FugaziBomb

The biggest thing to takeaway is that sometimes it's more advantageous to overlap frequencies instead of using a traditional type of crossover. When I used the crossover, I had a hard time sitting on a mix. Either my lows were just rumble or my overall tone sounded thin, depending on how I balanced the crossover. Now that I overlap 100hz, I don't have that problem at all.

In my introduction thread, @rwillett encouraged me to expand on my Bi-amped bass rig. Before I get into it, let me provide a little background: I was playing in a reggae/hip hop band and my 8x10 set up wasn't hitting as hard on the low end as the DJs were between sets, so I decided to ditch a traditional bass amp in favor of some dedicated subs. Eventually, this is what I put together: This oversized monstrosity is my bi-amp rig. It consists of two 18" Peavey subs each independently fed 500w from a Crown XLi2500 power amp to handle lows and an Eden 210XLT mated to a Mesa Stereo 2:Fifty tube power amp for another 50 watts of valve goodness to handle everything else (I'll get into a more detailed signal path later - it's really convoluted). The idea was to have a lot of headroom for lows while the highs can benefit from that "edge of breakup" tube thing guitarists are nuts over (it turns out 50 watts is way too loud to push that hard, but I like the way out sounds in it's capacity, so I held onto it). Another reason for it was that I didn't want to be limited to just using "bass" effects, so having a bass rig that was essentially a guitar amp sitting on top of a pair of subs meant I could use any pedal and still be fine. So here's the rundown: (This is a VERY dated picture of my board, but it's better than nothing. Everything is pretty similar these days, but I've added a dedicated splitter instead of using the parallel outs from the wireless. I also swap out my drive pedals a lot depending on my mood) I house everything in two separate racks for weight dispersal. One rack is signal processing, the other is power. My signal is split at the pedal board into two paths: The clean signal - which will be for lows - bypasses all the effects and goes right into a Polytune. The Polytune is nice because it acts as a mute, so I can kill the lows if I want to do some subtle work in an intro or breakdown passage of a song without all the bombast of big, round low end in the mix. Anyway, this clean full range signal goes from the pedal board to a small crossover unit which can be seen just below the power conditioner. I only use the low output of the crossover, so it's playing more of a low pass filter in this role. I pass this at around 350 hz (one of two low pass operations it will go through) and send the signal to a sub harmonic synth (the Peavey Kosmos on the bottom of the processing rack). The Peavey is a glorified octave pedal more-or-less. I low pass my signal before it to remove a lot of the high-order harmonics that will make it sound like an octave pedal. I only want it to "see" a certain frequency to taylor it's response. In this role, the sub harmonic synth not only adds a lot of EDM style lows, but it keeps my lows very strong as I climb the fret board. After the sub harmonic synth, the signal then goes to channel 1 of the EQ. This is where I get rid of the rest of the mids and only leave up to 100hz (again removing any vestiges of the "octaver" sound) to be sent to channel one of the DBX 1066 compressor. I set this to 4:1 with about 6-9db of gain reduction. This really evens out the low end regardless of how soft or hard I attack the strings. The DBX compressor has two outputs. One goes right into a Radial ProDI for FOH (which has a ground lift I sometimes seem to need), the other goes into the Crown XLi2500 housed in the power rack. From there, each side of the Crown feeds one dedicated subwoofer. This thing hits HARD. I can really make it uncomfortable in a room if I want to, but that's not what I'm after. I'm after head room, and man do I have it. The other signal routes through my pedal board in a very traditional manner, ending with a dedicate mute for the highs so I can have just lows to do that hip-hop/EDM thing when needed. Also when I tune, I need to be able to mute both signals. Anyway, from the board, it goes into the Demeter VSBP-201s tube preamp. I run the input gain on this kinda hot so I get a little bit of break up as my baseline tone. It's pretty subtle as the Demeter is a very clean tube preamp. After that I use the XLR out with the Jensen transformer to send it to channel 2 of the EQ where I cut everything under 100hz and from there, into channel 2 of the compressor. This side of the comp is set to 2:1 and barley nips the peaks of the waveform for pretty minimal gain reduction. It's really nice for taking the peaks off the envelope filter I have on my board, which can get unruly, but it isn't very aggressive on my dynamics. From there, the signal goes to the Mesa Stereo 2: Fifty tube power amp (loaded with 6L6s) housed in the power rack and then out to the 2x10 Eden cab. The problem with all this signal pathing is that it's very cable intensive. Because of this, I had to get a little OCD with cable management: I made all the power cables myself to specific sizes so that I could route them out of the way of my audio signal cables. All the power is routed along the side of the rack case. I used two heavy-duty power connectors to link the power amp case to the processing case which houses the power conditioner. I also used two green LED indicator plugs for the power amps. I did this so that I can tell if I have live power without looking at the front of the amp. The last step of the equation is how to send all of this to FOH. I covered that with the lows - they get sent off though a DI right to the desk - but the only way to get the highs out front is to mic my 10s with an SM57 like a typical guitar amp. I think that's the best way, though. Otherwise without the high end filtering of the speaker cones, the drives and sawtooth synths would be pretty harsh. And that's that - the world's most convoluted, over-the-top, back breaking amp. I hope all of this made sense. It's very complicated and it took a lot of trial-and-error to optimize it and bring it to it's current, final iteration. It's worth noting that this is a throwback to my days of touring midsized to large venues. It's wildly impractical for small clubs and I'm in the process of building a more compact version of it with a powered sub and a Trace Elliott 1x10 with a 20 watt lunchbox amp on top of it all.

TB users are weirdly confrontational. A lot of users go out of their way to disagree with each other about trivial things. I once commented that the site felt like it should be called "TalkSemantics.com" instead. My current rig is biamped to run clean lows and only effects on the mids/highs. When I was planning out the rig, I posted a few times looking for specific info on biamping only to literally be called an idiot for wanting to do that. I did it anyway and after a few years really perfected the art. Recently I responded to another thread about biamping, saying that one trick I use is to have both of my low and high sides overlap at 100hz instead of using a traditional crossover. This user responded that I was apparently doing it wrong. When I responded back that it works well for me, he shot back with a multi paragraph manifesto about how that couldn't possibly sound good. Meanwhile I've been doing that for years and it sounds great! Like I said, talk bass is weird. Everyone seems like they're itching for a fight.

Summer is great here... when it finally happens. It's been winter here since November. We're getting snow all this weekend.

I went through two different Hartke cab set ups. I started with a 2x15 VX way back in the early 00s and then upgraded to a dual 4x10 XL set up when we started touring, which can be seen in the background here: And here: These days I'm not so loyal, but for probably 15 years all I played was Hartke.

This attitude is why my music room eventually took over the whole floor. My basement looks like a music store these days

I own both Cort and Ibanez basses and they're both great. Every Ibanez I've ever got my hands on all seemed to play great, from cheap to expensive. The only reason I can't say the same for Cort is that it's rare to come across one on a shop floor.

You might be able to find a different power amp with selectable input sensitivity. The Crown rack amps I have both have selectable input sensitivity. That might be a tall order in terms of free standing power amps, though.

I'm not sure how often the moderation team turns around, but it's always felt like they were very censorial over trivial stuff. I had another strike against me when I replied to the thread "Does the bass player from Korn use all 5 strings?" By saying "He barely uses the fretboard." They have very little tolerance for acerbic humor over there.

A quick Google search came up with the Sumo requiring less than 10k ohm input impedance while the Sadowski has an output impedance of 12k, so there might be something to that. I'd definitely dive deeper on that to confirm those numbers are right, but it's a step in the right direction.

Hello! I've been an on-and-off TB'r for a few years, but the mods have finally left a bad enough taste in my mouth for me to give up on it. On a thread about "Best Pedals for Ultimate Clean Tone," I posted a picture of an empty pedal board as a joke. That was deemed offensive enough to warrant deleting my post on the grounds that I was insinuating bassists shouldn't use effects. The ironic part is that I myself have a large pedal board full of effects. Anyway, rant over. Here I am. Also, the challenge question on sign up felt like a trick question. Mr. Fender's first name was Clarence, not Leo.