Phil Starr

For recording I'd think most people would pretty much DI for bass, just cutting out the room acoustics would be good. However you might just want the feel of an amp whilst you are playing. There are two ways of going about that, I've just spent a couple of hours practicing with everything going through my PA, a little Alesis mixer going into a couple of RCF ART310's (PA speakers) I can feed everything through that including backing tracks, my vocals, the lot. Normally I use headphones but I fancied making a noise and feeling like I was playing live. The alternative is a proper bass combo, a lot of little ones are just for practice when you get your first bass and they aren't very satisfying to play. If you are going down the 'proper' combo route then the key is for you to go and try them out. They don't need to go loud so it's just the sound quality you need, if you really like the sound then that's a great amp and you'll use it lots, if not then why buy it I've got a little Hartke 10" Kickback which suits me but that's just my taste.

My instinct was like everyone else it seems 'be careful what you wish for' If you are looking for a berth with a band think carefully what you want, just the rehearsal room with like minded people or a gigging band? Is genre important to you or are you just happy to play? Covers or originals? There will be plenty of other bands along so get ready in advance, get together any video, promotional pics (or at least decent pics of you playing) links to bands you've played with maybe a list of gear you own, anything that will make a band want you. Put up a web page if possible, I have one on Bandmix for example. With everything prepared you won't have to dash anything off in a rush next time. I'd give it a week and then ask them for a response, musicians are not very organised and I've just been offered a spot with a gigging band starting in March after a month in which they failed to get an audition together and I'd decided weren't interested. I know the band and they know me so it isn't quite as mad as it sounds but now I have four weeks to learn and rehearse 30 songs instead of a couple of months. After a couple of weeks you have absolutely nothing to lose by hassling them but it may be simple disorganisation.

Yeah the kappalite is an 'upgrade' compared with the deltalite and pretty much as good as it gets with current technology. Most manufacturers offer similar spec speakers with a decent excursion well designed cone and suspension and a decent sized Neo magnet. There are lots of tweaks you could design in to improve in one area or another but eventually as you improve one area of a speakers performance you start to compromise others. 'Better' then becomes a relative term defined by what your design spec is, lower frequency roll off, better excursion, less cone break up, higher efficiency, better power handling, lighter weight, it's hard to get them all. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that I for one wouldn't ever argue that any particular driver is the 'best' but the Basschat two way design is very comparable with the best commercial designs. Having been involved in the early stages of the design (though the credit is all Stevie's) I know that there was little, if anything to be gained by using the Kappalite for example.

Sounds gorgeous, but high output is possibly where the brightness has been compromised. If it is something you can eq out then it isn't anything to worry about. looks like a lovely bass on their website.

There is much more to tonal differences than those caused by the fingerboard. in fact I would expect that to make little difference with a fretted bass. Many things are going to affect the timbre of your bass but perhaps two of the more important are the nature of the pups and their position. The closer to the bridge the pups are the less bass biased they will be and even fairly small changes in position will change that tonal balance. Not much you can do about that without major surgery on your bass. The windings inside the pickup act as an inductor and inductors will act as a low pass filter, they cut the higher frequencies, are they humbuckers on the Mayones?. The more windings you have the darker the pup will sound and the punchier the bass. Add in the choice of tonewood, bridge design, neck profile, how the neck and body are joined and so on and you can see why no two basses sound completely alike. The upshot is that you might find each of your basses works better with a different set of strings. In the end you have two entirely different basses so just enjoy that and explore to find out what strings work best with the chemistry of each.

It's been interesting to look at how different people practice, I wonder sometimes if I have it all wrong and a lot of bad habits, probably. I practice for about an hour a day fairly consistently sometimes more, sometimes less. I do wonder if I'd started with a more academic approach ten years ago whether I'd be further on now. Would I have a better grasp of harmony and be a proper reader? If so would that make me a better bassist? Within a few months of starting I was already in a covers band and I've been on a treadmill of learning new songs ever since. Every new band seems to involve learning 20-30 new songs over a 3 month period and once I 'learned' 30 songs in a fortnight. I stopped counting after hitting my 500th song. I'm guessing that a lot of us have a similar experience in covers bands and the practicalities of doing the job takes over from almost anything else. It becomes about short cuts though, check if there is a decent You Tube video? Download chord sheets and tabs. Anything to shorten the time between choosing a song and gigging it. How many root notes can I get away with? I love it but it ain't art. So practice routine? Load all the songs onto an Ipod (I know, how quaint) and listen to them on repeat in the car and out walking/working until the bass line is driven into my skull. Download any tabs/Chords, break down the song into parts and for any tricky bits make my own tabs. Then most of my actual practice is with headphones on playing alongside the originals. Nailing arrangements is usually more of a problem than the musical content of most cover band fare. I must admit I sometimes feel the need to break out of this cycle. It has given me a lot of pleasure getting out on stage and entertaining people and this was certainly a very quick way of getting there. There's always the next song though....

I have the Lidl one. Does the job.

Looking good, let us know how you get on at rehearsal.

Video? oh goodness! It has gone hasn’t it! let me sort that. i actually have a great follow up to record too! Thank you both. I've tried it in the practice room with everything turned up to 11. it really works and you don't feel cut off from the room. Rehearsals next.

There are actually two questions hidden in here. One is simply about shopping; I need a loud light cab, tell me which ones I should be looking at. The second question is about power to weight ratio and you are spot on, it is about sound output and not about how many watts the speaker can soak up. Sound output is a tricky concept as it is about frequency as much as absolute output. Our ears are much more sensitive in the frequencies of the human voice, one hundred times more sensitive more or less, that's why guitarists are so damn noisy A lot of bass cabs have some mid boost baked in, they are going to sound louder than other cabs without the baked in sound. The other thing is how much bass do you want and where do you want it. There isn't much bass in the output from a bass guitar surprisingly and very little at all below 50Hz, in fact you can generally filter it out without the audience noticing, in fact in a live situation you can usually filter it out without the bassist noticing. In terms of lightweight cabs that means you can reduce the size of the cab if you sacrifice deep bass. There's an added bonus too, you could lighten the cone if you know up front your design won't do really deep bass and that can raise the efficiency of the speaker. All I'm really trying to say here is that some cabs sound louder because of the tonal balance of the cab, if you don't want or like that tone it isn't a sensible buy for you. Always buy a cab that sounds good to you. Power handling isn't a sensible way to look at power to weight ratio. Some cabs are easily 10x better at converting watts into decibels compared to others, and decibels are what you want. Typically bass cabs vary by less than that and though there are exceptions youd expect most cabs to vary within a 94-100dB/watt range. that simply means the better cabs might give you 100dB across most of the frequency range for a 1W input and a lower efficiency cab might only give you 94dB. This is all standing straight in front of the cab and just a metre away. That 6dB is significantly louder, you'll absolutely hear a marked difference but it's not going to be twice as loud, just louder. That's at one watt, you an add more decibels by turning the tap up at the amp, at 100w they will both be a lot louder but there will still be a 6dB difference. The loudest sound they make will depend upon the power handling and the efficiency combined, how you hear it on the tonal balance as well. So lightweight? Small cabs, lightweight cab materials, complex bracing and lightweight neodymium based speakers. All adding to the cost (OK except the smaller cab) Efficient cabs, big cabs, large cone speakers or lots of speakers, large speaker magnets. Ultimately you can have light and loud but not light loud and cheap. If you are contemplating shopping though the best bet is a shortlist and then trying them

Thanks for this Dan, I only just stumbled on it and had to try the idea straight away with my H4N. It works brilliantly in the practice room, can't wait to try it out at rehearsal and at a gig. I may not lose my hearing after all. Oh I can't find the video, any chance it is still available somewhere?

There are a couple of places you can buy the RCF 310 Mk3 at just under £250 at the moment. RCF have introduced the Mk4 version so the 3 is a bargain, I bought two as monitors and PA use for our duo. They work well and at some time I will get round to trying them as PA (with subs) with our rock band. For the duo I go straight into them with the bass and at those levels it all sounds good, both DI'd (I've a John East J-Retro on the bass for tone shaping) and also when running through a Zoom B1ON as amp sim. I have thought of trying them as a pair as bass stack but IMO you would be pushing just a little too hard to get away with one playing alongside a full drumkit. It's pretty much the same as with a bass combo, a single 10 just isn't quite enough to get the sound levels a good 12 will just about make it at the current levels of technology.

That's about right from Islander. It isn't worth wasting time if you haven't cleared the problem after a couple of goes. I only asked about the spray because there's an increasing tendency for modern pots to have the two access points sealed. I've had some problems in the past with decoupling capacitors going short circuit with age, or otherwise being troublesome. The effect is to cause DC to appear across the pot and cause sparking problems which create noise and even pitting. If your amp is really old I'd look for any signs of leaking capacitors. The other problem is that the spring on the wiper inside the pot just weakens making contact less secure, often combined with dirt ingress so just cleaning the track is often only a short term fix. the biggest part of any fix is opening the amp up and removing the board. Once you get to that part replacing components is often just the quickest simplest fix. good Luck

Is the Servisol actually getting inside the pot casing onto the carbon track? A lot of people just spray in the general vicinity and it can't clean what it can't reach. Having said that 'clicks, pops and bangs'? That sounds like more than the sort of crackly noise you ought to get if it is just a bit of dirt.

I think you have to think this through, the Feder combo is £500+ and the Ampeg £450+ if you are asking can a cheap Alto or Mackie Thump do the same thing better then the answer is no. Could the RCF 315 at £430 do the job then, yes it could. There is a saving to be made by going the PA route but you won't get the same quality for half the price. The main thing though is the difference in sound, good PA speakers are designed to put out a good copy of what you put in. Bass amps are made (hopefully) to make basses sound good and that usually means a little bit of colouration. Your first step ought to be to audition the candidate systems to see if you really like the PA/clean sounding route to the traditional bass amp. If you do then there are advantages in terms of flexibility and a small cost saving, but beware, cheap PA cabs have to cut corners and that usually means in bass handling.

Reverts to old man reminiscing. I used to build these in the days before Thiele Small. the biggest problem in those days was just being loud enough. Amp watts were fiercely expensive and heavy for touring bands. Speakers had primitive treated paper formers and glues which only temporarily held the coils together so efficiency was all. I dread to think what the frequency response of the old W-bins was but very little mids and treble escaped those folded horns. I remember some bassists using them without an HF horn too. With vocals through a 4x12 there was little but very loud mush. It was fun making it all up as you went but thank goodness we don't build them like that any more.

As stated just the cabinet, the grille is missing. Would suit as a project for someone who just wants a cheap cab or with a Black widow driver to sit in a practice studio. These cabs sound great but are too big and heavy for any sensible gigging band. I could source a drive unit for someone who wanted it but that wouldn't be free. Just come and collect from Chard Somerset, it will go into a skip in a couple of weeks.

The answer is the same as for an active PA speaker really. Any decent PA cab will handle the bass and a FRFR response (yep response twice) will give you an 'uncoloured response and a good basis for amp modelling or eq. The trick is to get a good passive PA speaker cos the cheaper ones tend to have underspecified bass drivers. PA gear has come on a lot recently and a fair bit of the older kit did have limitations. Equally there is a lot of very decent passive gear out there that isn't fetching much of a price on the used market, so there are lots of bargains. The downside is that most of what you find will be fairly heavy wooden boxes with huge ceramic magnet drivers, the old cabs have passive crossovers of varying quality so they don't sound so good pound for pound and the most modern PA cabs have DSP built in so the responses are generally almost unnaturally flat. I can't resist playing bass through any speaker that passes through my hands, the old Yamaha S115V is a good contender and uses bog standard Eminence drivers with little light bulbs as protection so both bullet proof and repairable.

Having said earlier in this thread that my Wharfedale PA speakers had been faultless to date the inevitable happened and a speaker went down. To be fair it is almost twenty years old and blew when someone else borrowed it. However I took it apart and was very impressed with the construction. Cabinet is way too heavy with 18mm MDF but very well constructed, the amp is nicely made and very well over specified with 10 output transistors. The blown driver is nicely made too with a substantial ceramic magnet and a nicely made deep double roll surround. Best news of all is that although this particular speaker has been discontinued for several years Wharfedale still carry spares which are reasonably priced (cheaper than an Eminence or Fane equivalent) and available by return of post. That's great service in my book from an old UK firm (IAG who are Quad, Wharfedale, Audiolab) If this is their aftersales then I don't think the company is one to worry about

This is the best place I've found http://speakergrills.co.uk/

Thanks Johnny. All done I need to be able to type faster

You poor thing. I hope it wasn't too dull. Though I admit I just looked through to find any useful information for you and did get distracted by some interesting contributions from people. The big problem is that a lot of the links have gone down which happened when the Basschat site was moved. I've not got all of them saved either so difficult to put them all back up again. I never did do the step by step guide but I did build a slightly smaller version and put up a video of the build (link to follow) As ever bass playing and band changes get in the way, I love Basschat but prefer bass playing The external dimensions are 360x424x530mm the baffle front is set back 30mm from the front of the cab so internally the depth is 306mm. The four ports are made of standard guttering downpipe 190mm for a 50Hz tuning. All this information is elsewhere in the thread but it's probably hard to find. The techniques are the same as the ones in the video. I'll try and see if I can find any old pics and plans to put up but if you want to build one of these then I'm happy to guide you through the process. If you had been here a week ago I could have sent you one of the prototypes. Sadly someone else has bagged that one.

PM'd

If your output has a 5.3 ohm tap then it will be equally happy with either a 4 or an 8 ohm load. Like I said its 1/3 away from both so effectively 5.3ohms exactly in the middle between 4 and 8ohms. Either will work fine.