Phil Starr

We have a new drummer. Oh the joy of a drummer who can really play, something I've tasted only briefly at open mics and with one band which didn't last for other reasons but this is our drummer. After one rehearsal and one gig we went into the recording studio which we'd booked to record with our previous drummer. We're only a pop covers band but song one we did two takes 3.14 and 3.15. Song 2 2.46 and 2.46. third song 3.34 and 3.33, song 4 3.22, 3.23 and 3.23. My god playing bass is easy even though I'm going to have to up my game it's going to be such a joy. Not just perfect timing either.

I think you've realised you just have the wrong tool for the job and Bill has explained why. Your speakers are notable designs and there are advantages in small drivers, yours don't lack bass but they are only the equivalent of inefficient 1x10's where efficiency has been traded for good bass. Not all tens and 12's are equal but really the minimum you need is a good 2x10 or really good single 12 to keep up with a drummer. For mid range gear a couple of 12's will work well using one for the less demanding situation and doubling up when you play bigger venues. You probably need to upsize but remember to look for something that sounds good to you, not just to jump to the first thing.

They are singing this morning. I have spares here

the 45-105's were reduced on Amazon three days ago.

I started out with Rotosounds, hated the 'zing' when new but a week in they were perfect for me. I couldn't afford to keep replacing them once a month though. Tried everything and decided flats weren't for me and only stainless would do. I ran my own trial of Elixirs versus Blue Steels on two different basses, which I changed after a year. You could easily hear a difference with both sets of new strings but the improvement was similar for both so I concluded that there was no advantage in spending out on the Elixirs. Since they also sounded like old strings from the get go and I preferred the Blue Steels throughout they have been my go-to strings. The difference between new ones and year old ones is minimal. I've never used them for 4 years before though On the plus side if I do prefer the old ones it's going to save me a lot in the future

I'm not quite replacing like with like so I'll need to do a set up and check intonation. I'll take a second bass along too Rationally we all know what new strings do so I'm presenting this as an irrational fear. The sound is going to be a bit brighter but the studio will do what it wants/needs to do. It's a lot simpler to take stuff out of the signal than to add it in. I'll clean up the old strings and keep them for a while just in case they are the golden strings but I'm not really a believer in magic. It's a case of 'holding on to nurse, for fear of finding something worse' of course. I'm just wondering if others share that feeling or alternatively how we all feel about old strings, and if there are any real benefits. Thanks for the suggestions though

I'm genuinely nervous. We are going into the recording studio next week and my strings (Dean Markley Blue Steels) date back to 2BC, two years before Covid. It's time for a new set, Blue Steels really last but I usually changed them once a year. The trouble is that this set have been sounding absolutely great for the past few months. I've been loving playing them, am I going to regret this? New strings always makes it feel like a new bass but they sound so good...... Does anyone else get this sort of anxiety? Anyone else get the 'it's working don't touch it thing? On the plus side my poor bass will get a proper clean, wish me well I'm going in

If this is a multi-band event you may have to go with it. It won't be a matter of just parking your stuff on stage and playing. There's going to have to be connections to the PA and a balance to set, potentially cabs to mic up and they won't know what standard of care you've taken over your gear and what might not be working as a consequence. Then you've got to take all your stuff down at the end and the next band have to wait whilst you are moving out. It can easily suck up half an hour of everyone's time to change over between two bands. There is no harm in asking though, and if you are the only band it isn't very reasonable. If it's one of those events where they give each band half an hour then you'll probably have to roll with it or politely turn the gig down. If you go ahead it might be worth chucking your gear in the van anyway. The sound engineers may be a lot more flexible than the promoter (or not)

You don't suggest a budget but The Zoom B1Four is such a good shout. There's absolutely nothing to beat it for anything like the money. £69 Here is what it does. You plug the bass in and a set of headphones and you can practice in silence. Inside are electronic patches that will make your bass sound like you are playing through a whole range of different and very expensive gear. Unplug the phones and you can put it through your amp and even use it on stage. It has a mini-jack input so you can plug in your phone/computer etc and then you can play along with any song you choose. It has a built in tuner for getting those strings in tune. It has a built in metronome and drum machine to play along with This is the perfect practice engine. The headphone sound is great and playing along with your favourite songs is a great way of mearning.. Playing with drums that you can slow down and speed up is probably enen more useful. if less fun. The Zoom runs on batteries or a power supply or with a USB lead. I use mine for 80-90% of my personal practice. It also has dozens of studio quality effects built in and it works as a looper Zoom B1-4

It's hard to see on the pics but to me that looks like a split rail supply. The rectifier bridge is to the right of the transformer and there is a positive and negative lead sheathed in black going up to the main board between the two fuses on the left. there is another lead running from the transformer that runs up to connect between them and you can just make out the track beneath the board which is the centre/earth rail. This isn't gospel, I'm just saying that is where I would be looking. If you don't understand any bit of that then it is probably sensible to pass this on to someone else. The electric shock you might get off those smoothing capacitors ( the big black things) will be much worse than any mains shock and in rare cases are capable of stopping your heart. I can't see any sign of a bleed circuit so they will retain their charge for some time even if the amp is switched off and unplugged from the mains. Please be careful, this is not a trivial job, blowing the amp is the least of your worries.

Always the way, I had one glorious year using someone else's PA until I accidentally let slip that I'd picked up a few bits and pieces Glad it went well

Sometimes I worry about how my mind works. I love this sort of discussion I don't think there is a problem free way of fixing a speaker to a cab. All the regular methods are problematic in some way. You start with fixing holes which are often around 6mm from the speaker cutout with a 5mm hole drilled to take the fixing. that leaves you 3.5mm of 'wood' to prevent any sideways movement. Less unless you've cut both your cutout and drilled your screwhole perfectly. After you drill a hole the wood fibres, released of pressure are going to expand a little and close the hole, that's why you can't just slide the T-nuts in or why your Rawlplug needs hammering in. If you are using plywood you will have unseen voids which will mean some of your screw is going into air, not wood. Not all timbers are equal, some species are a lot harder than others. Fast grown poplar is softer than many timbers, oak famously hardens with age, the moisture content affects hardness as does the part of the tree the wood is taken from and so on. If you are dealing with plywood most of the time you have no idea what the inner plies are. A lot of 'poplar' ply is actually Eucalyptus internally and even the outer veneer is a Chinese poplar. Baltic birch is often only birch on the outer layers and if it comes from Kaliningrad it is probably from trees grown in Russia (which may be fine of course, it's a big country) I quite like t-nuts, you are pulling them up towards the speaker frame with the baffle sandwiched in between The shape of them spreads the load a little and if you have a weaker piece of wood underneath it is still going to hold. Your bolt is in a metal thread so it's way stronger than it needs to be and you are going to have no problem removing the bolts unless it all rusts. The downsides are the appalling quality of most T-nuts with poorly sharpened prongs at well off 90 degrees and poor thread cutting. They can be quite big so the diameter takes them right to the edge of the cutout and the prongs break the edge or even stick out past the edge. After losing one or two by pushing too hard on the bolt I now don't push too hard and I don't cross thread then because if they are tight with my fingers I stop and investigate. I don't hammer them in either, not on a speaker mounting I use a washer and tighten the bolt against it and pull them in, Screws are great in that they are quick and easy. you need a pilot hole if they are close to that fragile edge, even if they say they are self drilling you are going to get some expansion when they go in and a couple of mm of ply won't take that. Every now and then one will slip and pull out when you tighten it, all that variable wood or lack of wood. I just drill out a bigger hole and use a Rawlplug. I've never used a threaded insert, though I've come across them in commercial cabs. They seem to work. The biggest lesson I've learned is that you need to drill the right sized hole, at right angles with the right drill bit and properly centred. Use a brad point bit They are much easier to centre and they are self guiding , cut a much cleaner edge and clean out the sawdust effectively. Ordinary twist drills are much harder to centre and often wander off when you start to cut, in something as soft as timber it's really hard to stay square and you can easily end up with a slightly oval hole with rough edges. Don't pooh pooh the speaker clamps either, the metal L shaped brackets. Ugly as sin but that's not a problem if they are under the speaker grille and are painted black. By moving the fixing point away from that soft edge you have a much better chance of a nice firm fixing. I use them a lot when developing a new speaker as getting the speaker back out is simple with less chance of sticking a screwdriver though a nice new speaker That all makes it sound difficult but it really isn't, just take a little care and it'll be fine.

Let us know how you get on

It's good to see you and @GlamBass74are sharing tips. I can't tell you the number of people here who've helped me over the years. Most of what I build are prototypes, I like the design and testing process and I'm naturally restless. I frequently cut corners and many of my cabs start life with speakers just screwed in. I've had the odd screw loose (!) but never had a speaker come loose and rarely had a rattle. The idea is that I would always replace the screws with T-nuts but sometimes that takes months or years I tend to use 18mm hardwood ply though. Poplar ply is softer and if you have 12mm poplar then sticking a little square of wood for the screw to sink into would be better. I guess my 'official' advice would be why not screw the speaker in place so you can test it at home then use the screw holes as guides for drilling out to fit the T-nuts before you start carrying it around.

I cleaned out my titebond bottle and now re-use it with whatever glue I'm using it is a great design.

How's the build going?

''''''' Help yourself, I have plenty used and unused laying around

That paints a picture This is BassChat so I'll limit myself to bass. Look for another band, unless this one is gigging regularly you won't need to give up on this one. As my wife says 'don't put your dirty underwear out until you have clean'. So you are a reader, with a musical background who can also play by ear. You know enough about music to improvise and you can sing, at least enough for you to do backing vocals and maybe harmonies. You take what you do seriously and you want to work harder. You may not realise it but you are hot property. Stop apologising about your age too. I didn't start playing until I was 55, zilch/rien/nothing apart from a few guitar chords as a 14 year old. I've been between bands a couple of times and in multiple bands when it looked like a band had reached the end of it's development. Musically those gaps were the most fertile periods. I filled them with regular auditions which forces you to learn half a dozen songs quickly. I also teamed up with friends at open mics, depped for a few bands and just generally took anything offered. It forced me to learn a lot of songs and I hate making a fool of myself so even the open mic stuff I worked at. That's the way to get a lot of different rhythms under your fingers too, every genre has things that make it what it is and everything is a learning opportunity. I briefly played in a country band, how hard can it be? It had me screaming, playing simply and well with nowhere to hide is a discipline itself. The advantage of lots of activity is that there just aren't that many musicians out there and they will soon get to know you. Become part of that community and things will come along.

Ha ha, I don't think we'll ever run out of things to learn, that's part of the fun. Are you in a band?

Let's address a couple of technical things first maybe. There's lots of complexity in matching cabs but generally speaking a 300W RMS or AES cab will 'handle' the output from a 300W RMS amp in the sense that you can normally expect a long life without much probability of blowing the speaker . The only proviso is a real idiot can achieve damage in almost any situation Most of the time you can use a more powerful amp and if you don't use a lot of bass boost or distortion you'll also be fine so 180W at 8 ohms into your 8ohm 150W speaker is probably fine (but listen out for signs of stress) Don't worry about 4 or 8 ohms too much. The difference in sound output is unlikely to be huge but with 8 ohms you can add another 8ohm speaker later so I'd go there if it were a straight choice. But a 4 ohm 2x10 is just two 8ohm 10's in a single box. Don't even think about attenuators for bass. Size does matter, a bit anyway. A tiny speaker is not going to be loud enough to match a drumkit, unless you pay a fortune a 2x10 or a single 12 is about as small as you can go and even then some older gear can struggle. Old gear tends to be heavier so for someone 'rather disabled' a newer lightweight cab is a good if expensive solution. The Mag 300 is quite a weight too, maybe look at a newer amp too Do you have a budget in mind?

I wonder why you ask? I wasn't clear whether you are looking for something to work on in your skill set or if it the job you aspire to? Or maybe you are just musing? Let's be clear, the hurdle for a working session musician and a covers band are the difference between Olympic qualification and entering the parents egg and spoon race. You can already do much more than I can and I''ve been gigging in covers bands every other weekend for years. Learning 30 songs by memory playing four to the bar and the root note in the right places gets you an awful long way. Listening and responding to the rest of the band helps a lot too. I take it seriously and practice daily and try to be professional in my attitude but technically I don't offer much, fortunately I've not been rumbled yet Being in a successful touring band is a matter of luck, no disrespect but most of us here could probably learn the whole of the Rolling Stones (insert almost any band you like) back catalogue and go on tour playing it but weren't there when Keef and Mick were growing up. To be a session musician or a professional gun for hire you need to be good, either good at one thing which you will get hired for or with high level musical skills. Growing up my best friends father was a classical musician, he played French Horn variously for the BBC Symphony, Philharmonic and the LSO and incidentally for the Beatles (on Rubber Soul) He practiced lots, hours a day, every day, he treated it like a job! He probably had a lot of talent too, had studied since a child and was a really personable man. The big skill most musicians miss though is enterprise, you aren't going to join a band unless you get out there to find other people to play with. Look for the ads, answer the ads go to auditions, prepare for auditions, say yes to playing with other people. Go to gigs and talk to people. Advertise for people to play with you. Hang around places you know the local musicians hang out or find out where they go if you do. Start your own band. Be flexible too, the chances of you meeting three other musicians whose taste exactly matches yours is close to zero.

Out of curiosity I checked and Faital have used the same length of voice coil in both variants you used and the specs are very close, they have gone to a lot of effort to keep the impedance as the only variable. They also give the same sensitivity at 1W/1m. Unfortunately they don't state their method so this could be with a 2.83V input which is the usual method which gives 1W into 8 ohms but 2W into 4ohms which would give you an extra 3db. You don't say how you did your listening tests; if you have two cabs for example so the test was done quickly or of you simple removed the driver but kept the amp settings the same. The latter would of course mean you were testing the 4ohm speaker with twice the power. There's an old trick used a lot by retailers that when demonstrating sound systems you set up so that the one you want to sell is the loudest, people universally like the louder sounds and we are very sensitive to changes in volume which we perceive as a change in tone. Listening tests are notoriously difficult to do well. Moving a speaker or you head position even a few cm can create a perceived change in sound because of room acoustics. Faitals own data suggests that you probably wouldn't hear any difference between these two at the same power, even at full power so long as the amp was capable. It's a good choice of driver though, I'm increasingly looking at Faital first when designing cabs and this gives me even more respect for what they are doing.

They are fabulous but really quite heavy. I wouldn't want to carry one by public transport.

I think you have found the two best options. GR are new to the block so not many people will have tried them. There are lots of people here who have used the Barefaced 110 so much more personal experience. They do sound good and they regularly comne up for sale here used so you could pick up one for less money. I've listened to one of the GR 2x12's and they are remarkably light and they do sound good. The only downside is that the case material is brittle and there are some reports of them getting damaged easily, that may be an issue on public transport and you'd probably want a properly padded bag for it as a minimum. In the end these are both great and will do a job for you but you can only get so far with a single 10" driver. Any single 10 is going to struggle if your drummer turns out to be a loud one but these will be as good as it gets and better than your PJB. There are tricks you can use to squeeze extra volume out though. Filter the deepest bass with an HPF, https://www.talkbass.com/wiki/high-pass-and-low-pass-filters/, use a compressor/limiter to protect the speaker against any peaks or just turn down the bass on the eq. It's worth knowing that the TC BAM, Warwick Gnome and TE Elf pocket amps all have some HPF built in. I'm amazed you didn't get more suggestions for the Barefaced to be honest. Alex Claber used to be a regular Bass Chatter and has a lot of fans here. His cabs are about as light as a wooden cab can be and he uses quality drivers in his cabs. The only other suggestion I can make is that LFSys are about to bring out a 110, I doubt it will be as lightweight as the other two but it will be a one handed carry and will sound exceptional. They are only in prototype at the moment but it might be worth sending a pm to @stevie