Phil Starr

That's brilliant, I still get excited at every gig but the first one....... Be prepared, gigs can be chaotic at times and the more secure you are about your bits the less the chance you will panic. Other people in the band will make mistakes and the better you know your songs the less likely you are to get thrown by things. Unless @Woodinblack knows different never trust a provided PA/backline. I always take my own gear even if it ends up staying in the van or more frequently on stage but turned down or even off. If you can't hear yourself or the band can't hear you then there's no way the gig will go well. It's probably better that the audience can hear you too Great advice from everyone else, especially about the dark/flashing coloured lights. There's nothing worse than trying to set up your gear in the dark when the previous/next band are treading all over the stage. If you make a mistake glare at the drummer, if he glares at you it's because he got it wrong Have fun!

That's quite sensible, I'm making the move to in-ears but if I have little or no control of the PA I like to have an amp in reserve. If the monitoring is good I turn it off/down but there is a bit of pride in setting up with a good sound and every now and then, well you need to have a blast. I'm also quite lazy about tone so an amp that is plug in and go is quite a nice proposition. I quite like what my Peavey MiniMax does. Most f us do this for pleasure and nice gear is a pleasure. Don't completely discount the monitor though, Alto's are great value for money but there is so much better out there. Even the humble ART310 from RCF makes a great monitor and I use mine for bass, my vocals and a bit of FOH when I don't have in-ears. If you have in-ears maybe the guitarist ought to be upgrading their monitor

The more sound you make on stage the more your instruments will be picked up by the vocal mics and the dirtier your sound will be out front. It's essential though that you can all hear each other so there's a balance. It's hard to get the exactly right balance to everyone and the room acoustics affect this so if you play in different venues one night where it sounds good may be to do with that. You might be better off looking into in-ears or the mix going into your guitarists monitor rather than ramping up the on-stage volume. Just a thought.

For multi purpose use why not look at a small active PA speaker? It has the advantage of no inbuilt sound of it's own and you can then do the modelling outboard. Zoom G1/B1-four for example then you have great guitar sounds and bass sounds. Something like the Alto TS308 will give you very decent sound and volumes in a compact package.

If you love the sound of your 110 then stick to getting a second, you'll get a worthwhile increase in sound levels if you need it and will preserve your sound. They come up used on BC fairly frequently so your wait shouldn't be too long.

Have you finished the Eight I think the 'fighting physics' thing is important without being totally crucial. Cone size affects a lot of outcomes though there are technical ways of stretching the limits. We live in a time where amplifier watts are abundant and cheap, so speaker efficiency isn't so important. FX and amp/speaker modellers are getting better and a guitarist (no booing please) doesn't need a full Marshall stack to 'get their sound' any more. That itself has a knock on effect on the rest of the band and bassists no longer need to 'compete' with guitarists. PA systems have come along so we don't need to fill the room from the backline. We've reached a stage where for most of the time your bass amp only needs to work as a monitor for the band and match the drumkit. A reasonably decent 12" speaker with 300W of amp can be expected to do this. It should go to something like 122db at 1 metre from 80Hz upwards with a -10db point of 40Hz and do so in a reasonably sized portable cab. We no longer really need 4x10's and if you can do it with a 12 why carry a 15. A single 10 will be fine a lot of situations but most if not all will struggle in others. So long as you have PA support for the bigger gigs a good 12 will do almost all you'd want and is the Swiss army knife of cabs.

I wouldn't be choosing cabs on the basis of impedance but how they sound. Ask what sort of sound you want, is weight and portability important and so on first of all. The probability is that with 1200W into a pair of 4 ohm cabs or even 800w into 8 ohms you are going to be able to drown out the rest of the band and blow the whole bands eardrums/cochlea so extra volume is the last thing you want even if your 4ohm speakers could handle 600W. Do you have a particular speaker in mind?

Thanks, that sounds more reasonable then especially if they did contact you before going ahead.

Being reasonable it is really hard to fix intermittent faults. The problem often disappears and you can't diagnose a fault that isn't there and so often you can leave the amp on a test bench for an hour or so and it maddeningly decides to behave only to repeat the fault when it gets back to the customer. Having said that if it worked for a year before playing up again then you could say it was fixed and that what you have is a new fault and something else is just giving similar symptoms, or of course it could be an inherent fault with this amp and the responsibility is MB's not Real's However £180 is an extraordinary cost for replacing the pots and why would you replace anything if you can find no fault? Did they contact you before going ahead with this repair? I was quoted around £200 for fitting a replacement board, effectively replacing all the works inside the amp so effectively fitting a complete new amp inside my case. If there were only a few tens of pounds between a complete new amp and a bodged repair why wouldn't they advise you to have a new board? At the moment MarkBass take no responsibility for their products outside of warranty and do not provide parts or circuit diagrams to third party repairers preferring to keep (probably sell) a monopoly to Real. Real have a monopoly so they don't need to respond to customer pressure and their attitude is take it or leave it. Mark Bass gear is effectively just a disposable item with no after sales support in the UK

As you know there is a limit to what you can reasonably expect of a single 10. There's only so much sound a 10" speaker can shift and you can reach this limit with less than 200W. There are tweaks to squeeze a little more out of a driver but in the end you hit physical limits and the design trade-offs tend to cancel each other out. In the end if you want more sound you need to have a bigger piston. Higher rated 10" drivers are likely to be designed for specialist use in multi-way systems. 2-300W is about it for power handling but of course it isn't/shouldn't be a problem to just turn the volume down. Anyway here is the 10" cab design. I've used it successfully at rehearsals and small gigs and just as a stage monitor. You could just leave out the horn and crossover but it sounds so good with it I don't know why you would, unless funds are tight.

Well done John, this is what self build should be about. I love it when someone takes a design and with a bit of initiative pushes it a little further. The original House Jam speaker was built just for this use and started life using a guitar practice amp to drive the speaker. All I wanted was something with just enough power to match an acoustic guitar for those 'acoustic only' occasions. It was only when I tried the cab only version with my proper bass amp that I realised it could be pushed a lot further than that. So now I'm going to have to do some work building my own combo. I bought a Warwick Gnome (I wanted the BAM but it wasn't available at the time) to do just that but haven't pulled my finger out yet. I hope you get many hours of pleasure from your design, I hope the acoustic world is ready for you

You saying I'm old John?

Generally speaking the marked cable (black line) is positive but you can't be certain without testing. As you've been told it won't matter until you connect up a second speaker. Borrow a second speaker and try it, if the bass drops away then they are wired up so that one goes forward when the other goes back and they are cancelling. So long as the two speakers are fairly close the cancellation will be really obvious. Reverse the connection in the Trace and you should get the bass back.

It would be good to know which PA speaker you used, that photo isn't very clear. I've wondered why more people haven't tried this, I just sold a couple of Yamaha S115IV's for £150 as part of a complete PA system. The bass drivers are OEM Eminence Delta Pro's and they also use Eminence compression drivers and have a decent crossover with built in protections for the drivers. Effectively that's a 15+horn for £75. Eveyone is unloading their passive speakers so they are really cheap if you buy used. Choose a PA speaker that can handle a decent amount of bass and it's a cheap way to try the FRFR experience, OK your bass amp may not be perfectly flat but if you don't like the sound you can move the speaker on for whatever you paid for it. I know that a few years ago even a budget Maplin Pro-Sound outperformed a number of bass speakers in a shootout.

There used to be an advertising campaign for margarine. Blindfolded people couldn't tell Stork from butter. I used to repeat this test with my 'a' level biology students as an introduction to stats. 10 slices of bread, five buttered and five with marge'. Nobody ever got 10/10 and I can't remember anyone ever getting 5/10. I had to explain that getting 1/10 meant they were good at this they just preferred marge'! we consistently year to year came up with averages between 7 and 8/10. Humans are notoriously bad at detecting these differences which is why we measure so much. Good luck if you are ever falsely arrested and depend upon an identity parade! The reality is that certainly in biology and medicine truth is statistical. My students could do better than chance on identifying butter. Vaccines improve the outcomes for a proportion of people and some vaccines work better than others. If the efficacy is very different you can pick this up with a small sample but the less difference there is the larger the sample you need to be confident in your test. There are accepted mathematical techniques for testing whether a set of data are actually significant and at what level. For a scientist statistics is actually the way of challenging and examining the data, ironically you don't lie with statistics, you lie with data. In this case as described it's hard to see what on earth they were trying to test, the assumption that the skill level of an ordinary person was 0 isn't a safe one to make. It seems unlikely to be true and they may have been as good as a musician at hearing a difference. The musicians and non musicians also might be able to tell that there was a difference but might have preferred the VT pedal. It just isn't clear what hypothesis they were testing and what null-hypothesis was used in the statistical analysis, if any was done. If indeed the test was as described there were too many variables to make any sense of the results.

@stevie deserves all the credit for that design, I designed the tweeterless version. Stevie's cabinet is fantastic though

Yeah, I like the look of a grille cloth but it's years since I used it. I've done a few cabs recently and one of the big problems is that all the British manufacturers seem to have disappeared (well we knew that anyway) and so it is difficult to get hold of decent quality cloth at sensible prices. Allparts stock a range and I've found a Chinese supplier who do the same range and may be the source for Allparts. Historically I used to always heat the cloth before fitting to soften it and I fitted some black and tan cloth that way sold to me off evilbay as 'American Style'. Unfortunately it was the type that shrinks when heated and it shrunk a bit, fortunately it had enough 'shrink' left to finish the job although it was a bit untidy. I experimented with thee offcuts later and this material would have been easy to fit if I'd known (there were no instructions). Later I bought the Marshall Bluesbreaker cloth from Allparts and this was completely different, much thicker and tougher. I cut off a sample and tried the heatgun on it. It didn't shrink and the heat discoloured it. It was really tough to stretch but in the end went on well and looked great. The moral is that you need to know what you have before you start and they don't tell you. Email to check or order enough to cut a sample. Beware also, most of the cloth on ebay is for hi-fi speakers and not tough enough for touring gear. I'm going to order some samples from the Chinese supplier soon and do some experimenting over the next couple of months, I'll report back when I have more information.

Welcome to Basschat You'll have gathered that this has been discussed a lot in these pages so it might be worth using the search facility to find some of the older threads. Equally we forget sometimes that we were all new here once so I'll attempt a quick answer. The gist of this is that size is only one of the things that contributes to the 'sound' of a speaker. It's important, but only a small part of what makes the overall sound. Not all 15's sound the same by a very long way and neither do all 10's. It's not even true that bigger speakers have more bass than small ones; my 5" hi-fi cabs go lower than my 12" bass speakers. So, it's not a very informative debate, most of your answers will be of the 'I've got an xxxxx speaker and I love it it's a 10/12/15 so that's the size I like. The best advice is to approach speaker buying with an open mind and listen to as many speakers as you can, then choose the one you like irrespective of the size of the driver/s.

It is really encouraging to know that others are having the same problems as I have, and many of us share. Like @ubit I jut can't get my head round playing and singing 'All These Things' but as others have said Dakota is a cinch. What has helped me are a couple of lead singers who have been both patient and encouraging. They'll put up with the odd bit of pitching for the right sort of reinforcement in other songs. I started with one or two songs in the set and I've slowly built up to about a dozen or so, mostly big chorus songs. It's encouraging that when I sing the audience usually joins in and when I don't the song often falls flat.They may just be trying to block me out of course My experience is slightly different though, I can only really pitch accurately if I can hear the monitors, without the PA I feel lost and I even have to set it up at home to practice.

It's true I have the same problem and that's how i found out how hard sanding Tuff Cab is Always have to find things the hard way!

Tuff cab is great, it's full of solids so it builds really well. It goes on as a sort of gel, a bit like painting on Swarfega in texture and it stays workable for quite a long time but it sets really hard. The long open time means mistakes are really simple to correct and you can work slowly and carefully FWIW I have a simple process I now stick to. First make sure all your sanding and shaping is done, sanding back set Tuff Cab is almost impossible it's scratch resistance is also sandpaper resistance. First coat I apply with a paint brush, I apply a thin layer but take care to get it into every crack and crevice. I have tried thinning it to get deeper penetration but it isn't necessary and the adherence is excellent if you have a dust free surface, I've never had any peeling or scratches through to the wood. Second coat I apply a generous coat of paint all over the cab (again I use a brush) and then use a standard mini roller to even out the spread all over the cab. Having an even coat is important for the texturing. I'm aiming for about 0.2-3 mm depth of paint here all over the cab. Having got it even I then do a very light rollering over each panel in turn using long strokes of the roller all in the same direction. This lifts a texture on the paint which I think of as a 'linen' effect like a coarse cloth finish. The texture will depend upon how coarse your roller is, the thickness of the paint and how quickly you move the roller so slow light even movement is what i aim for. The glory is that Tuff Cab stays open for so long if you aren't happy you can just flatten it and repeat, it's a joy to work with. Final coat I apply an even thicker layer, it doesn't drip so you don't get runs. Again I use the roller to even the paint layer first then do a finishing pass with a coarse roller. I have the coarse foam rollers sold specially by Blue Aran but I've used thicker mini rollers too and you can get a good effect either way, just different. I've done a lot of house painting so I'm used to a three coat paint finish and three coats might be unnecessary but this is a system that works for me. The attraction of Tuff Coat is that it is so forgiving, take your time and it's hard not to get a good finish

I guess it depends upon exactly how you'd use it (and we are all different) but if losing wires is a priority there's a different approach. The Zoom G1/B1Four runs off batteries so that loses one lead. It has effects/tuner/drum machine/metronome/headphone amp built in and you can mix in a stereo signal to play along to so it is a complete standalone solution. I think you can download patches, though I've never tried. That might let you have a a mix of bass and guitar patches on yours, you'd have to investigate that. I've used the G1ON for bass and got some good sounds with bass. You'd lose the interface aspect though and if you were combining your practice with recording it wouldn't be as good a fit. You'd also lose the laptop modelling as it would all be on the Zoom. On the plus side it's so cheap you could have it as well as what you have just for those times when all you want to do is play. It's probably not what you want but but as a plug and play practice machine it's worth a mention.

I think there might be something happening on the 25th that is affecting deliveries I've used them and have also found going direct to the courier is sometimes cheaper. I'm guessing there are a lot of people working flat out and no-one is seriously looking to take on extra deliveries so couriers aren't currently off-loading their spare slots to P2G

Bill my aim here is to enlighten not to confuse, and as I always do I stated clearly that I had simplified things in my post. I don't think anyone here wants technical nit-picking. I stand by the general principles of what was in the post. I was clear in saying "Now there is quite a lot of over-simplification here" You yourself have failed to mention that a practical speaker is rarely actually mounted flush with the wall but some distance in front of it leading to comb filtering issues so that the neat calculated response you put up is not a reflection of what would happen in practice. I'm sure you know this and offered a simple explanation that people would understand.

So the graph below is the predicted response of a 12" speaker in a 60litre box, the red line shows a ported cab and the blue line a sealed cab. Same driver same box. The first thing to see is that above 300hz the lines converge and pretty much the whole of the midrange and top end are going to be the same. Exactly as @Twincam discovered when they tried the experiment. Below 200 Hz and for a full two octaves the red line is higher showing that the ported cab is a lot louder and gives a lot more bass. There's an extra 6db at 50 Hz where the port is tuned. That's the same as if you moved from a 200W amp to an 800W amp, and more is better right? It's really hard for a designer to ignore this effect, when you go to try the speaker out in a showroom the ported cab is going to be louder and bassier and sales teams know that this is what sells. It is also what most customers want so why would a designer choose to withhold the extra bass? The sealed cab gives a -3db of 76 Hz and the ported -3db of 50 hz, hands up who will buy the 50Hz cab over the 76Hz cab? OK now move into a gig. Put the cab on the floor and the bottom end gets a 3db boost, back against the wall another 3db. Now you start to notice something else. That sealed cab has a nice flat response that tails off slowly, the sealed cab has a sharp knee and lots of deep bass. The extra 3db makes up for the missing bass for the sealed cab and it sounds a little better. 3db of deep bass isn't so helpful for a cab which already has enough deep bass and it starts to sound boomy/muddy. This is exactly what @BassAdder27 was describing in terms of mid-punch versus fullness or roundness. Extra bass isn't always good, you need to make decisions based on what sound you prefer and recognise that what works in one situation won't sit comfortably in the mix in another. Now there is quite a lot of over-simplification here. I've deliberately chosen a driver which will 'work' in both a sealed or ported cab and which is the sort of speaker you'll find in a lot of mid priced commercial cabs. I've also used the sealed cab size that gives the flattest response, that happens to give the nearly 2db peak for the ported cab. I could have easily changed drivers, porting and tuning to create a flat response ported cab. I've chosen to emphasize difference too but you are always going to get that extra bass from a ported cab all other things being equal. It's the sound coming out of the port that does that and the port does other stuff too. There's a bit of a generic difference between ported and sealed cabs but a good designer can create a good response from either sort of cab with the choice of driver and the careful matching of the cab There's one other thing to think about too. We almost can't hear bass, not the deep stuff. Most of what we hear as bass is the second harmonic, 80-160Hz for a four string so -3db at 76Hz is more liveable with than you'd expect and on top of that what really makes the timbre of your bass is all up in the mid frequencies where the cab makes little difference.