Phil Starr

Sometimes we just have to make the best of what we have to hand, I think this is the best solution for the moment. One day, perhaps once gigging starts again, you might want to revisit this but it is sensible in the meantime to just try and squeeze as much as possible out of what you have.

It does help, many thanks. So for example one of the parts I need is just that, a gear wheel. It's one of a pair in a John Deere mower for which parts are no longer available and weren't distributed in the UK anyway. The gear is about 10cm in diameter and drives the wheels of a mower that probably weighs 30kg. It's made of some sort of hard plastic. There are a few used ones in the States but they would cost anything from £10-50 and the list price was in the $20 region when they were available. If i could get one for say £20 it would make the repair worthwhile.

I haven't checked but it looks like I could be well over that in 13 years with maybe 10 in covers bands. Remembering is a problem, though most return fairly quickly with a couple of run-throughs so long as they were originally gigged a few times. I wondered where the saturation point comes and it is pretty severe for me at around 100 songs (down to having three bands on the go at one time). I lose them fairly quickly once I stop gigging them and always mean to keep the ones that cost most to learn going, but I don't think I could make much of a stab at Fool For Your Loving for example. I don't play from notes though due to an inability to play and read at the same time For me memory is the lazy way out and it's a skill I've never learned.

Slight derail here but how much would this have cost if done commercially? I've needed a few plastic parts recently which are not available and aren't bass related; like a pinion for a CD transport for example. Have we reached a point where parts can be scanned, replicated and sold at prices which make them economically sensible to use?

Sympathy with you from me, I too have a broken Markbass and have come across the problem with Real Electronics. They aren't unpleasant or anything but you get a fairly inflexible response and estimate from them. The 'estimate' is around £200 whatever the fault is and they talk about it being as good as new on the phone, ie they are simply taking boards out and replacing them. As the used value is about £300 that's a huge chunk of the value and it makes MB an unviable purchase IMO. You might just as well purchase Behringer for all the aftersales support you get from MB, in fact to be fair the UK supplies of Behringer spares are very reasonably priced and with better availability. I bought the Peavey Minimax for £180 on the offer above as a stopgap as i had a load of gigs at the time. It sounds way better out of the box than the MB Tube and has noticeably more heft, if i can use that word. I ought to fix the MB and pass it on really. I won't be going back to it but the absence of gigs has removed any urgency.

Ha ha I should have said that the only time I've used these was with a hand brace, you need really slow speeds and decent torque to get a good cut and I've never used power tools to drive this sort of bit. I'd also cut the whole half way and turn the board round to cut the other face . I actually use a router to cut my own holes. Hi, I used a different and higher tuning to get the best out of the smaller cab and i was looking for a good hump around 100Hz rather than extending the lower end response. This emphasizes the second harmonic of the lowest notes rather than the fundamental but gives a pleasant warmth. It was never conceived of as having an extended flat bass but as something usable in the small pub venues I regularly play in with my covers band. I checked your tuning on WinISD and it was very close to the tuning I intended. Old school bass rather than FRFR if you like.

Here you go Hardwood Plywood Poplar Core FSC 2440 x 1220 x 12mm (jewson.co.uk)

You'll find it is difficult to source small amounts of sheet material, generally the smallest amount is an 8x4 sheet or 1220x2440mm in new money. Even that can be problematic from local suppliers or the big chains and this adds to the cost. Jewsons however were offering Birch ply with a poplar core recently at a good price. Fortunately a lot of fast growing poplar was planted in Europe a few decades ago so expect some of it to replace dwindling tropical hardwoods used in making ply. A 20kg single cab solution is not ridiculously heavy (12mm birch+ driver) The only way to get much below this is to reduce the size of the cab but this sacrifices bass response as I've mentioned, as Bill pointed out the EV design already sacrifices some bass for portability. I wouldn't have started with the Kappa for bass, it has limited excursion for bass, a far too strong mid peak and needs a big cab to get the best out of it but that doesn't mean Steve needs to go out and spend, he already knows what this speaker sounds like in the EV design. 8kg is a lot of weight saving. I use the 20Kg bar for exercise with lots of reps but can barely get 30kg above my head. Designing any cab is a bit of balloon squeezing, as you tighten your grip in one area something else pops up elsewhere and in the end you have to compromise. For me that is half the fun

Hi again, The tube we all use is plastic downpipe used from guttering. If you are based in France or Belgium then it's possible they use a different sized tubing. In any case a single larger pipe would be better. I use a router or rarely an electric jigsaw to cut holes or you could use a hole cutter like this Silverline 427644 Adjustable Hole Cutter 40-300 mm: Amazon.co.uk: DIY & Tools. I'm not recommending that particular one as I haven't tried it but you get the idea. I'm making no judgements about how complex you want your woodwork to be either, a lot of it is about confidence and how much of a learning experience you want it to be. Sorry I don't play slap and nobody has tried the cab for slapping whilst I've been there so no comment.

Once Covid has lifted Mansons does have some stock and practice spaces so you do have the chance to eliminate some stuff from your search. The staff are fairly knowledgeable and helpful. If you can wait then the bass bash just outside Taunton is a great place to meet other basschatters and try their gear.

The speaker weighs 8kg so this is a really heavy cab. That's MDF for you. you can play with this Large panels | OSB board | MDF board | Plywood | Chipboard | Weight | Calculator (timberpolis.co.uk) ready reckoner and work out for your self how much lighter just changing the board material will make your cab. MDF is great unless you have to carry it Change the volume to area and thickness will come up

It's difficult isn't it? £600 is a decent sum so you should be able to get a really decent rig used for that but if you spend £300 on the amp your choice of speakers becomes more limited. If it's any help I have an MB Tube, not up for sale and currently broken from taking a dive off the top of a 2x12. They are good and the 'Tube' channel does add something but when mine took a dive I needed something for gigging quick and took a punt on a Peavey Minimax. Frankly it sounds better out of the box IMO and what was a temporary fix has become my go to amp. There's one for sale here for £180 which is going to save you £100 on a MB which you could take as a saving or put towards a wider choice of speakers. Peavey Minimax 500 head - Amps and Cabs For Sale - Basschat Another possibility might be to go for two 1x12 cabs. One will probably do all you want at the moment and you could delay getting the second you might want for bigger gigs until Covid is fading and gigging and other money making stuff starts happening again.

If you are going with the 606 cab then some of the panels are quite big and will vibrate, ply is intrinsically more bendy than MDF and also has less internal damping. You'll need to compensate for this by bracing all the panels.Adding dowels to 12mm ply isn't going to add much in the way of strength, if you used 6mm dowel hat only leaves 3mm of plywood either side of the dowel which will weaken the ply. The only reason to use dowels on something so thin is to locate the panels whist the glue sets. It's quite possible to build a cab with plain butt joints and a glue joint will be stronger than the ply but a 12mm glue join isn't inherently very strong simply because the area is so small and the plies in plywood can easily separate. Reinforced butt joints as in your original cab design are stronger and because you can screw them in from the inside make the construction simple as they pull the panels together hold everything square without clamping and increase the glued area. They will also provide some damping of the panels. If your woodwork is competent though and you have good access to clamps whilst the glue sets many cabs have been built without them so this is a decision for you to take. 8 braces are a lot but it depends where they are placed. It is possible to put them in after the cab has been built, more later about that.

Hi, that looks great and using a bigger port is great, I only used the smaller diameter pipe because it is easily sourced and you can get cheap hole saw cutters in the right sizes. That ties in with the idea of 'easy build'. The only thing to remember is the obvious point of not blocking the rear port by pushing it hard against a rear wall. I checked your calculations and the sizes look good. If you do go ahead and build it would be great to see some pictures when it is done and let us know how it sounds when you use it. Good luck with the build.

Thanks Bill, I had noticed some of the already entered data can be false. I've always entered the parameters manually for my own designs and I didn't check this time. As for the box for the EV it's a 90l cab tuned to 55 or 40Hz I checked both and I'd go for the 55Hz tuning with this speaker. I think Steve has enough to make some choices about which way to go and I'm happy to answer questions and tweak the design as he goes if that's what he wants.

Your Kappa is going to be intrinsically bright for bass it has a huge peak in the midrange which is likely to completely dominate the sound of the speaker whatever cab you use. The weight saving depends upon exactly which type of ply you can source and I used a timber merchants site to estimate the savings in mass you might get so treat that as approximate. The speaker calculations take no time as all the Eminence drivers are pre-loaded into WinISD. It took longer to type than to calculate the cost is that if you do build to put up some pics of the build here to encourage others to have a go.

Here you go. The EVTL606 is a good design for your speaker. the low end frequency response is in red below. The green line is your speaker in the Basschat Mk 1 cabinet. You can see there is a loss of bass below 100hz by squeezing this 15 into the smaller cabinet, partly compensated for by a 2db bump at aroung 120 Hz which will add a bit of warmth and punch. For comparison the Blue line is the original 12" speaker I used. I gigged the BC mk1 (blue line) for a couple of years what I found was that the extended bass response was sometimes a problem, in smaller rooms which equate to the average UK pub the bass was sometimes a bit too overpowering and needed to be rolled off at the lowest frequencies and boosted a bit at 120Hz something your speaker will do naturally in the smaller cab. rebuilding your TL606 in 12mm ply will save about 8kg but you will need to think about bracing the bigger panels, putting the Kappa into the 50l BassChat mk1 would be feasible if you are happy to lighten your bass sound and will work well in a live band situation. It will be a loud shouty cab though because of the Kappa's huge midrange frequency peak which won't change. I don't think the eminence design has any advantage over the TL606. Basically you can use the BC design and lose maybe 12Kg total using birch ply or lose a bit less and keep the bigger cab with the extra bass. Remember though that carrying a cab is about size as well as weight, it's easier to get a smaller cab through doors and into your car. Either way you have decent designs available to you so all you have to do is build. The choice is how much bass you want.

The Eminence designs I'd go for the medium sized box if you choose one on these to go with Eminence Designer

Hi, I don't think 9mm is a good idea unless you love complex woodwork as such thin walls with a big cabinet will need a lot of bracing. There are available plans on the Eminence website and there is a probably a small ported cab design there. Go for that, it will have the best power handling and be the lightest cab. If I get time today I'll have a quick look at running the Kappa through the design software and suggest a cab for you that matches your speaker.

I'm a sucker for accents, Lyrics too and Emmylou Harris's harmonies in this which come one minute in a bit different but this gets me every time You'll Never Be The Sun, Dolores Keane with Emmylou Harris (1993) - YouTube

Hi @Nicko this is a separate issue I guess. The first thing is that people who have the first part of the two part jab are still just as likely as anyone else to be 'spreaders' and I think that is reflected in government advice. There was an interesting interview yesterday with one of the behavioural scientists on the SAGE committee. Spitting tacks as it happens. I'm no expert but one of the danger points is going to be when the rates start falling and people relax. Clearly seeing what others do is one of the major cultural drivers. My son teaches in japan where it is normal for anyone with a sniffle to mask up and they simply masked up without needing to be told when this started. They also have a strong touch taboo so their epidemic has been really delayed. I've noticed since the second lockdown that more people are wearing their masks in the streets and that makes us less self conscious in joining in. Seeing people who have been vaccinated relaxing is bound to affect all those around them, even if relaxing is found to be a perfectly sensible thing to do for them. We truly are all in this together, we need a government plan which we all share and invest in and which makes good scientific sense as far as our knowledge allows. Survey after survey shows 3/4 of the population in favour of more caution with only 25% likely to be pandemic/vaccine deniers. We are pretty divided on this so not many don't knows. There's an irony in those who call on Churchillian metaphors being the ones supporting those who aren't all in it together.

Of course it does, but it is extremely rare for that to happen. The only virus I can think of is HIV which we know attacks the immune system, it's an immunovirus. At a very simple level if people recover from the virus it means their immune systems can stop the virus replicating. If we have a vaccine that works, and we have several then again it works via stimulating our immune system. Viruses work by taking over our cells and printing out billions of copies. It's those copies present in massive numbers in our breath that spread respiratory viruses so if they aren't replicating they won't be present in vast numbers and you've cut the chances of infection. We know a lot about Corona viruses because we've seen them before, two of them cause common colds including probably the one that probably caused the Flu pandemic of 1889 1889–1890 pandemic - Wikipedia. It's possible that the current coronavirus is different in some way from all the other coronaviruses but there is no evidence that points in that direction and the possibility of a problem is only that. When we have little or no data it makes sense to keep an open mind and remain vigilant but it isn't rational to believe we have the whole of our biology wrong and not go where the 99.5% probability points us. If you've reduced the virus in our respiratory tract by millions to one it is a bit obtuse to think you wont reduce transmission.

I assume this is the new variant? It will make a difference. Assuming yesterdays figures are accurate the base r-rate for Covid is 3-3.5% so the new strain is up at around 5. With the measures in place the r-rate is 1.2-1.4 with doubling infections every 10 days approximately. This is with about 50% of the home counties infections already being new variant. I'd already assumed in my calculations that the r-rate over Christmas /New Year would go up to 2. The new variant will push this up over the next few weeks but the tier 4 changes and what amounts to a third lockdown in London will act in the opposite direction. Delaying the return of the schools and hopefully extended travel restrictions will delay the spread of new variant. Hopefully the new fear factor and shocking scenes from hospitals will boost compliance in the general population. It's really messy and only a fool would make firm predictions at the moment but I don't think the r-rate is going to go over 2 for long. that does mean doubling of infection every week however and deaths rising to 1500-2000 a day in Jan. I think at that point and with an end in view from vaccination (I'd also assumed that other vaccines will gain approval in the next few weeks) people would wake up and compliance will improve and the r-rate I expected to go back to 1.2-1.4 by the end of Jan, deaths remaining high for at least 28 days from then on. I also assumed with 1 in 95 of the population infected at any time during that period 15% of the population would have been infected at least. Add these to the inoculated and I think we'll reach the 50% point sometime in Mar. The point is that even if the basal r-rate moves up from 1.2 to 2.0 then 50% herd immunity will bring it back down by half once achieved. Once R is permanently below 1 then the doubling every few days becomes a regular halving of infection and there will be a decay curve as predictable as the exponential growth curve. I still think this is likely to happen some time in Mar or early April. At that moment it will still be grim, worse than now but if we are at 1000 deaths a day then if it is halving every 10 days then it will have reduced to 125 deaths a day a month later and double figures 10 days after that. Meantime we will have continued vaccination and the r-rate will drop further and the rate of infection will halve more quickly. Two months of holding R below 1 and we be down to death rates in single figures and even before this happens infection rates will fall to a level where track and trace can cope. The Prime Minister is being foolishly optimistic in expecting this to be over by Easter but I don't think I'm completely a Fool for predicting R below 1 by April 1 ( you see what I did there ) I'm a biologist, I expect viruses to mutate, usually they become more infectious and less deadly bu there are no guarantees. this has always been a race against time and mutation is one of the reasons we should have locked down sooner and harder. I'll stick with the end of May for now until more data comes in. Keep safe everyone.

Yes, the government advice bassfinger links to is mainly concerned with people thinking they are immune from the first injection when the reality is that a few of them may already have an infection, and the immunity isn't really well developed until you've had the second booster. As to being cautious, scientists will quite rightly only state those things for which they have experimental evidence, so they aren't going to commit to saying how long a novel vaccine will last or that no infection is possible from a vaccinated person. However you are only going to have huge numbers of viral particles in your body if it is actively replicating inside your body and if you have few to no viruses then you are extremely unlikely to spread the disease. If you are immune it is because the virus isn't being allowed to replicate in any numbers. There's a theoretical possibility of transmission but at very low levels approaching zero. If the vaccine is 90% efficient then 10% of the population can still be infected and infectious. It makes sense for infection control to assume that might be you who can still spread the disease which is why the advice is so cautious. In terms of society though most people who have the vaccine will be extremely unlikely to spread the virus. The probability is that sometime next year we will achieve sufficient herd immunity in the UK to permanently reduce the r-rate below 1 and shortly after to go back to something like normality. I'm neither an optimist of a pessimist so I think that Easter is unlikely but it will happen a couple of months after Easter even with the new variant. Though if the Government fail to put travel restrictions into place it could take longer. For me the big question is how many lives can we save between now and then? Do we have the collective will and the informed leadership to save potentially 100,000 lives? I have hope, polls are showing 75% of us want to have a well thought out plan to reduce infection and only 25% are in denial, we only need the government to back the majority. The 75% will comply and pressure/persuasion will convert some of the rest. Stay safe out there and look out for each other. That's kind of the BassChat way

I feel like I'm spoiling things but there's a fair amount of research on this and our sense of rhythm is cultural and largely learned. Other cultures and particularly folk music use wider ranges of time signatures. Even a lot of classical music has shifting time signatures. 4/4 comes from early experience and repeated listening as does a lot of the rest of our listening. To us there is something 'right' about songs with the four chords and returning to the key at the end of the song. One thing I've noticed is that with the demise of rock and blues from popular culture younger drummers struggle at First with the shuffle and 12/8 something no-one thought about in my generation. You can tell with my 40year old drummer he just isn't quite comfortable with triplets, they feel learned rather than natural.