Phil Starr

It strikes me that you are paying a lot for a smaller box to put on a pedal board, great idea though that is. These amps are pushing £500 for a single ICE power amp. For £299 you could get a Crown PA amp with 500W stereo or up to 1500W in bridge mode. 60% of the price for twice the amp. If all you want is a power amp and don't mind the profile of a PA amp then I don't think these boutique solutions are good value. I know John (ChienmortBB) is working on an amp to build into the Basschat V3 speaker cab maybe he could design our very own power amp. A single ICE amp module with a nice beefy supply should be relatively straightforward if you could source the boards cheaply enough.

OMG why haven't I done that with my router, such an obvious idea, and your workshop is so clean and tidy compared with mine.

For the cost of the TS3 12 and 18 you could get the RCF 735's, quicker to set up because there are only two boxes easier to carry and more importantly they will sound better. The Alto's are unbelievable value for money but are still budget speakers. The RCF's are pretty much the best sounding speakers in this price bracket at the moment. They'll comfortably handle bass and kick drum without subs in any pub venue. If you did want to go for the 'something special' then the RCF 745's at £1100 each have a better bass driver but importantly a high quality horn driver that crosses over lower down and improves the sound quality even further. Either sound better than the QSC's that we use which were once the speakers to beat. I don't own the QSC's and I'm looking at the RCF 735's myself, my only remaining concern is that I will regret not spending the extra money for the once in a lifetime purchase that the 745's would represent.

OK that's potentially a big budget. The top end of what most pub bands would spend and potentially enough for a great PA. A few more questions: How technical are you? Are you looking for something simple and set and forget or a wide range of options and flexibility? Does the budget have to include mic's, stands, leads and monitors or do you have bits and pieces? How are you going to monitor? are you thinking in-ears, floor monitors or back-line and vocal monitors? How many in the band, what sort of music, what sort of volumes do you operate at?

We gig with QSC K12's which are fab but with a price tag to match. Even though they are only 12's we have run bass and kick through them with no fuss in a large pub. We are going down the Behringer XR18 route in the near future to improve our monitoring and reduce our set up time. For monitors we use RCF ART310 mk3 which are perfect, lovely flat response so no feedback issues. I've also used them as PA speakers and again they just work really well. I've also got an old Wharfedale EVP pa system with a couple of subs which we've used for open air festivals successfully, they sound great but weigh a tonne so they don't come out much nowadays. I paid £400 for two 12"tops and the two 15" subs and it is worth looking out for used. Wharfedale support is good if anything goes wrong. (hint, don't let the drummer do PA) I'm thinking of upgrading I did a straight comparison between the RCF 712 and the Yamahas at PMT (I'm a big fan of Yamaha) but have to say the vocal quality of the RCF's was just better and the sound generally a lot cleaner. Actually prefer them to the QSC's which have a slight harshness at times. Splitting hairs here though all three are good speakers. If funds are tight and you just want something cheap then the Wharfedale Titan 12 is really interesting, it's loud and lightweight, vocals and guitar are really well done but the downside is that with high levels of bass the plastic cab resonates a lot, fine if you filter everything at 80Hz but you aren't going to put kick or bass through it and you might need to watch keyboard too. I've used them at really high levels with a couple f JBL subs though. The price to performance ratio though is totally mad £125 for a 127dB active speaker that renders vocals really well is at a price where I'm tempted myself even though I have a couple anyway https://www.andertons.co.uk/live-pa/pa-systems/active-pa-speakers/wharfedale-titan-12d-black-finish-active-pa-speaker-250w-50w

It's interesting that almost no-one has changed their minds. No criticism in that as it has to be a personal decision but I'm in the camp where there is good and bad in everyone and I prefer to believe in the good and try to be as straight as I can myself in the hope it might edge the good behaviour on. Not to say I haven't got the same stubborn nasty streak we all carry. What have you got to lose? Local band goodish standard and you know 3/4 so it's not going to be a lot of work. Would 10 decent gigs make it worthwhile? 20? Any band might go sour or you may find Dave turns out to be a friend for life. I've usually been bandleader and it isn't easy keeping folks happy. He may have wanted you all along but the keyboardist wanted his mate and persuaded the others. My experience is that it is easier to get other positions if you are already working so if you see something better you haven't lost much. If you don't do it you'll never know, if it works out well then you won't care. Most of us, me included are rubbish at other people, incompetence rather than conspiracy is the usual reason these sorts of situations arise. Enjoy your new band

Not just this land it's pretty much worldwide.

Not really, valves work with a series of metal plates and grids as the valves age the plates lose material and the plates move about and distort changing the electrical properties, in the end most of them become microphonic picking up vibrations and passing them though the amplifier on to the speakers. In addition they can become loose in their sockets as you mentioned, so there are plenty of ways odd sounds can occur through mechanical noises. Solid state is … well it's solid

I guess since this is a site where there are more guitarists than bassists and the famous riff is usually played on bass it wasn't going to get to the top. I thought it would be the highest scoring bass riff but the first one I could find was Muse. I trawled through over 500 songs before I found any bass tabs at all. The next few bass tabs I found were nearly all for ZZ Top.

I love that this was edited by one of the mods As a flag waving, T-shirt wearing techy I'll bite. Mic that rig up and pump it through a really good Class D, Neo speakered, festival sized PA rig and it'd sound just as good. So it isn't class D or lightweight neo speakers, it is something else. I'll tell you my theory, in the olden days speakers and amps were designed to enhance your bass sound (guitar sound even more so but this is Basschat) They didn't need to be clean and undistorted they just had to sound good. People built cabs and tried them out with bass and the ones that sounded best or most popular got made and sold. Theory wasn't really worked out until the 70's and didn't get through to instrument amp design until much later. The truth is we don't much like uncoloured sound for bass and most of us aren't very good at finding the eq to achieve it so a nice old Trace that gives us the Trace sound sounds better to us than our own attempts to recreate it. The second thing is that we like things that are loud, too loud to be sensible but there is joy in just cranking up an old monolith of a speaker with an amp with the frequency response curve of the Cairngorms. Sensibly we'd scrap the backline, use in-ears or at least floor monitors and let the PA do it's job but for some that's no fun. There's also a lot of self delusion, I used to have fun in my old rear wheel drive cars with cross ply tyres sliding round bends double declutching because the synchromesh was rubbish but I can't really pretend those cars were 'better' than those I drive now. One day soon the computer modelling will be so good we won't be able to tell the difference but that is still a little way away. Until then if you love an old Peavey stack and don't mind shifting it then the important thing isn't technical perfection so go for it and enjoy.

And the top bass tab.... Muse Hysteria

Here you go, this is a list of the most popular chords/tabs on Ultimate Guitar all with over 11,000,000 hits worldwide. Obviously it's a skewed list as it is mainly guitarists, lots of US users but lot's of British songwriter success. Very little rock music but I guess representative of what young musicians are learning over the last 10 years. Very few would make the set list of a covers band but there are a couple of old favourites. I'm feeling old, I had to look some of these songs up Jeff Buckley Hallelujah John Legend All Of Me Passenger Let Her Go Ed Sheeran Perfect Led Zeppelin Stairway To Heaven Jason Mraz Im Yours Ed Sheeran Thinking Out Loud Plain White T's Airplane Elvis Presley Cant Help Falling In Love Coldplay The Scientist Adele Someone Like You Metallica Nothing Else Matters Bruno Mars When I Was Your Man Justin Bieber Love Yourself Ed Sheeran Photograph Oasis Wonderwall Vance Joy Riptide Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here Radiohead Creep Oasis Dont Look Back In Anger

I don't think it is a bad idea but just that there are 'issues' which will affect the sound, some good some not so good. The important thing though is that if what you have sounds good it is good. It's what your bass sounds like that matters. If an Ampeg 8x10 sounds great for the sound you are aiming for it may be loads of cheap drivers in an inappropriately designed box but it isn't 'wrong', for anyone who wants that sound it's just a set of compromises that work. The plus side of using two cabs is that you get more sound, 3dB from doubling the power and 3dB from greater efficiency at the lower frequencies. That means you can turn the amp down everything runs cooler so you don't get thermal compression and you don't overload stuff and get distortion so easily. The downside is that if two drivers are producing the same sounds but are separated in space by something in the region of a wavelength you can get cancellation or reinforcement and it messes up your frequency response and radiation pattern. If you put the two cabs on top of each other so the speakers are vertically aligned then this will only happen in the vertical plane, side to side you will be fine. That means it will be fine for the audience in most cases. If you are using two cabs stack them with the drivers in line to get the best out of them, which is probably what you do anyway. Stevie is engineering a system, he only wants the lower frequencies reinforced and he is trying to control the vertical plane so the bassist hears what the audience hear, so he doesn't want the frequencies above 800Hz interacting and filtering them out of the 'sub' makes perfect sense.

John didn't we try the Mk1 with one of your cabs?

Welcome back, helping you with your build also contributed to the MK1 design which led to myself and Stevie (also Lawrence and John) getting together etc etc… Glad you are still using the cabs. You might want to build Stevie's design, he did much more work than I did on optimising the damping of the cab and reducing the weight. If not a really cheap method of upgrading suggests itself. One of the early iterations of Stevie's design (I think we called it the Mk2 was with a Celestion horn driver and an SM212. We did a shoot out last year at the bass bash down here with the mk2 and mk3 up against a Fearless and a MarkBass cab, whisper it quietly but my favourite was John's Mk2. There wasn't a lot in it to be fair, the Mk3 was louder and slightly more forward in the mids and the Fearless was bloody good too but you could relatively cheaply just add the crossover and horn to one of your existing cabs at just the cost of those plus a new baffle

I had the same situation arise. Audition went well they'd auditioned a couple of others and pretty much told me I was best fit. The next day they told me they'd been in the pub discussing after the auditions and decided I was the one when a mate came over and said 'didn't know you were looking for bass, I'll do it'. I was pretty fed up but sent a polite email back. A year later I saw the old ad still up, pinged them and I was in the band on the basis of the year old audition, and probably the nice email. We've been gigging for a year, they are lovely people and had been completely honest and it's the happiest band I've ever been in. If I'd been band leader I might well have done what this band did. You need someone who can play but also someone who will fit in and a friend is a known quantity. TBH Carl may well be a problem if he's fallen out with another band, it may come round quicker than you think

You'd expect it to be that good really. The RCF has a better compression driver on the horn, go through to Blue Aran who stock both Eminence and RCF drivers and there are a lot of high end drivers which match or out spec the Eminence ones and are cheaper over here. The crossover is active rather than passive and the amps DSP managed. the only thing that the bb2 is likely to score over the RCF is in the cabinetry. Since both are voiced to be neutral you'd expect the RCF to be better/as good. The One-10 of course is voiced to be played with bass so if anything you might well prefer that sound, but that would be a matter of how you see your bass amp/personal choice. We use K12's as PA, there are no problems putting bass through them. I sometimes use RCF ART310's at rehearsal for bass, one of these is enough, just about. I'd be confident the 732 would do the job

Something about Bromley, I was born in Mason's Hill, grew up in Downe and went to school in Bromley. Also play bass and a bit of Banjo. Welcome to basschat

Or get along to a bass bash, basically everyone brings their stuff along and you get to hear it/try it out. https://www.basschat.co.uk/forum/77-events/

There is no point in being louder than the drummer. If you do have to go louder than that to fill the venue then so will the drums, and without a volume control that means mic'ing the drums and going through the PA. That means you should go through the PA as well. If your current combo is loud enough to do that and you like the way it sounds then there is no need to change. That doesn't stop us wanting to change though does it Your choice should be based on how it sounds to you, we can only tell you what we like, so take any advice as a steer as to what to listen to, but take it all with a pinch of salt. It's how it sounds that really matters so don't buy without trying. Fortunately nowadays there is little really bad stuff out there and most gear is pretty reliable so that is less of a concern. If you get the chance then get out to hear other local covers bands and see what they are using if you like their bass sound. I value practicality, I want to sound OK and I want enough power to do the job in any circumstance. The sweet spot for me is a couple of 1x12's with a 300/500W amplifier (that's 500 into both) Most gigs and rehearsals I take one speaker, for bigger venues both. This gives me all I want and is easy to pack and carry. For your budget you have a really wide range of options, have fun choosing

If the difference is 2dB you are going to notice testing them next to each other. If you are going to operate both at less than the maximum output then of course you can just turn the amp up a bit. However what you also have to factor in is the balance between bass and the rest of the frequency range. Our ears are so much more sensitive to treble and so insensitive to bass that a more midrange biased cab is likely to sound a bit bass light. The other thing to factor in is that the modelling in winisd tells you nothing about the way the midrange is going to sound, it just models the bass response. If you have the frequency response charts we can make an educated guess as to the sound but you won't really know until you try them. Putting them into a ready made cab and experimenting is a good idea Frankly if you order over the internet you can return them un-damaged in the original packaging within 30 days and get a refund so you'll only lose the cost of postage.

I think the patches are the same as their more expensive pedals. It can get a bit noisy if you chain lot's of fx but then so are standalone pedals. It is a plastic case but decent quality. The fx are really slow to set up but easy enough to use once set up and the settings are saved. The B1-4 addresses this as instead of everything being adjusted through a menu system you get instant access to minor adjustments via the extra knobs. As a practice tool I agree with Stewblack it really is excellent.

Get it fixed, or at least get a quote. Might even be worth asking in repairs on here and someone may be able to suggest a simple fix. Even if it is something you want to move on it will be valuable to someone else. I use headphones for practice you get a fabulous sound and don't annoy anyone else. I either use a small mixer (Alesis) or more often a Zoom B1ON, now upgraded but mine is the old one, but they are on offer https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zoom-B1on-Bass-Effects-Pedal/dp/B00JLEHMG6?SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duc08-21&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00JLEHMG6 They sound great, you can mix in a stereo signal, there's a tuner and a drum machine, amp modelling and more fx than you'll ever use. I run mine on rechargeable batteries and it lasts about a week on those. Plastic but well made.

Of course the other big price fix/anti-competitive policy is that to stock Fender (or Gibson) retailers have to buy a minimum (but large) value of stock, effectively locking out small local music shops from stocking new Fenders as the entry price is too high for them to afford. It also means the medium sized outlets would have to choose between Fender and Gibson with only the biggest outlets able to afford to stock both. Either way the chance most of us have of going in and trying instruments and comparing them and then being able to shop around is highly constrained. In the meantime both companies only need to service a limited no. of outlets who effectively become main dealers tied to policies controlled by Fender. Fining American companies is an interesting policy, I wonder if Mr Trump knows about it? If only there were some sort of Europe wide trading association we could be part of.

I had the same problem, try these. The small ones fit right inside my ears and seal well, they don't fall out even in the gym or when I do star jumps on stage https://www.amazon.co.uk/TheTransporterUK-Isolating-Replacement-Silicone-Earbuds-Black/dp/B06WP97FL3/ref=pd_rhf_se_p_img_13?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=ZJJ02JF93TGWS55SX170