Phil Starr

Our singer collapsed at our last gig so that was probably one step too far. I managed to put my thumb through the table saw two hours before a gig once. Put on a comedy sized bandage and managed to get through the gig on paracetamol and ibuprofen. After one gig where I had a few extra breaks I routinely carry Imodium in the car..

They do sound good don’t they. Well done. btw I also use a black pen for screw heads.and sometimes use plasterboard screws which come in black.

Wish this thread had started a couple of weeks earlier, I've been looking for a similar speaker for my study/practice room. I do most of my practice with my Zoom B1 and a set of Sennheiser HD595 headphones. Great for bass but I struggle with practicing my backing vocals and sometimes when everyone is out I want to make a real noise. Anyway I'd bought these just as this thread started RCF LYRA PRO5 with the Yamaha HS5's in contention. In truth they were a present brought by Santa I love Santa Just a quick review as they only arrived yesterday. The sound is everything I hoped for. My practice room is round 4m x 2.4m and they go more than loud enough and will handle bass aty like the sound I get through the room filling volumes without complaint of obvious distortion. The sound I'm hearing is very like the sound through the headphones and the few test songs I've tried have demonstrated how revealing these things are. Voices sound very separate in the mix and you can hear the effect of different miking in the recordings, all this with a cheap Alesis mixer in the chain and dowrticularly pleasing was nloaded off Spotify so not a clean source. The stereo image is great, lots of depth and separation with instruments nicely placed in space which would really help sitting them in the mix if I was recording and not just playing them back. Actually the lack of colour makes them really pleasant to listen to, I've a horrible feeling they'll give my very expensive hifi a run for its money. That's mad for two speakers costing no more than a decent soundbar. Particularly pleasing was using them as monitors for my backing vocals. I'm a pretty weak singer and only manage at all with decent monitors and these are better than anything I've tried so far. For bass they sound like my headphones and like my FRFR bass speakers (LFSys Silverstones) That's going to make setting up fx at home a whole lot easier. The only downside is that they are a bit bigger Than I'd hoped. I had measured up the space and they are of course exactly the size it says on the tin but the reality is that they are big and black and I'm going to have to tidy up my study to fit them in. On the plus side the bass is far more satisfying than I expected, they really don't sound stressed at all and it's a lovely clean sound. So @JPJ has his Rokit's which I also thought looked good, I'd love to hear how he get's on with them but I'm really happy with these Lyra's so far.

Sonically fine or sonically something you love? If you like the sound and just want something that looks right then just put the cab on it's side and buy a second to go on top. You will keep the sound and the two speakers will be aligned.

It's been a revelation to me watching the design process for this and the Silverstone cab. I've been lucky enough to have had the chance to do some critical listening at various stages and be party to many of the tweaks that have taken place since the first BassChat design. I've listened to a number of different compression (horn) drivers in @stevie shed and a lot of different horns. TBH I was surprised by how much difference the final horn flare made compared to some respectable competition. However the real revelation and the reason I think this cab is so successful was the care that went into the crossover design. Minute tweaks exactly matching the bass and treble drivers together, then completely recalculating when the horn flare was changed. He still measures every frequency dependent components in the crossovers before they go in. Crossover design remains a bit of a black art with the software only getting you so close followed by hours of tweaking and testing. All that careful alignment across the crossover area would be wasted if the cab had an HF horn control

Mine has been faultless so far. That's no help to you of course but it might be worth seeing if they will swap it for a working one.

A couple of observations because I'd advise anyone thinking of moving to in-ears to read the bible (the long thread in post 2.) Don't be scared of doing this and don't worry about it being somehow artificial or not properly rock'n'roll. I can promise you will make the adjustment and quicker than you think, you won't want to go back because your music/playing will be better. Hearing yourself better than the audience hears you puts you in control you will never be in one of those grotty venues where you can't hear yourself again. Try it at rehearsal first, you can wear a giant pair of over ear headphones and look like a Cyberman but there's no fiddly earbuds so you can get a decent sound first time. In the rehearsal room you don't need to worry about what you look like. Basically you don't have to be scared of change, you can take baby steps. My first experiment was using a Zoom portable recorder taped to my mic stand straight into my Sennheiser £20 buds I used with an iPod. I've tried taking a feed from my monitor speaker and from the front of house and i tried everything in rehearsal before trusting it on stage. Unless you play big stages don't worry about not hearing the drums, if they are anywhere near the vocal mics you'll hear them. The KZ ZS10 pro are great for bassists, I just paid £26 for a spare pair so the cost is really low, I find them not so great for vocals but you can always hear yourself and IEM's pretty much rule out any feedback Spend lot's of time on getting earbuds that fit; all our ears are different shapes and my right ear has a much smaller ear canal than my left, I had no idea until I tried getting in-ears to fit. That seal is going to get you the best bass sound possible and will be the thing that cuts out the noise from the drums/guitarist or anything that drowns out what you need to hear. You can get by with a FOH mix but a digital mixer will give you your own aux channel(s) and you can have 'more me' if that is your choice. Here's the final tip. I'm deaf in the ear that faces the drums with added tinnitus. Ears ringing after every gig is the death warrant for your hearing. Do this before it is too late

Good decision, those Fane's are really great sounding things for bass, I built a cab for a friend and I have to say it was surprisingly good especially with double bass as it turned out.

It won't but to be fair it's almost impossible to describe a sound exactly in words. A buzz could be something loose in the cab, check the speaker wires aren't rattling against anything. next thing to check are the speakers themselves: if they have been stored for a long time they may have deteriorated or may be damaged. Isolate them and try pushing them carefully back and forth, use a pint glass or similar to do this with even pressure and be gentle. Listen for any scratching sound when you do this. Examine the speakers carefully for anything that is torn or has become loose.

Not just me then

I have the Mk1 and can confirm it is a cracking little amp. It has been completely reliable and produces a really dynamic sound out of the box. The various push buttons all produce useful sounds if you like that sort of thing. The fact that it has an iPod symbol next to the aux in rather gives the game away that they haven't really changed anything other than the chicken head knobs. Is an iPod the new retro? The biggest downside is that fan, it is really noisy in a small practice room even if it is easily drowned out on a live stage.

I'm going to play devil's advocate for Bugera/Behringer/Music tribe here. I'm pretty sure the amplifier section of the Bugera is 'borrowed' from Behringer's class D PA amps, specifically the iNuke. I've got both here so I ought to take a look There was a lot of online 'debate' between Uli Behringer and the designers of the Peavey IPR series PA amps about copyright so it is a moot point about how original their design is but I think they will have simply stuck a bass pre-amp onto their existing power amp to create the Bugera. Behringer have form in recycling their own designs and I've come across their 300W class D/100W A/B combination in a range of different PA speakers and monitors. Again to be fair this is common across many manufacturers who use essentially the same power amp across a whole range of active speakers throttled back to match the drive units. I've also recently acquired a SansAmp to go alongside my Behringer BD121, there is a generic similarity in the sound but it just isn't the same. It's way easier to dial up a pleasing sound with the Behringer which also doesn't have the same range of adjustment the SansAmp has. I wouldn't say either is 'better' and one is definitely a tribute act to the other but it isn't a straight copy. Any commercial designer would be a fool not to look at what their competitors are doing. It would be a real arrogance not to monitor the world around them. The boutique speaker makers have stimulated the big makers to look at making their own lightweight speaker cabs and if GRBass start to take significant market share then expect a rash of 'me-too' plastic bass cabs. If I were chief designer for Behringer/Music Tribe I'd be pretty much doing the same thing, reverse engineering everything I could find, taking the best bits from everywhere then bringing them together in a design I'd hope to have maximum appeal to everyone. I'd imagine all the big manufacturers have had a look at the insides of all their competitors products and keeping a wary eye on what the market is doing. (OK maybe not Gibson ) Ultimately if we see further it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants and we all benefit from the copying of good ideas and the dropping of poor ones. There's a problem in plagiarism if it starves the means to continue to innovate but IP is a double edged sword if it retards the spread of good ideas. Where would all us covers bands would be if Mick Jagger had never heard the Beatles and thought 'I want a slice of that'

The Hal Leonard books are as good as it gets for a beginner. Like many I started off with those, There's so much on You Tube now too. I had several false starts with other instruments so here's a few things that helped me. Practice every day I aimed for an hour but at first I didn't have enough to actually practice so it tended to be two sessions of half an hour. Learn whole songs not just riffs or the bits you like. It forces you to address things you otherwise skip and as you get more and more songs under your fingers you start to understand why the original bassists chose to play that way. The first song you can play the whole way through along with the original is such a buzz Buy a decent bass and amp. You'll work harder if it sounds good and the bass feels right in your hands. It doesn't have to be fearsomely expensive, there are a lot of well made, reasonably priced basses and great sounding amps and if you buy used you can always get your money back when it's time to trade up. Start playing with other people as soon as possible. Bass only really starts to make sense when you play with others. You'll probably be terrified for the first 10 minutes but then you'll have the biggest grin you've ever had in your life. I'm a little bit jealous

I'd go even further on the impossibility of any 'simple table', quite apart from the size of such a table. If you limited yourself to the 200 most popular bass cabs a table of 40,000 combinations would take a lot of searching It would be theoretically possible given enough data to predict the frequency response on axis of any given combination and to give indications of the off axis responses but would you need a greater level of detail to predict how each combination would interact with a range of rooms amplifiers and basses. You'd need a huge amount of detail though and the 'answer' to how it sounds would be just as technical and detailed as the questions. The big problem would be ow to interpret the data. The language we have to describe sounds is so vague and other people's perceptions so variable that a guide would be no more helpful than most restaurant reviews on Trip Advisor. How often is the best place to eat the sandwich bar that does a good sausage sandwich and not the Michelin starred restaurant and it's snail porridge? And, who is to say who is right. If you want to know who makes the best coffee then you need to go and taste it yourself. (I make it myself btw), but you might not like black strong Americano so me giving you the weights temperatures and pressures won't help you make anything other than the coffee I like. Ultimately if you really want to mix speakers you need to do the listening yourself.

No, this was just an initial impression, some amps you just can't make the change to the sound you want and others are entirely intuitive, hard to get a tone you don't like and this is what I found. Hopefully when we get time to start collecting measurements we can let you know.

These are crazy good value, I just bought one at £200 and I'm really happy with it at that. The amp actually measures in at just over 700W and essentially has a flat response with the tones set to 12.00. They are really nicely put together too even the fan is reasonably quiet and the eq centres are well chosen, the one knob compressor not too aggressive and so on. I'm tempted by the BQ250 as well, again a crazy price for a very serviceable backup/practice amp

I was looking for a 'version' of Auld Lang Syne and came across Der Toten Hosen, kind of German punk band. Then discovered a whole Christmas album and that they'd changed their name. Lots of easy to copy versions so great for a covers band. "Mit bonus tracks." https://open.spotify.com/album/6fjZocev4hdF6prrHEQeND

I think you may have thrown people by mentioning the Genelecs 😂 There's a reason this sort of thing doesn't really exist. Getting any sort of bass out of a tiny driver means huge excursion even at modest levels and that makes the driver unsuitable for the high notes. That little Celestion speaker is designed to work with a subwoofer and even the low mids are rolled off. If you want a project it might be worth looking around for something used that can be repurposed. An old cassete player (am I allowed to say Ghetto blaster) or mini hi-fi with plastic speaker cabs where you can rehouse the speakers in a better wooden cab. Alternatively when I worked in a recording studio we had a couple of car radio speakers in home made boxes. This is what people used to listen to music through and so we'd check the sound was good through those as well as on our monitors. It's a very long time ago but I think they had a single 7x4" speaker salvaged from a TV.

I've never knocked them off TBH but scuffs come up whiteish surprisingly.

Have you just done a single coat? I normally do three coats but that may be because I've done painting and decorating for a living and three coats are a thing. Primer, undercoat and top coat. my first coat is just to cover and create a primed surface and I apply the paint with a brush which gets into every crevice and leaves a flatter surface. This first coat is usually very thin. Then I apply a second coat where I keep rolling with a fine roller to get as even a coverage as possible. The paint is jelly like and stays open for at least 20mins so you can keep re-working it until there are no large bumps. I coat the whole cab then re-roll the whole cab in one go with even pressure and speed on the roller. Once this is dry I apply a much thicker layer of paint, the texture layer. Usually I use a coarse foam roller for this to give more texture but that is just my taste, I've done it with the smooth foam roller and also tufted rollers just to experiment with finish and it all works. This is where I take my time and care. The final coat needs to be done with a steady hand, a constant roller speed (I go really slowly) and even pressure. If you make a mistake and a panel looks diferent from the rest you can just flatten it with the roller and try again. I find it quite relaxing as the paint is so forgiving and you can vary the texture just by changing the pressure and roller speed. don't knock the nibs off though You'll get white marks!

Tuffcab is designed for a textured finish so a rough surface is to be expected, even a smooth foam roller will give a textured surface, I use them to get a 'linen' like effect. the paint goes touch dry in anything from 20 mins to an hour depending upon temperature and how thick the paint layer is. At this point you can knock the raised bits off but leave it for a day to fully cure and it lives up to its name ,Tuff. A dry roller will allow a smoother finish until it is fully laden with paint. If that isn't what is happening then you hae problems with adhesion to the surface. Most probably dust from the woodworking build. Before painting anything bruch off any dust then wipe the whole surface to be painted with a cloth dampened with whatever solvent the paint uses. In the case of Tuffcab that is water. Tuffcab isn't compatible with some fillers so if you've used filler and then sanded it you will have problems. Try priming your cab with a mix of 1/3 woodworking adhesive to 2/3 water to seal it.

Never say never but the chances of you installing a tweeter that works well is fairly low and changing the driver will change the rest of the sound of the combo and worse is more likely than better. you also have a valuable bit of kit that is going to be easy to sell and will be devalued quite a lot if you start to do surgery on it. To install a tweeter you'll need to design a crossover to manage rolling off the high frequencies as the tweeter takes over and to make sure only the top end goes to the tweeter. You'll also have to match the output of the tweeter to that of the bass driver or one will dominate the sound. Get any of this wrong and you'll introduce all sorts of issues where both the tweeter and woofer are sharing the sound. A generic off the shelf crossover will 'work' in the sense of making a sound but won't be matched to your speakers and will introduce problems with your midrange around the crossover frequency along with the extra zing. If you are handy with a soldering iron, have lots of patience and are willing to fiddle around you might get something you like better but it might be better and cheaper to sell the AMP 1 and try something else. Have you fully explored using eq or fx to get a bit of extra zing? Surgery should only ever be a last resort

I thought I'd read something but I've just never tried it

If you want to use both bass and guitar into the same source then you only have two options really: use emulations to get the tone and FRFR of some sort to bring that up to practice levels or something like the amps you suggest and be prepared to compromise either the bass sound or the guitar sound, or both for something in the middle. Only you can judge if a nice but compromised tone is going to let you happily get on with all the things you need to get out of practice, after all no-one else is going to be listening. If you decide to go the emulation route then using your home computer and a DAW to do the sound processing opens up a huge universe of possibilities, though I'd use a set of monitor speakers rather than a home hi-fi. (I came to BC today to look for monitor speaker recommendations) Hi fi speakers and unprocessed bass dynamics can be a problem. Great shout from @chyc Alternatively you don't have to go full Helix or whatever for emulations. The Zoom B1-four or G1-four both give a huge no of emulations and fx to play with and it is possible to get good bass sounds out of the G1 and good guitar out of the B1. At £65ea you could go for both. Then a small PA speaker could take that up to practice levels or even a bass amp. In my duo we tried the G1 through my Warwick Gnome and bass speaker and it sounded good. Other combinations are available.

Youll need something which takes an XLR (microphone lead) and has a headphone output with some way of adjusting volume. Sitting here I have a small mixer which does the job when I'm practicing. I've also got an audio interface which I use for recording and a Behringer Micromon which will do the job. The only problem you have then is that these will probably have to sit on the floor without a belt pack so you'll need a long lead to your headphones. That's not ideal So, XLR in, volume control, headphone out. long headphone lead If you are depping they should have a beltpack for the regular bassist. No one would want to lend you something that shares earwax but the beltpack ought to not be a problem for them to lend.