one place. You've got a couple of mini amps in there the Elf and Gnome. I've got a Gnome and have tried the Elf. Remember they are only 130W into 8ohms. The gnome is my go to for stage monitoring but it won't fill a medium sized venue so will be limited of you don't have PA support. From your list I also have the Minimax which sounds great fresh out of the tin, plenty of power and lots of useful tone options. Beware the cooling fan though if noise from that bothers you, it won't on stage but at home it might be intrusive. I'm using the Bugera Veyron Bugera not 2000W but 700W well made and cheap. Anything Ashdown you like is worth considering because of their legendary after sales support. Barefaced stuff is excellent but I would have thought was in the 'break the bank' category. More affordable , better IMO and almost as light is LFSys https://www.lfsys.co.uk/ made by a basschatter and if you go to the affiliates section here you can get a discount. When I was looking I went round watching as many pub bands as I could, you might not get to play the gear but you can get to hear a lot of different kit and you don't have to stay long if you don't want to.

Guilty as charged your honour. I am Lidl's secret shopper Anyway I deliberately choose to run everything off a single socket. The theory is to have everything connected to the same earth point. Any resistance in the wiring can lead to differences in earth potential and voltages appearing across betwen gear plugged into different sockets. I measured 47volts between earths once, after I got a belt off the mic of course. I re-wired some 6-way mains strips so I have two with 5m leads and one with a 10m lead and Ihave one with the bought 2m lead. First thing I do at every set up is to plucg in to the most convenient socket and run the cables so there is a 6-way at each corner of the stage. Everyone plugs into these and I won't say its idiot proof but it reduces the chance of miss hap. As John says you've got nearly 3kW to play with and that your PA is probably running at 20% load anyway. With LED lighting most of us could run off a 5A fuse never mind 13A

OK the 8" is the one I'm needing to work on next(!). We've a couple of builders over here who are going to have a go too and the prototype I built for a friend so I've never used it in anger. I like to thoroughly test cabs before I put the final design up. If you decide to go for the BC112T later then we've found other horns that work. The supply of the specified one has been difficult here too.

No pressure then, I'll need to catch up on writing everything up. I shouldn't have signed up with that third band. Playing bass is getting in the way of chatting about it If you need help with the builds PM me for suggestions, I'm not sure of what drive units you can source easily over there but I've helped out other people with tweaks to the designs. BTW @stevie designed the BC112 mk3 Welcome to Bass Chat

It depends upon location so much. I've tred to persuade Mac to reach out into the real world but he's happy to hope it grows organically.

If you are in Devon then it's a no-brainer. Devon is one of the areas where Lemonrock achieved critical mass early on. Facebook gives the impression of doing something but in the end people only go to your site if they already know you exist and you browse FB you can't really search it. Lemonrock is all about getting bookings in areas where it it strong many/most of the pub bands are on it so the music pubs ususally fill their calendar by simply contacting the bands there. If they need a band they can see who is available and if you've put up recordings and videos they can see and hear you before they ring. I've picked up 10 bookings in the last 8 weeks with no effort on my part and many of the pubs I play regularly started off as Lemonrock contacts. If you can convert your initial booking into regular re-bookings then each contact is worth £00's so the fee is modest. Lemonrock is also a gig guide so if I want some live music I can find gigs locally and LR messages hundreds of punters for every gig. You also get reports on activity on your pages, my duo had over 9,000 hits last year all either from punters or pubs looking to book. Lemonrock isn't perfect, the sofware is a bit clunky and setting up your initial pages or entering gigs won't be as simple as it is on social media but it is run by a gigging musician and has a lot of functionality. It also offers support if you need help

We did put some response curves up but I can't remember where. it was a couple of years ago so I'm not promising that I'll find them. John @Chienmortbb and I did most of them but there were a couple other people had done.

I'm completely with Bill on this one. Modern PA's have improved so much that this is what the audience should be hearing. Needing a 2x15 or a 4x10 to reach the back of the room is just not necessary and it has so many disadvantages apart form the fag of harrying to transport, store and carry a huge box or boxes. I have multiple cabs because it is my passion but the biggest cab I've taken to a gig in the last two years is a 1x12. Often I go ampless or the amp and bass speaker stay in the car. I think any serious gigging bassist needs their own bass amplification still as you never know what you'll find when you get there but a 300W amp and a good quality 12 (or 2x10) should be able to match the drumkit and why would you want to drown out the rest of the band? The guitarist can just turn down

WinISD is the program most of us use. It's free. You have to input the parameters from the manufacturers data sheets and once these are saved you can ask it to design a cab and it will print out the bass response of it's design. You can then change the size and tuning of the cab and it will show you what the changes do on screen as you do them. It's quite useful to set up two projects with the same speaker at a time and it will show you two responses, you can then tweak one and see exactly how that compares with the suggested design. The cab only really affects the bass response directly so that is all it calculates. It also shows you things like power handling, maximum output and so on. The sky (or your growing knowledge of cab design) is the limit but it will design a simple box for you too. If you get stuck there are lots of BassChatters here to help. http://www.linearteam.org/

Note to self: I don't need more speakers!

RCF have always done this, fairly constant marginal improvements. The Firphase improvements in the crossovers did tidy up the midrange which was already good by industry standards. They introduced that piecemeal at first and then rebranded everything as IV series. At one point they were selling mk2,3 and 4 speakers all at the same time. The latest thing is XBoost which looks to be DSP operating on the bass frequencies, hard to tell from the blurb on that link but it would seem to be some bass boost combined with some clever compression to protect the speakers. They did this already on the Mk4's so my guess is some more tweaking rather than anything radical. Expect Mk5 for the 9 series soon. I guess they just keep the design team working constantly to keep them together and with driver production in-house prototyping must be streamlined. The marketing is clever too, there are RCF's at just about every price point and you can always pay a few pounds more for something genuinely just a little better. All the sizes in all the colours The good thing is that last time they did this there was a sell off of the old Mk2 and Mk3 kit and I got some ART310 Mk2's for a knock down price from Andertons. I think Thomann had the reductions as well. If anyone is thinking of buying new it might be worth keeping an eye open.

Funnily enough I'm looking to buy a new car and the Skoda Superb estate was on my list. How are you getting on with the 945's?

I've had these for almost two years now and I wanted to put something down to help others make choices when they come to buy their PA. My experience with them over 30+ gigs has been generally good but there have also been a few issues so that what I thought would be my forever speakers certainly haven't been perfect so for me this is a chance to re-evaluate. I'm not generally too prone to GAS, I love my basses but regard bass amps and speakers as just utilitarian tools of the job. I've reached a stage in life when I have all the things I properly need and all my band money goes into a pot to pay for my music. For years my PA was based upon the old Yamaha S112IV and a Behringer amp, then I upgraded to a well used second hand Wharfedale EVP system. The last band I joined had their own PA using QSC 12A2's until the singer left and took her PA speakers with her. That gave me time to save and plan for my 'dream' PA speakers. I decided that what I wanted was one pair of speakers that would do everything. Everything a very ordinary covers band would be called upon to do anyway. Loud enough to fill any indoor space we were ever likely to play, to make a decent fist of playing outside but portable enough that I could pack everything into a decent estate and compact/light enough to make setting up manageable. Also something that could cope with bass and drums without being concerned or needing subs. I'd previously had subs but they only came out once or twice a year so I was storing stuff I didn't really use. I felt the QSC's just fell short of the last bit and that I needed 15's to get drums and bass loud enough without having to compromise. I auditioned speakers and thought the bigger horn drivers just sounded better for vocals and plumped for RCF 735's as being the best I could afford when a pair of 745's came up used and I pulled the trigger. OK the good stuff. They've been utterly reliable and plenty loud enough even in outdoor events with 250+ people. We have E-drums and I go out now with no back line so all the bass and drums go through the PA. We've used them for all our pub gigs too so the Swiss Army knife theory worked out. The sound has been outstanding, we've had punters and promoters commenting positively more than ever before and you kind of grow in confidence when you hear just how good it can sound. Vocals are really well presented. The speakers have behaved faultlessly. They came with covers that don't need to be removed which speeds up set up and break down. The down side is that they are huge. They won't stand upright in most cars and are too tall to go through most car doors upright, laying them on their sides takes up a lot of space and packing the car can be a struggle. They don't feel heavier than the QSC 12's but something that big is still an awkward lift onto the stands. That's ok on one off gigs but it gets a bit old after a year or so. Being big makes a one handed carry difficult and they bang your legs a lot. You don't need that much power for most pub gigs and big and heavy means less stability on the stands. They are also quite imposing/space hungry in some of the smaller venues and frankly are overkill in most of the places we play. The bass is prodigious too and is generally rolled of heavily at 50Hz in most venues. We don't often need the extra that the 15" drivers offer and bass is sometimes overwhelming on stage. The other thing I didn't consider is comb filtering. When the bass is coming from two different speakers separated by a few metres you get significant cancellation and the bass sounds unnaturally loud or quiet as you move round the audience area. With subs you can push them together but you can't do that when your subs are also your PA speakers. It's not noticeable indoors as the wall reflections are significant and you don't really get bass dead spots but it's been really noticeable in some of our outdoor gigs. It's a really boring conclusion to say that a couple of speakers costing £1135ea sound really good but I have to report that they do, it's also true that for most bands they are going to be enough to handle all your needs in a single pair of speakers without subs. TBH I don't think we've ever needed to drive them hard. The thing is though that we are carrying way more than we need for most gigs, in fact nearly all our gigs. With my duo we take a couple of RCF310's and they also sound good with a great vocal sound. I carry one in each hand and they pop up on the poles almost by themselves. I've started to wonder if a couple of slightly better 10's plus a decent sub wouldn't match the 745's, be just as quick to set up and more convenient more of the time. So in conclusion I'd recommend them but say ask yourself if you really need something that big. Interested to see what other users think and to see what anyone else's experiences are with other PA speakers