Phil Starr

All of the above, plus a bit more. When you turn the volume up our hearing changes the way we hear different frequencies boosting our perception of bass (and also the extreme highs which aren't relevant to bass) so to keep the same sound you need to roll bass off when the volume goes up. Being close to most bass speakers means you get less of the midrange than the audience as the mids and highs are directional. If you go out front you might be pleasantly surprised at what the audience are hearing. Tilting your speaker and pointing it at your head will help as will raising your speaker to head height. If you can then push the bass out through the PA and just use mid heavy on-stage monitoring for yourself. In terms of sitting in the mix and occupying the 'correct' bit of your sonic space have a listen to some of the isolated bass tracks in You Tube. It's quite a shock to hear how tinny some recorded bass can be yet still sound good in the final mix. And don't worry, we've all found this out the hard way and welcome to Bass Chat

Love the band Al

A lot of us use the Zoom B1-four https://www.gak.co.uk/en/zoom-b1-four-bass-multi-effects-pedal/924373 £80 runs on batteries or USB, sounds great, mini jack input for playing along, cab and amp emulation, tuner, metronome, drum machine etc, etc. and of course it is a multi-fx unit you can use at a gig. I've been using my B1ON the predecessor pretty much every day for years

They lost me a bit when they talked about the "air between the amps and mics" being responsible for the change in sound. That's too fairy dust for me. I persevered and it looks like this is just the guitarist and with the amps he's running stereo but with the modeller in mono. Um it could be that guys To be fair when you look at how they mic'd the cabs you are going to get different tones as you move the mic around and mics aren't flat response and they had to change mic's at one point. Then they talked about mids and bass (on the guitar) and the different eq they were getting. Um, no eq available in their modeller? This was comparing apples and pears and yes, they are different! the other thing is that this is a touring band with not just one sound person but separate mixing for FOH and monitors and probably a team of engineers, I can't see any stage monitors so presumably they are still using in-ears. Come to that the bassist didn't seem to have a bass amp and they didn't talk about that or what the keys were using for amplification. They still had the on stage problems with the volume of the guitar amps and this was "outdoors and on large stages" not the Dog and Duck.

We seem to have wandered off your problem @Lozz196 Sorry to hear about your back problems So the on stage sound? Is that just as a monitor for you and maybe the band, or is this to fill the room because sometimes you can't go through the PA? I suppose I'm asking how loud you'd need to be. Also what is your potential budget? A lot of the active PA speakers are quite heavy. I've gigged with an RCF 310 and that's about as small as you can usefully go but they are over 12kg, most are bigger and heavier than that.

If it helps I use a Warwick Gnome to power my Silverstone it's not ampless but it is pocket sized and fits in my bass case along with mains and speaker lead. Your BB2 is pretty close to being FRFR and the same sensitivity as my Silverstone so I know it is going to be loud enough as a stage monitor. The power amp section of your RM500 is flat too so you are pretty much using FRFR already. The sound isn't going to be an issue for you. You say "have to" is this a back problem? I can't think of a PA cab as capable as the BB2 which will weigh less. To be fair Barefaced really are the ones to beat on weight reduction.

To understand this I think you need to divide FRFR theory into two parts; full frequency flat response, and then using an active PA speaker to do that. Most bass amps and speakers are coloured, the frequency responses aren't flat and there may be other distortions too. That colouring has become part of what we all expect when we listen to a bass. Initially it was there because the amplification at the birth of electric bass just wasn't very good but generations of bassists used the colouring to their advantage to create music and sounds we all want to hang on to. The downside is that if you have rose tinted bass amps to listen to your bass is always going to have a rose tinted sound. Rose tinting is lovely of course and some people want to stay in that rose tinted world, but you might fancy a change. FRFR gives you your bass through clear glass spectacles. Multi effects units, emulators and so on will then let you add in whatever colours you want, you can buy in a ready made tint or mix your own depending upon your own creativity. It's really hard to get that exact rose tint to copy a particular amp and speaker but the fx have been good enough for as long time that you probably couldn't tell the difference once all the band are playing and the audience really won't. And that perfect P-bass Ampeg tone on you favourite record? That was probably recorded straight from the DI into the desk and fx applied afterwards, possibly mixed in with a little bit of what came out of the speaker. So then the question is whether to use a PA speaker to get your FRFR sound. FRFR is nothing new as touring bands have used floor monitors for years. The advantage of using PA speakers is that they are produced in huge numbers, more is spent on their design and there will be a cost saving because of mass production. If they are designed to put the bass and kick through they will handle bass and buying a box with the amp in means they will be perfectly matched and the internal DSP will protect everything inside from even the most idiotic use. The down side? All speaker designs are compromises, there isn't a perfect speaker out there and PA speakers are jacks of all trades. In cheaper PA's the bass driver will be quite limited, but that is true of cheap bass cabs. There is an issue with plastic cabs, a well built well braced wooden cab will beat a plastic cab every day, but the moulded cabs get better all the time. Portable PA cabs are designed to go on poles so their size and weight becomes an issue and some bass may be compromised to achieve portability. So my experience? The best bass sound I have ever got has been out of a couple of RCF ART310 speakers on poles. On the stage floor they sound completely over blown. I also have some ART 745's for PA. The bass through them on poles sounds like it does through studio monitors. On stage on the floor I don't like them much without a lot of eq to reduce the bass bloom. For gigs I use a bass speaker designed to be FRFR the LFSys Silverstone with my bass amp set flat and a SansAmp doing the colouring in. For me the wooden box and exceptionally good bass speaker combined with truly flat response (I've seen the measurements) works really well. What the audience get though is through the PA. Hope that helps?

I carry spares of everything and always have done, though that means the floor monitors would have to double as PA. The exception now is the mixer and in 17 years of gigging I've never had a mixer failure. In fact the only problems we've had with the in ears have been other band members forgetting or not changing batteries, so I carry spares for them too. Equipment failures are rare nowadays, I haven't had anything fail for over 15 years other than the odd mic lead.

I suspect you hadn't mic'ed the drums or that the mix was wrong for you. Isolation and excitement were my concerns and I did feel that way at first but I stuck with it. It fades as a feeling and disappears at the first good gig. I was prepared to mic the audience so that we could hear them in the mix but it never happened. In the end what you gain is more connection with the drums and the rest of the band because you need to hear them better and honestly getting studio quality sound through your ears is what you really need for that. No more straining to hear the guitarist on the far side of a narrow stage and the kick crystal clear every time. In the end you have more spare capacity for feeling the music and engaging the audience because your monitoring mix is perfect every time. To be fair there is a problem when the band forget they are wearing in ears and shout something across the stage instead of using the mic.

I plumped for the RCF M18, it's gone up in price since then unfortunately. For me it offered all I need in the simplest package, rock solid router connection and in two years not a glitch in the software which is simple and intuitive. The pre's are good too so it sounds great. The Behringer offers a lot more in the way of facilities and flexibility but with a steeper learning curve. I mix from on stage apart from a quick soundcheck so I'll never use most of what I have, nothing on the M18 is more than two clicks away. Basically it is idiot proof which suits me

You don’t need to get too carried away with power. It matters but is only part of the story. What you need to do is to be able to match the sound levels of the loudest instrument in your band. Probably the drums. A drummer will typically produce an average sound level of around 100db @1m so for a 40db range you need to be able to produce around 120db. Bass speakers vary in their efficiency/loudness but 97db/W is fairly typical so for 120db you need a gain of 23db which is 200W. For many years people used Trace and Peavey amps of just that power and we seem to have forgotten that. There’s no harm in going bigger than that but ‘need’ is a bit strong if everything else is right about your choice. Make sure it gives that power into the speakers you choose. Having said that the bog standard for amps nowadays seems to be 300w into 8ohms and 500 into 4ohms so you’ll have a lot of choice of those. Choose based upon sound. btw that 180w Ashdown is close enough to count as a 200W amp paired with something like a 2x12

Having lived through the whole period this is spot on. It was done that way because the other options weren't feasible at the time. Once people have a system up and running they are going to be reluctant to change to something which might be difficult for them, expensive and until they try it a potential problem. For me what has made it feasible for your 'average' band is the advent of affordable digital mixers. A couple of years ago I paid just £330 for an 18 channel mixer and sold my old Yamaha analogue for £200 (If I'd bought it that week it was still made for £400 so going digital was cheaper). I lost the snake and the new mixer is only the size of the old stage box. With the old mixer I'd have needed a separate monitor mixer to offer individualised monitor mixes and a host of outboard fx ideally for front of house. Just physically carrying all the kit to do on-stage monitoring was a bind. Even the Yamaha stayed at home a lot of the time because it physically wouldn't fit in the venue space. On stage I had to referee more than one volume war with each band member turning up to get 'more me' so they could hear themselves over the rest of the band. So now I have six monitor outs for four band members. They don't need buy any kit to do their own monitor mixes as they can do this on their phones. Once the singer and I were using in-ears the drummer said "I'll try it" then wouldn't give my spare buds back, the guitarist realised he was missing out and ordered in ears from the rehearsal room. They can have as much 'me' as they want now and having control has upped the confidence. The final thing which hasn't been fully explored is the damage to your ears of traditional back-line. Average sound levels on stage with a drummer and matching guitar and bass are going to be over 100db for most of us and you need that to reach the back of any medium sized venue. The permitted exposure to 100db is 10min and anything above this is known to permanently damage your hearing. It's too late for my generation almost all 60 year old musicians are deaf to some extent and it isn't due to age, it's due to noise exposure. It's due in some respect to 'more me' and the desire to feel 'your trousers flapping' I'm not telling anyone they are wrong, the old school generation of musicians have invested so much time, money and love in getting to where they are with music and sound to be proud of. If you are out entertaining people you want to concentrate on the music and what works is hard and seems risky to give up. I'm never going to knock people for doing what works for them but my goodness you don't know what you are missing until you try it.

@Chienmortbb and I have had these two on the test bench and I use the Gnome myself; bought as a backup and for open mic/jam sessions I probably use it a little more than my gigging amps. The TC BAM is also very similar. I go through the PA so my bass amps nowadays are used for stage monitors at gigs and rarely get a run out at high power levels. The Gnome (hence all of them) is loud enough for most small gigs with my 12" LFSys Silverstone and for stage monitoring with my 10" cab. With a couple of 12's the extra 5db means it will cover all my volume needs and would fill a decent sized venue. In terms of measurement power output is the same for all three and as advertised. The voicing is different and somewhat surprising though with one similarity between all three. Set to 12 o'clock the Elf has a smiley face response with the bass and treble boosted and hence a mid cut. That's very nice sounding at low/medium volumes and effectively a 'loudness' boosted sound. The gnome has a small bass peak another mid suckout at around 400hz and a climbing treble response which makes it very clean sounding. the TC is the flattest response somewhere between the other two. The striking similarity between them is that the mid tone control works at exactly the same frequency in all three and the mid dip in all three is at this frequency. This means you can pretty much dial up the same sound in all three. The Gnome is more or less flat with bass at 2.00 mid at 1.00 treble at 10.00. You could happily buy any of these, I only bought the Gnome because the BAM was out of stock and though I preferred the colour it wasn't enough of an issue for me to wait. I think most of us would prefer the voicing of the Elf but whether you think that is worth the extra money is your choice. You can get almost the same sound out of all of them mine has been 100% reliable and has the blessing of a nice quiet fan.

My first instinct would be to see if TC/Music Tribe would supply replacements. I've tracked down spares for behringer before now and they were reasonably priced. Replacing with recognised parts keeps the cab 'original'. If not as @Balcro has pointed out a 30l cab for a 10" driver is fairly typical so 70l for a 2x10 won't be hard to match. something like the Celestion Pulse 10 would work and is available from Thomann If you wanted you could copy the BassChat 110T with 2 drivers and add in a high quality horn. It would no longer truly be a TC cab though

As well as a collection of the BassChat speaker designs and the shootout John @Chienmortbb and I should be running some frequency response tests on amps this year. If you want your's tested then make sure you bring it along.

I didn't start playing until 55, and from a much lower base than you musically. I've had a guitar laying around which I still can't play and had never played a whole song on anything. Within a year I was gigging and I've literally played hundreds of gigs since then with a collection of bands. Bass makes more sense when you play with other people and for me the stimulus to keep practicing and improving. I've no idea about grades on bass but my kids both reached grade 4 on piano and my son played the Moonlight Sonata at a school concert. I'd think that grade 6 would put you way above anything I could do technically and solidly into "intermediate" in terms of skill. You don't say if you are with a band but if not it is time to get out there. You almost certainly have the technical skills and it won't take you long to be a useful band member. Whether it is the thrill of an audience dancing in time with your fingers or the fear of messing up in public there's nothing like live performance to sharpen up your playing. I'd be jealous of you starting up but I'm having too much fun with an unexpected late life passion

I've just made this move with my band, I think no-one who has done this and cares about their sound would ever willingly go back. There is absolutely no way on earth that you can get a clean sound out front when the guitar, drums and even bass are significantly louder on stage than the human voice. We spend fortunes and invest hours in getting our sound and then can't pick ourselves out of the mix so no-one on stage or in the audience ever gets to hear that perfection. (the sound, not my playing ) There's a thrill in sheer volume of course, feeling the stage vibrate, trousers flapping and all that adrenaline flowing but the cost is permanent hearing loss and early retirement from music far too often. People stick to what they know and what they can get to work and cling to backline and vocals through PA. It's like driving a vintage car though, fun on a summers day but you wouldn't use a model T to commute into London every day. @Downunderwonder makes a good point; you'll need to carry some backline for a while yet, but if you are in an established band what are you doing?

Now Celestion has confirmed the speaker was mid 70's (1976) it seems probable that they didn't publish TS parameters at the time. I think they stopped production of that model around then and I assume the speaker was designed earlier than that. Thiele and Small didn't publish their research until 1970 and it took a while to become widely known, it took maybe 10 years for the music industry to catch up. In 1970 most powerful amps were big, expensive and unreliable valve amps and speakers were mainly general purpose. Thiele and Small developed a model that could be used to mathematically describe the movement of the speaker taking into account a number of the electrical and mechanical properties of the speaker itself and also the cabinet and repeat the calculations at any frequency. In 1970 I was programming computers with punched cards and pocket calculators and home computers were yet to hit. Speaker design was indeed a craft skill at the time. I built and tested a lot of boxes with hours of very subjective listening tests. Science is better

His audition not mine, but yes any audition is always a two way process. It was one of those situations where everyone was terribly polite as he 'explained' that we were 'doing it all wrong' we needed to drop the songs from our set and all learn the set he had learned. We couldn't get away fast enough

It's the guitarists that get me on this one. "I play the solo just like the original" and then they never do, which wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't for coming out of the solo onto the E at the end. It wouldn't matter if they made eye contact, gave a little nod or stuck to the right number of bars. Or even if they knew that Free made at least four different versions out there. I had one guy at an audition (his not mine) shouting at me because I'd got it 'wrong'. 'Um, mate you came in three bars too late then missed the first beat of the bar. Fluffed the third to last bar in the solo and completely lost where you were was what I decided not to say. I've had others that tell me they improvise the solo but always end with 'this' and then fumble the demonstration of 'what they always play' or alternatively play 'this' three times in the solo so I have to guess which one of the three is the end. No point in asking them how many bars they want for the solo either. Then again was the band who told me 'we do the Christina Aguilera version' where the bassist plays over everything and which is in a different key . They played the Free version and had clearly told the female singer they were doing Christina just to get her to do the song. I rewarded myself by playing the Aguilera bassline over the verses which was actually good fun. Actually I love not playing the verses, it answers the question 'what does the bass actually do?' as the whole song lifts every time you come in.

Why does no-one show the bass player

It's the same sized cab as the BC110T (which if people aren't familiar is a home build design by Stevie which we published on Bass Chat during lockdown here) I have to confess that despite having better cabs it's my go to for rehearsals and small gigs. It's a really nice little cab and weighs nothing. The Celestion bass driver in it is a little gem which doesn't have the lumpy response peak that most bass speakers have, that lets you get away with a simple high pass filter for the horn driver which basically takes over where the bass unit starts to roll off. The crossover point is higher and the 10" Celestion has fairly modest power handling. It sounds great but won't go so loud. Fortunately our recent drummers are very controlled. The Monza is a very different beast, it goes lower than the 110T and the bass is much tighter and more controlled due to the much more powerful motor system in the bass driver. It is also a 600W speaker. You are going to get some of the slam you get from a much bigger speaker. The crossover point is nearly an octave lower (I think) so the midrange is sweeter and the dispersion of the Monza much better. We didn't spend much time comparing the BC110T with the Monza, it was just idle curiosity on my part to hear my own cab and we were surprised that it wasn't disgraced at that sort of volume. The sort of clarity from the Monza is at another level though.

@stevie

I had a chance today to see/hear the very first LFSys 10" cab, the 'Monza'. As far as I know there is nothing like it on the market yet, and it may be the next step in the evolution of bass cabs. A 10" cab that will be a genuine one cab solution. So I had a pleasant afternoon playing with speakers. @stevie brought across the Monza and one of the 12" Monacos to demonstrate and I have an LFSys Silverstone of my own. @bussonetthebass came along specifically to compare these speakers. We used a Bugera BV1001M with controls set to flat. We've measured the frequency response and know it to be just about neutral. We tested mainly with a Fender Highway One jazz fitted with Fender noiseless pups but also with a American Deluxe P bass and a Japanese thunderbird copy by Burny(Fernandes). Now it's hard to describe the sound of these three speakers because normally you'd describe a speaker by their 'voicing' and the voicing of all three is essentially flat. deliberately they add almost no sound of their own so the differences are minimal. Although each has it's own crossover design they all cross over at 2,000Hz and everything above that is essentially identical. What you hear is what comes out of the pickups, what you would hear in the recording studio direct from the pickups. The Silverstone has the flattest bass response and sounds the warmest of the three. The Monacos have a tailored bass response with a drop in bass at around 200Hz and then a shelved response after that. It's designed to avoid boominess at high volumes when used live, subjectively you can hear the bass goes all the way down but it doesn't become obtrusive at high volumes it movesfrom a lovely clean deep bass to a real slam as you crank the amp. The 10" Monza sits between these two, the bass is well controlled but retains a slight warmth. The outstanding thing about all these speakers though is their clarity across the rest of the range which is more than just a family resemblance. They do this with zero sibilance too, no nasty tizz from a cheap tweeter it all just sounds very natural. The other thing is that the sound is very even as you move round the room 60deg off axis either side and you hear pretty much what you hear 10deg off, I saw @bussonetthebass (Jules) walking round to test that claim so hopefully he will comment. Changing basses brough instant and very obvious changes in the sound. A lovely thud from the Japanese T-Bird a slightly polite but recognisable P sound from the P but our favourite was the Jazz with the upgraded PUPs. It all just sounded so clean. So how loud does the Monza go? Well it is a little quieter than its 12" siblings more than 1db and less than 3db so call it 2db (I didn't measure) Given that the Monza will handle double the power of the Silverstone (+3db) that means in my opinion it will match pretty much any drummer for volume with the right amp. I've been gigging my Silverstone with a Warwick Gnome round the local pubs so I know that is 'enough' for a pub band. With the Bugera or anything else that puts out 300W+ into it's 8ohms I think we now have a 10" bass cab which will do any pub gig or monitoring and fill a room with a 100 people in it without sweat. I think it might be the first truly one cab 10" solution for a gigging bassist. So what is special about it. On the surface it is a 10" speaker in a lightweight 30litre box with a horn tweeter, nothing revolutionary there. The differences are down to three main changes but significantly is the chosen 10" driver it has a huge 3" voice coil which allows it to dissipate more heat than a smaller coil so the driver is rated at 600W continuous. it's a long coil too so can handle a lot of low frequency excursion. The second part of this is the crossover because of the design of the bass driver it has to come in lower down and the horn has to cope with more of the mids. You can see the horn through the grille and for a small cab it is massive. The crossover itself is more complex than anything else you'll find in a bass cab and not only divides up the bass and treble but looks at the phase responses around the crossover frequency bringing the same level of design detail as you would get in a top end hi-fi speaker. It's more normal to see the 'crossover' in a bass cab to be no more than a high pass filter protecting the tweeter but allowing all sorts of problems across the crossover region even in cabs costing over £1,000. Finally this cab is built out of lightweight 12mm poplar ply and extensively braced. None of that is new of course but not many cabs can claim all three. There are cabs made of thinner ply extensively braced and others made of poplar ply unbraced or with limited bracing. You can buy PA speakers with similar care over the crossover but they won't have the same specs for the bass driver as this cab and will be in a plastic cab and as an active cab you won't be able to use it with your favourite bass amp. My conclusion was that if it had been available at the time I'd have gone for the Monza when I bought my cab. I think it is all the cab I'd ever need, I go through the PA nowadays at gigs so it would only ever be for monitoring or something I'd use if the PA was inadequate, or in emergencies where I'd need to fill a medium venue from back line. It has no sound advantage over the Silverstone but it will do the same things in a smaller cab. I've heard the Silverstone up against the BB2 and the Vanderkley and they aren't in the same league, they both have a more coloured sound. The BB2 is lighter but the smaller Monza is an even easier carry and fit in the boot. I'll leave you to decide if this little cab is a next step in evolution.

It is a guitar driver, that frame dates back to the mid 70's. The 80's version had a chunkier chassis I think. They still make a G-15 100 I'd be very careful about putting 100W through it or using it for bass. It may have a paper former for the coil and won't be using the sort of high temperature adhesives we use now. You might be able to sell it on to someone doing a restoration project if you do some research and find which cabs used that driver back in the 70's.