Phil Starr

Another factor with a capacitor is that the whole design of this cab with the very high tuning of 87Hz was to get the flattest response possible down to below 80 Hz. As you can see with your own WINIsd plot it's hard to get a flat response low down with other tunings. All cab design is a matter of compromise and this one was done by compromising on power handling and the speaker being almost unloaded below 70Hz in part mitigted by it's intended use with a Gnome/Elf/BAM style amp which has a bit of HPF going on. I'm a bit prejudiced against a simple in line capacitor. In the olden days when I built amps I found a few that really didn't lke a capacitative load. In addition the capacitor produces a phase shift. @stevie is more expert than I but I instinctively wouldn't want that happening at the port tuning frequency. Being lazy I haven't looked at any calculations though

Even the 68mm port is a bit on the small side. 75mm would be better. I use drainpipe because it's easy to get hold of and you can get hole saws to cut a 68mm hole. It's part of the easy build philosophy behind my BassChat designs and I think I mentioned this somewhere in the text. We did specify the Blue Aran ports early on but availability was so patchy people were pausing their builds so I went back to drainpipe. The micro amps are 130W into 8 ohms.

You almost certainly have a tone control which will roll off the bass by 12db or more. It would be easier to just use that as a starting point, not least because it costs you nothing and you can restore the system back to normal when that has finished. I don't want to speculate too much but anyone using the cab for the first time will sense the loss of the bottom frequencies and probably boost the bass on their amp or bass if it is active. We've all played with guitarists who swear blind that they haven't turned up even when you can see it on the meters. Bassists can be just as naughty The thing is that it is perfectly acceptable to use a big amp with a small speaker if you are aware of all the parameters. As the owner of everything you know the risks and will be careful accordingly. For a bassist just jamming with their mates and no knowledge of the gear involved you'll just go for it. Just swapping from a bridge pup to a neck pup could be enbough to put you in the red zone. At open mic nights I reckon I'd match my cabs to double the amp power for 'safety' as you have no idea what fx or playing style you will come across and some people are brutal with their equipment.

Just back from having impressions taken by Michelle at Snugs HQ. My lord it is hard to find, I thought we were rural. No phone signal either so it's hard to ring in. Michelle evenmtually hd to come out onto the road and flag me down on the way past. Anyway its a very simple procedure, a foam block is pushed into your ears and a two part resin injected which takes 3or 4 minutes to set. I sing a little so was asked to use a bite block, I think all it was doing was keeping my mouth open and still. The resin/gel sets with no heat, no real force is needed, not a suggestion of discomfort thoughout. it was all really a non event. 10 mins later I was saying goodbye. I get the moulds next year as Snugs are closed for Christmas I'm looking forward to trying these, the amount of sound that was blocked once the gloop was injected was impressive, probably years since I've been somewhere tht quiet, it promises well for the in-ears when I get the new moulds. I also discovered that I have particularly narrow ear canals but also rather high, like a letter box on it's side I guess, no wonder I couldn't get round plugs to seal. I let you all know when I get the final moulds back next year.

Sorry Al, I'm leading you astray again. On the plus side you'll be blown away by the sound per pound ratio. I still covet your new mixer though

That’s a tricky one. I think you have to decide that yourself. The speaker would handle bass and it has the full protection of the DSP which is probably common to all RCF stuff. A single speaker would be 6db down in volume though. I’d be mixing in stereo at home too so a single speaker wasn’t something I ever considered. I suppose £89 for a bass combo that sounds great is a bargain though. You could drive it off your mixer or something like a Zoom.

This was with my duo, two vocals, bass, guitar and a drumtrack going through a small desk into a pair of these. In my 'study' which is probably 3mx4m the volume was around our on-stage volume at gigs and loud enough that we had to amplify the acoustic guitar when we used it. The sound quality is stunning, certainly a match for hi-fi costing double and this is with the built in amps included.

The problem was probably excessive excursion. The cab is an awful lot safer with those sort of powers if you use an HPF at 50Hz or even higher. The output is very limited below 80Hz by design so there's no point letting anything through below that. The coil may have been smacking against the back of the magnet and if it over excurts (is that a word?) it loses the cooling effect of being in the magnetic gap. If i'm playing that loud I pretty much always put the cab right in a corner and roll off the bass which corner placing reinforces. I'm glad it's mended, the BAM will be a perfect match and does have some bass roll off built in which helps.

Btw they are also selling the RCF AYRA Pro5 studio monitors for £89. That's mad for decent studio monitors that will take bass at pretty high volumes (I've rehearsed with mine) and which sound not far short of my moderately expensive hi-fi

I'm so tempted at that price. Get ye behind me!

Ain't that the truth! The trouble is that they watch too many videos and copy the moves. It's quite fun watching some live video and picking out when you are listening to a recording or one of the backing singers. I've spotted Kylie's live videos where she has dropped the mic down to her knee and the vocal continues with no change in volume or timbre. Trying to persuade a singer to watch mic technique on genuinely live video seems to be like asking them to read War and Peace.

I've done that twice recently one of the downsides of in-ears is that you have this magnificent sound the moment you crash into the first song but only you can hear it. OOps 🙄

There are simply too many variables to give a definitive answer to this. Size of venue, genre of music, how loud the rest of the band are and so on. Thats only about how loud you need to be. That depends upon the power of the amp, the efficiency of the speakers and the tone you choose to set up. There are so many variations that no advice can be completely solid. However there is an approximate answer which applies to roughly 60% of the possible set ups and it is 200W into a single 12 or a 2x10 That's a bold statement so it needs some explanation. A few years ago I designed a speaker on Bass Chat. One of the design specs was that it should be ‘loud enough’ to work with a band on its own. I had to turn that into something technical so I made the basic assumption that the bass has to be as loud as the drums. No point in being louder, if the guitars are going to be louder than that then all is lost anyway. Match the drums and you are good. The next thing is how loud are drums? I found some health and safety measures and the average level at the drummer’s ears is around 100-103db. I took that to be 100db at 1 metre and that the bass would need a 40db dynamic range. So 100db +/- 20 and 120db clean was my target. Looking at specs for speakers efficiency wa around 94-100db for bass speakers and I took 97db/W as being typical. So at 97db/W you need to have 23db of gain which is 200W I gigged with one of these speakers for 2 years. The theory holds out for all normal gigs but not for really big spaces or outdoors where simple physics says you need more. There are a whole raft of amps that are 300W into 8ohms 500 into 4ohms. Any of these should be more than adequate.

Here you go

It was the AKG D5 I recommended, not that I think the D7 is a problem, I've just never tried one. The D5 is terrific at feedback rejection but at the cost of you having to be really close to the mic if it is to pick you up. It sounds terrific too and is built like a tank, makes the Shure feel flimsy (which it isn't) I have two which I don't use as: I have a loud singing voice so feedback is not an issue I bounce around like Tigger when I'm performing so I need something more forgiving of poor mic technique The D5 is cheap too, £73 at Gear4music and the sound is sooo good. I swapped out one mid gig once when I was mixing for another band and their SM58 went down. The vocals went from very ordinary to terrific.

FWIW, My technique is to apply a base coat with a paintbrush so that I have a good solid covering and no wood can be missed and show through. You can touch up bits you've missed easily enough. I apply my top coat with a brush too. I apply the Tuff Coat generously but only spread it loosely, a bit like spreading butter. Just making sure each panel is equally loaded with paint. At this point pick up the rollerand spread the paint evenly over all the panels taking care with the edges. Once you are satisfied about the even coating you are ready to texture the surface. The texture depends upon the roller you use , the pressure you apply and the speed you roll at. You need light, even pressure. Just enough to make full contact with the paint but not enough to dig into it which creates skid marks. Once you are happy with the finish on one panel you should try to work your way evenly arond all the panels at a nice steady pace. This all sounds more complex than it is in practice. Tuff Cab dries very slowly at first and in my shed which never gets very warm you can re-work the paint for at least half an hour. If it goes wrong it's simple to flatten it out and have as many 'goes' as you like. I've tried all sorts of rollers from the fine short-pile gloss rollers to the official Blue Aran corse foam ones. They all give a different finish but all work well with the fine rollers giving a 'linen' texture and the Blue Aran ones the closest to the sprayed 'splatter effect' you get with professional cabs. I use eiher the BA rollers or a long pile emulsion roller nd get a similar finish from both A couple of tips. you don't need a texture on the baffle which will be behind the grille so support the speaker on this side with the back of the cab uppermost. Make sure you have access to the whole cab before you put any paint on. If you can't walk round the cab freely then an even texture is difficult to achieve. Do the final coat in one go, it's hard to get an even coat if you let one side dry before doing the next. Don't do your first cab on a hot dry day as the paint will set too quickly if you get it wrong. If you aren't happy you shouldn't worry, doing a third coat isn't the end of the world.

Nice, I love playing that bass line It's the start of Chrismas for me when I do my first run through to check it is still under my fingers.

This was my experience. Mixing from the floor during soundcheck is such a game changer for a pub band with no sound engineer. Saving pre set mixes speeds up the whole set up and individual monitors are revolutionary. There are a myriad of extra things you can do of course but start off simple as you did and add in the frills only as you feel a need for them. How did the next two gigs go?

It depends upon the gig a little, I'm definitely more relaxed about pub gigs and those close to home. I generally carry spares for everything and our PA has some redundancy built in, we use the same speakers for monitors as we do for FOH in one of my bands. We carry a little four channel mixer as backup most of the time but I've stopped worrying about mixers going down, it's just never happened. I do have a backup iPad with the mixing software loaded up and I could also use my phone at a pinch to run the mixer.

At Snugs HQ, it’s not too far for me.

I do 90% of my practice with headphones. Mostly I use a Zoom B1ON now replaced by the B1 Four. Completely portable with batteries and comes with loads of emulations and effects, plus drum machine,tuner and metronome. Plus a jack input for playing along with recorded music. For the times I want to play loud I have an interface going into my studio monitors. RCF Ayra5’s but rokit,Yamaha, and many other brands have similar offerings. We all practice differently though. I ply in covers bands so a lot of practice is learning new songs. Having something that I can just plug and play woksfor me.

Well done Al hope it goes well.

Well I’ve finally done it. I’ve ordered custom tips from Snugs. One pair for my KZ ZS10 Pro and another for my Sennheiser IE100’s I’m booked in for impressions on the 16th and should have them for the new year.

I use a Gnome with a 10 (BC 110T) for the poor snowflakes who can’t manage in-ears in the same way you do 😄😂 Glad you had a fun gig.

I often find that simplifying things gives the best sound. Too often you can twiddle to solve one problem only to find you’ve created others. I’ve stopped saving settings at the end of a gig. They are rarely better than the basic mix I’ve set up in rehearsal. Don’t be surprised, i too get my best bass sound out of the PA on poles. You get several db of boost of the lowest frequencies from the floor and adjacent walls with backline and it just muddies everything.