Phil Starr

Done

Master Blaster for me I might re-visit the Steve Harris gallop too, the band didn't notice but I fake it

Just that really. We are in a great position to cope better than most. We have a community here to talk to and something we love doing but never get enough uninterrupted time at. I'm planning to sort out all my hundreds of chord sheets and tabs and get them to our top floor, make sure I have plenty of rechargeable batteries for my zoom and my best headphones at the ready. My three best basses will go up and the computer and an mp3 player, then I'm entirely self sufficient and can play without waking the street. For fun I'm intending revisiting songs I haven't played for years. Our band wants to go down a soul/funk route, something that I've never played, it was going to take me months to learn a new style with a few techniques to add to the flimsy armoury I currently have. If I can find time my music theory is shocking, I need to work on my speed, hell, I could even learn the dusty bit of the fretboard. Two octave runs..... (I wonder if I can fake a cough and get extra isolation time ) For me bass is all the 'wellness' I need. The man cave my safe space. the best anti inflammatory I can get. Guilt free time on Basschat as well. What will you do?

Just to back up what has already been said from experience the 935 (which I use) is more forgiving about mic placement for idiots like me who can't stand still when playing and singing. I think the 945 actually sounds a little better but I only do bv's so no-one is interested both are good mics anyway. I've found that the Shure Beta 58 sits somewhere between Cardiod and super-Cardioid in terms of pick up.

Yes Nice that you get two Thumpinators built in as well

Mike I think you are going to cancel anyway but don't be out of pocket, I'm happy to chip in if you are

Hi, I haven't kept anything from the design process, everything should be in here The reason for four ports is the 'easy build' bit. I wanted something that could be cut without specialist tools and easy to source so drainpipe and a hole saw were chosen. I built one prototype with a slot port but couldn't build it without using lots of clamps that most people wouldn't have at home, so again that didn't fit the 'easy build' criterion. A single port with the same area would be better in terms of port noise if you can cut a bigger hole accurately. The other thing is that this design was specified to match a 19" rack mount so the dimensions can be changed if you want to have something a little less blocky in shape.

John, (Chienmortbb) has bought one and has been playing around with it. It looks like a better buy than the SM212 and it models well in the 50l cab. Coronavirus allowing I'm going to meet up with John fairly soon so we could try it in the Mk 1 cab if you want to wait for a listening test. However I'd have to say the 12CMV2 looks a real bargain and I'd have no reservations about using it other than the fact I haven't actually tried it. I gigged the SM212 fairly extensively and still do from time to time. Playing with a couple of the MK1's is to drown in a sea of bass. If you decide to go ahead and are happy to do a build diary I can help you through the build and maybe tweak the cab a little.

Don't you remember the great vinyl crisis during the three day week? I reckon my current stocks of loo roll will last until 2045

Spot on about the only being completely in phase at one frequency. These were designed in the 1960's way before Thiele and Small came along in the 70's even than their academic paper took a while to permeate into the design of instrument speakers. I was designing and building speakers in the early/mid 70's and it was more craft than science. Development involved a lot of listening and testing and even the tuning of the port often involved a lot of trial and error to get right despite Helmholtz resonators being fully understood. My best selling design (mainly I did custom builds) came about completely by accident. I was attempting to build a small (by 1970's standards) cab with rear horns when I needed a couple of cabs for a gig quickly. I bodged together the half finished cabs with a simple straight horn rather than the folded horn I'd been intending. It sounded great with a nice smooth punchy bass ideal for disco and was way quicker to build than the 'proper' design I'd intended. W designs were very popular at the time which was probably why it sold. I surmised that it had a broader flatter tuning than a straight reflex port but I never investigated. Hell I had a nice sounding easy to build design people liked. There were many attempts to get a broader output form the ports at the time, changing the Q of the cab. This may have been at the back of the mind of the designer but personally I think it's just a support for the grille and it sounded good so they kept the design. A bit of me still misses the hours of fiddling with a cab and hours of listening while you tried to get the 'best' sound you could. Not very scientific but it might be why so many people like vintage gear. Anyway that's a lovely build rubis, I hope you get a lot of pleasure from it.

I'm still finishing off a roll I bought back in the 70's

If you wanted an upgrade then for £600 you could go for the RCF ART 312's https://www.thomann.de/gb/rcf_art_312_a_mk_iv_bundle.htm. I've auditioned the mk3 versions and they sounded great for the money and definitely a step up from the Alto's. the vocals were particularly well done. Having said that nothing wrong with the Alto's and they are great value. Buying subs will help but it's a lot to carry for a pub gig. Unless you put bass and kick drums through you won't necessarily need those IME. I'd certainly look at replacing your other vocalist's mic something like an AKG D5 is a great sounding mic though it's tight pickup pattern (great for feedback reduction) makes it less suitable for someone who moves around a lot and has poor mic technique. They are only £50ea at the moment too. If you think their mic technique is a bit less than good the SM58 (£80) is a very forgiving mic, it doesn't sound as good as the AKG but will be like lifting a veil from his current Shure cheapy.

I use a zoom B1ON (Now updated to the B1 Four https://www.zoom.co.jp/products/effects-preamps/bass/b1-four-b1x-four-bass-multi-effects-processors ) for home practice with headphones as do a few people here, you could then put that through a PA speaker or floor wedge if you want it in the room with you. As a guitarist you probably know the G1ON It contains a load of amp modellers, all sorts of effects, a tuner and a drum machine/metronome and you can mix in a input from anything with a headphone out like an mp3 player or a phone. It's neat and well made and runs for hours on a set of rechargeable AA batteries. Through headphones it sounds great.

Turning the sensitivity to 'mic' should give you plenty of gain. I drive my ART 310's straight from the bass and volume is fine. try missing everything else out and just plugging the bass straight into the jack on the speaker. you should get at least a decent volume if not loud enough. Try switching from mic to line and than back to mic again, I don't like those sliding switches and they might not have switched as they should, a wiggle usually fixes it.

As you observed the frequency responses are very different, that peak with the LaVoce is huge and over a bigger frequency range than the Celestion. It's also centred on 2kHz where you are really going to notice it. The more open and snappier is now your over emphasis of slap sounds. It may be that in fact the extra mids might make this a good speaker for rock where it would really cut through rather than slap where you have just too much of a good thing. Knowing it is there you can always target it with eq of course but this is a really highly coloured speaker, I'd probably quite like that sound but it is coloured. The advantage of self build is that you learn these things but the disadvantage is that you can end up kissing a few frogs before you find your prince. Actually the response rises from 400hz and that too will affect how you subjectively perceive the tonal balance.

Again I've simplified some of the problems in calculating these things. I've been reading up on Spanish Flu for years. Everyone has to have a hobby. The trouble is there were no tests at the time, all they really knew was that there was an infective agent smaller than a certain size. Many of the deaths may have been due to other causes and some due to flu misdiagnosed as something else, there's flu going round at the moment and that will kill a few thousand people this winter, I've also seen figures of 80% infection and much lower figures around 27% too. On top of that even the size of the world population in 1918 is a matter of speculation. I simply chose to quote the WHO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

We need to be careful about mortality rates, they are expressed as percentages, what is not clear is percentages of what? All countries seem to be using different measurements of what constitutes infection. For some it is those tested who are positive, for some it is an estimate of how many we believe might be infected, for others it is people who show symptoms and others of those hospitalised. That's one of the problems of comparison with Spanish Flu there were no test for viruses so the 2-3% mortality is based on people reported as infected. The 2-3% for Coronavirus I quoted was based upon the proportion of serious infections in China and other east Asian countries as reported in New Scientist. Spanish Flu was particularly deadly because it was a novel disease, we are the decendents of the survivors so the 2009 outbreak was much less dangerous to us. Covid-19 is another novel disease

Genius

That's absolutely fair and I did consider putting some of that in my post, but my posts tend to be too long anyway. I'm not coming on as a prophet of doom. I've been following this since the coronavirus popped up in 2014 and before that the SARS outbreak. Pretty much any epidemic novel disease interests me. All I'm really trying to do is pass on some of the stuff I'm reading. I'm optimistic by nature and there are things we can do collectively to help. I suppose by giving a bit of perspective I'm hoping people take this thing seriously. It isn't really here yet but people washing their hands will slow colds and flu too, when it does get here properly, if it get's here then the better our understanding the better we will cope. We all know people who think they know best, who will try and leave quarantine because they feel fine, who will fly to the Veneto because they've paid for the holiday, who will go to work because 'it's only a cold' What you say about the conditions and people moving because of the war is all true, I don't have numbers but in 2018 there were 4.4billion air passengers carried worldwide (Statista) way bigger than the movements of 1918. We just have better transport now. Cities are bigger and more of us are urban dwellers. Worldwide there is less absolute poverty in proportion but still plenty of people who are under nourished or who have little access to healthcare. My specialism at university was mathematically modelling biological populations. It was a long time ago but is kind of why I've been interested in contagious diseases over the years. It seems whatever the changes in conditions the transmission rate now in our conditions is similar to the transmission rate then in their conditions with a different disease and so is the mortality rate. You'd need far more fine detail than those two crude figures to do any modelling but the figures I've seen haven't been comforting so far. FWIW I'm checking figures and information before I post, I'll make mistakes of course but i'm trying to be objective.

I don't want to get into a long argument about this mainly because neither of us know if any of these things might be true, because there is a lack of data. Comparing it to H1N1 flu virus is interesting though. You may feel the 2009 pandemic was sound and fury signifying nothing but WHO figures suggest 27% of us were infected and anywhere between 150-575,000 people died prematurely. The fatality rate of those infected was 0.01% The 1918 pandemic was altogether more serious between 11 and 21% of the worlds population was infected. Fatality rate was 2-3% and the peak death rate was 25 people per 1000 population in the UK. Worldwide for a brief period it dwarfed malaria 40-50million people died in a couple of years. At the moment Coronavirus looks like it is killing 2% of infected people showing symptoms and infecting about 20% of the population. Given that the world population is four times that of 1918 and the similarity of early figures to H1N1 in 1918 we ought to at least consider the possibility of ten's of millions dying, maybe hundreds of millions. Game changer? certainly for those of us who are killed. Significant? Well I think 150-500,000 is significant even if there are nearly 8 billion of us. So if it pans out as badly as the 1918 pandemic expect maybe 195,000,000 deaths plus a lot of illness, that's about 400 years worth of malaria deaths (600,000 in 2017, 420,000 in 2018). That's only one possibility amongst many of course. It will be a game changer, we have been steadily upping our response capability to novel infections, we can now sequence the DNA of these viruses we are more vigilant than we were and Chinese scientists were warning of a new infectious Coronavirus in 2014. Our skills at containment are getting better, work on AIDS has improved our anti-viral skills. Part of what drives this is public opinion and unfortunately we are all too willing to let problems be ignored.

I don't get your point. Every malaria death is a personal tragedy leaving children without parents and families and friends losing people they love, the economic costs are huge and some parts of the world are held in poverty just by this disease. Some of those deaths are preventable and that is a disgrace. In countries where it is endemic it affects the daily lives of everyone. The research efforts could still be better and so could public health measures in many countries but this is an entirely different disease. If we did nothing it would kill more than this and if we do more we can reduce that toll. That is true about Coronavirus. Our responses in this country will be in part shaped by public opinion and understanding. There's a lot of nonsense out there on social media but I think people need to know that this is probably coming and it is probably going to be serious but there are things we can do to mitigate. If official advice is just met with cynicism and complacency it is going to be worse for all of us. I'm trying to be as accurate as I can and some of this is potentially not too good.

New Scientist this week and the WHO are effectively of the same opinion. We are at the tipping point of this becoming pandemic. If that proves to be true it simply means that the disease is out in the wild spreading from person to person in a certain number of areas and the process of tracing and testing contacts of known cases will no longer contain the disease. That doesn't mean we give up just that it looks like a lot of us will get the disease and we will move from contact tracing to hygiene measures as a way of slowing the spread. Slowing the spread is important, it gives healthcare systems a better chance of coping and longer for us to develop counter measures and treatments. In the UK as ever we are in a fortunate position, islands are easier to protect than land borders. I doubt our government has the political will however to take extreme measures to protect us, not a party political statement that, I don't think our system is working well at the moment and if the election result had been different I doubt that it would affect this threat. IMO it looks very likely that we will all be exposed to this disease at some point. On the figures that we have so far which are extremely unreliable maybe 1/5th of us will be very ill with flu like symptoms or worse and some of us won't survive, so far it is looking like 2-3% of the people who get very ill but who knows in a different population with different levels of fitness and different healthcare in place. If the government has the will it will try and limit personal contact, which won't stop the disease spreading but will slow it reaching people. Obviously with a million people all ill at the same time the health care for each would be less than if it were only 50,000 ill at any one time. There are still so many unanswered questions that speculation isn't going to help much but nevertheless there are things we can do to mitigate the effects. The world hasn't really reacted well to mitigate climate change so it'll be interesting to see how we respond to an immediate but lesser threat which will be shared across borders. I found out today that Tokyo ( my son lives there ) has run out of toilet paper, it ran out of masks last week. People there are planning for what they will need if they have to stay at home in isolation for a while, you can see loo roll would be important. We may have more to worry about than keeping the pubs open.

surprisingly varied for what is meant to be a flat response, I actually thought no 1 was the most 'honest' but of course that might be because is sounded most like my bass, we don't really know what your bass sounds like. 4 sounded a bit lifeless to me but more bassy due to some top/mid end missing, I can see why some like it but it's a sound I think would get lost in a mix. 5 sounded quite coloured but was my preferred sound. It's interesting that they were so varied but I suspect you would notice very little of this in a live performance. It would be good at some stage once everyone has had a blind listen if you could put up what the runners were. If people are about to make a purchase I'm sure they would like to know the identity of a good cheapie and if people really did get the identities right or wrong it will help inform their opinions. It'll be fun too.

I don't know about being the same boat but both the drivers are changed, I'd imagine the bass driver will probably have a bigger magnet and allow for improvements in excursion and maybe control over the cone. The specs show a 3dB increase in total output which will be determined mainly by the ability of the bass driver to handle bass excursion. Both systems seem to have the same amp but both will be throttled back by the onboard processing the 712 slightly more so. You've got a better speaker

Of course it can, cabs have a wide range of efficiencies though you won't get cheap, light and loud all in the same package. Try and find out the sensitivity (usually measured in db/W) if your original speaker is a fairly typical 95db/W then you should be able to find something that will be significantly louder. Don't get too hung up on sheer volume though any new speaker is going to change the sound you like so make sure you try anything with your amp before parting with your cash.