Phil Starr

Hi Leo, it's a bit more complex than that, though quite possible. Bass stresses speakers much more than guitar so you have to be a bit more careful in design. You'd need the cab to be at least closed back/sealed and possibly ported to get the best bass you can. If you give us the internal dimensions of the cab we might be able to find something.

I've used pretty much all the tips available and they make a huge difference to the sound. Because of my anal nature (wonder if that passes the profanity filter) I've looked at and measured the various tips and its about diameter of course but also the length/depth of the tips and the angle of the 'exit' tube compared to the angle of your ear'ole As we are all different there isn't a universal tip which fits all of us. I've settled on small triple flange ones which go deep into my ear which work well with ZS10 pro but comply with the original ZS10. I've also realised that my left and right ears are different shapes! Who knew? Obviously custom in-ears would solve all the issues of fit and I'm happy to pay £2-300 for them, after all you'd pay that for a floor monitor but the £700-1000 they seem to cost is just completely beyond my budget.

Looking at your original post you are looking for something that will double for guitar and bass and your budget is 2-300 Euros, so I guess you are not UK based? Maybe space is also an issue for you? For anybody in the UK I'd always give the same advice; buy used. None of this practice/starter amp is great and the used value is low so anything you buy now will be upgraded fairly quickly. If funds are tight you don't want to be losing money by spending out on something you'll outgrow quickly. Your current Vox set up with its 3" speakers obviously has limitations for bass, sort of works is about right. How about some active studio monitors? They are designed to sound good with a whole variety of instruments with modelling, you could probably feed them with the headphone output of your Vox or go and buy a Zoom G1-Four or B1-Four. If you are prepared to use headphones you could even skip the monitors until funds allow but monitors will bring the headphone sound into the room, and at quite a volume. They'll also make great hi-fi speakers and ridiculously good monitors for your computer. Monitors are the way to go for multi instrument use and are of course the best if you are recording. I use RCF Lyra's but any top brand KRK, Yamaha, Tannoy etc will do a great job and give you both better bass sounds and guitar sounds than any practice amp in your price range. Go for the 5" monitors if you can stretch that far and look for used.

looking at the Woodsheets site it looks good. They seem to be using high quality plywoods and from their offer are CNC machining from consistent quality materials, and charging accordingly. One of the indicators is that they are using sheets with multiple cores. The cheaper boards generally use fewer thicker plies. Let us know how you get on with them and if they provide a good service others will want to go to them. Looking forward to your build

Like all itches you know you will scratch it, just not how soon There's a lot of effort in writing these things up and it takes me a lot longer than building them. Now if you all paid me ...........

I can and do John but as you know from speakers you can’t easily make a coloured sound uncoloured. Moulded in ears give you so much more though. I might be getting 18 db of isolation with the KZ’s when I put them in but they don’t stay put at a gig and the outside noise leaks in, once I get sweaty I’m pushing the things in every other song. They’ve been a great first step and are really good for bass but I’m ready to move up to customs so long as I can afford it. 30db of potential isolation means I can consistently reduce the monitor volumes and still hear clearly, perhaps by as much as 10db which is going to help preserve what is left of my hearing. I’m also singing a bit more so that becomes more important a factor. Interestingly after about half a dozen gigs I no longer feel the isolation from the audience

Well done for completing both those and thanks for the review. I love that you have adapted both designs by the way, it was always our hope that there would be a mixture of people who would try our ‘recipes’ and people who would innovate. I’d agree with your comparative comments on the 110 V the 112. I use the 110T a lot, it’s more than enough for practice and bass goes through our PA so it’s also enough for stage monitoring. For upright bass and for small venues the deep bass can be an embarrassment of riches so it’s often easier to get a good sound from a speaker like the 110T. That’s the problem with listening tests, as you go from one to another anything louder sounds subjectively ‘better’ so I completely identified with the where has the bass gone comment. I prefer the side handle on the 110T. I’m not very tall and the Mk 3 bangs against my knees when I carry it. That’s the joy of self build though, it won’t affect the performance so you can put the handle where you like. I have to say it gives @stevie @Chienmortbb and I a great joy to see our cabs being built. I hope you inspire others to give it a go.

That flyscreen looks really good Luke the piping makes it a professional looking finish.

Sorry if this has been asked already but I can't find anything @EBS_freak have you any views on the ace evoke 2custom in ears. I'm fine on bass with the zs 10pro but the smiley face response isn't helping with vocal monitoring. The flatter response and 30db isolation look inviting and the price bearable if they are an upgrade.

As most of you know I'm a friend of @stevie and have worked with him on designing the free self build designs on BC. The Monaco is a remarkable design, probably uniquely suited to double bass, crucially it has a really tight, tailored low end. This is going to reduce boom and hence low frequency feedback. Higher up it has almost certainly the best crossover available in an instrument speaker and a really flat frequency response, again this will help avoid feedback with an acoustic instrument as well as giving studio quality sound. The third feature is that the horn is rotated 90deg so that you are going to get more information when you are standing close to the speaker. All these things help an electric bass of course but I'd suspected that these would be crucial to upright bass. I had the chance to hear this at the SW Bass Bash where @TheRev had a chance to try out/demo the Monaco. Perhaps he might come on and give an opinion. The Monaco isn't cheap but it is a lot less than the barefaced Big Baby

Welcome tho BassChat. I hope you make lots of friends here. Don’t worry about coming late to bass, I started at 55 and was gigging regularly within a couple of years. Amazing what you can get away with if you can hit the root note on the first beat of the bar. 😀

I've got an un-named and un-marked 4" strap of fairly thin plain leather that I bought 15 years ago. The leather is really soft and flexible if a bit smelly from all the sweat it has absorbed over the years. Apart from the softness and flexibility of the leather there is nothing at all exceptional about it except that it is the most comfortable strap ever and has long ago moulded itself to my shoulder. I've never found a replacement as everything else is either padded or made of super stiff leather. I've wondered about looking to see if I can get something made up, in deepest Somerset we have a lot of saddlers so finding someone shouldn't be difficult, anyone else tried this? Option two is to invent a gift from a now dead relative and a sob story about feeling them looking over my shoulder every time I gig so Susie on The repair shop makes me something

One of the crucial bits. If you look at the equal loudness curves you can see our ears are most sensitive in the 2-5kHz region and there are always irregularities around the crossover region so moving it away from those frequencies makes sense. However horns introduce their own distortions and bigger diaphragms in the compression drivers create their own problems so there isn't one solution. The difference is what you would expect with the horn rather than the mid-bass driver handling more of the vocal frequencies but there may be other factors. One of the things I've found in listening tests is that sometimes a couple of resonances can really make a particular voice or instrument really jump out of the mix and suit a particular song or instrument. I was really impressed by the difference and slightly surprised by just how much extra detail I was hearing but without a lot more testing and listening it is too easy to jump to conclusions.

I'm going to recommend you have a look at The LFSys Silverstone or Monaco. You'll need an amp though. The advantage of a designed for bass speaker is that the drive units are selected specifically for bass, you get a less resonant wooden cabinet and in this case the crossover is exceptional. It is also designed with a horn chosen and orientated specifically to give great audibility when you are standing close to your cab when it is on the floor. I've used RCF310's RCF745 and QSC K12-2 and they all sound great when flown on poles, which is what they are designed to do, on the floor they are very bass heavy so you'll need quite a lot of eq to tame that excessive bass. Just so it's clear I have a friendship with LFS and was involved in some of the testing whilst the speaker was being developed. Try contacting @scrumpymikewho has the Monaco for an independent view FRFR Bass Guitar cabinet LFSys https://www.lfsys.co.uk/

Hey Al, how did you record that? There's so much more detail coming out of the 732's I'm surprised it's that obvious, did other songs show the same level of contrast? I've learned over the years not to judge on a single song. I've tuned up crossovers to make my test tracks sound good only to find that the 'improvements' didn't always transfer to other pieces of music. The bass sounded nice on the 912's which I think have a more rigid case than the 732's

Welcome to BassChat We are all assuming you will be playing with some sort of rock or pop band with a drummer. I'm also going to make the assumption that you might be playing some gigs at least without good PA support. PA support means you will be able to feed the bass through the PA. This all means your bass amplification will need to match the volume of the drums. There is no point being louder because you'll drown them out and if they are louder than you then you won't be heard. You need to work as a team. I don't have any experience of any of the combo's you mention but generally speaking a decent 2x10 or 1x15 ought to be able to play at enough volume unless your drummer is extremely loud. Most of the venues I play have 50-100 capacity and I'd expect to be fine with either set up. Your budget is quite good at UK prices and I'd expect to have a decent choice of combo's, I'd be choosing on sound rather than worrying too much about absolute volume, so take your bass along and try them out if at all possible.

I used them lots before I bought a table saw, never had a problem. You are there as they do it so you can check before you leave the store, and most of the staff (the ones they trust with machine tools anyway) are really helpful.

I'm going to play devils advocate here and argue for the guys who run things. I think the first example of the band you left is open and closed. The only exception would be if they made clear up front that you were employed as a session player in which case rehearsals would have to be paid by negotiation but if everything is upfront and open then that's pretty much OK by me, I've only ever done fair shares though. The open mic is different though and I've had experience of this. I ran an open mic night/jam session with a mate and frankly it's an organisational nightmare. You set up the PA on your own and take it down on your own, you need more and different stuff because people turn up without amp or with gear they won't share. some weeks you have too many players and people are grumpy because they only get three songs other times you don't get enough people and you have to spend the day before ringing around begging favours, you run the PA and FOH and you'll be amazed how often you say 'you're on next for the whole band to decide they need the loo/a drink/a smoke or that they've lost the drummer etc. On top of that if no-one turns up or you are quiet you have to be prepared to play all evening if necessary. I know the landlord/lady so offered to do it for free as they were just starting out, they offered expenses which I thought would be petrol money but turned out to be £150. That was a pain in the butt. I started out with £50ea for me and my partner in crime and £50 for expenses which included extra leads and a guitar amp. Then for a few weeks I had a settled house band and split the money 4 ways. then guitaris and drummer decided it was an optional extra and I had regulars who were more reliable than them so that seemed unfair. In the end it was such a pain that I took the £150 and put it behind the bar so anyone who played could get a drink. I can honestly say that the organisation was 90% of the work, if we'd run for longer then we would have built up a community of decent musicians and it would have been easier but I'd still be setting up and paying for the PA and back line. I don't think any pub could afford to pay more than £150 for an open mic night round here and frankly I don't want to have to decide who gets paid what and certainly not on the basis of deciding who is the better musician. An open mic night/jam session is meant to be fun and no-one has to be there. It was fun to be fair but bloody hard graft to get there. As to the band; I've always been part of an even split. However we've had some illnesses and have started using deps. We're paying them 25% of the cut (we are a 4-piece)but are getting prepared to pay a flat fee if this builds up. i've also got a mate who is a decent singer, he's depped for Jools Holland and other name bands. We've tried to set up bands locally but had problems with the musicians we've recruited. We are now talking about going out with just deps, people who are competent enough to just sit in with a set with little or no rehearsal. We will have to pay them a fee and for a while take the financial hit with the hope that when the better gigs come in we'll recoup enough to make it financially viable. I don't think anything is unreasonable so long as everyone knows.

Sort of, at the same power it will give you 3db extra which would take a doubling of the amplifier power. (pedantry alert) But: just plugging in in an extra 2x10 would have the impedance and draw double the power(so long as the amp can cope) and add another 3db; so that would give 6db it would double the power handling so at full power that's 9db extra potentially. at lower power the speakers will be sharing the load so won't get so hot and hot speakers can lose 2-3db easily adding extra speakers will change the frequency response and change your subjective experience of the sound. You did say "all things being equal" so you were spot on.

I'll see what tickles peoples fancy (ooh-err) and go with that.

my feelings too There's another problem I found this year, it's hard to be technician, compere and play bass at the same time. It would be good to be a bit slicker so people can get a bit more out of it and another person up on stage would be really helpful. Any shootout would have to be set up really carefully to be really meaningful so this is mainly for fun and to stimulate the old brain cells. I did wonder about something different this year. Deliberately choosing different sized drivers/cabs or trying identical drivers in a range of cab sizes. Maybe forget cabs and try different amps with the same cab and make it an amp shootout.

I'll bring the usual collection of home built speaker projects and am happy to run a shootout. I'd love to do it with a live bassist if someone wants to volunteer.

Woodsheets is a good shout, I hadn't come across them before. Looks like they would cut out the speaker and port holes too, at a price. Did you try and send the plans or did you just specify dimensions. If you could get all the cutouts done then a kit for a speaker build at around £50 wouldn't be a bad price.

There will be all sorts of things going on in your room which will affect the sound. First of all your acoustic dampening won't stop reflections of the sound completely, merely reduce them. If you ever see pictures of the echo free rooms they use in universities and research facilities they have huge wedges of sound damping material some well over a metre deep completely lining every surface and even they don't trap everything. You can't achieve anything like this and as a result you'll have a lot of multiple pathways between you and the speakers. Then the air in your room is itself resonant so you will set up standing waves in the air. All these are dependant upon how the distances involved compare to the wavelengths of the notes you are listening to. All the resonances in the room will change when you changed the room dimensions, mainly moving down in frequency but the sound pressure level at any point in the room will vary at every spot in the room. Even slight repositioning of the speakers or moving your head slightly will change the sound. All the reflections have to travel further to reach your ears so what happens depends upon how long the delay is. Some reflections will arrive in time (actually in phase but you didn't want technical) with the note you are listening to and will make it louder and others will be out of time so the pressure waves cancel and make that sound quieter. All this changes the frequency response at the place you are standing However sound decays over distance. In open space by 6db for every doubling of distance. In a bigger room the difference between the distance the reflected sound travels will be greater and for the most part the reflected sound will have less energy than the direct sound and so you will experience a cleaner sound at most frequencies. Most of the resonances will have dropped in frequency too and your hearing isn't as good down there so the overall impression will be of an 'airier' sound unless you set off new low frequency resonances. In the end probably the best thing to do is just enjoy your 'summer sound' but if you wanted you can download some lovely room analysers on your phone and see which frequencies are changing, some of them show spectral decay so you can see the echoes dying away.

Some of the bigger B&Q stores have machines for cutting sheet materials, you might also be able to find a timber merchant who will do it though they are becoming scarcer nowadays. At one time most hardware stores would have a saw bench and charge 50p a cut.