The Big Fat South-West Bass Bash - Now Sunday 19th September 2021

[Norm]

9 hours ago, zbd1960 said:

Looks like a great event. Wonder if an interloper from the northern Border Marches in darkest Salopia could sneak in next time? 🤔

Pays yer money & turn up, just like the rest of us! 😉

[zbd1960]

41 minutes ago, Norm said:

Pays yer money & turn up, just like the rest of us! 😉

I was worried about the border guards along Offa's Dyke, but it's been clarified... there are routes....

[scrumpymike]

So now we can start looking forward to the next one 😊  The hall is booked for Sunday, October 9th, 2022 - so get that date in your diaries!

 

Mike and the Scrumpettes

Edited September 24, 2021 by scrumpymike

[Woodinblack]

In the calendar now!

[stewblack]

I am unavailable to everybody else but you Mike

[Ashweb]

Sadly, real life has kept me off the forum for a while; I'm really annoyed I missed this.  If you have any T shirts left, I'll happily take one off your hands as a penance... 🙂 

[scrumpymike]

1 hour ago, Ashweb said:

Sadly, real life has kept me off the forum for a while; I'm really annoyed I missed this.  If you have any T shirts left, I'll happily take one off your hands as a penance... 🙂 

PM sent.

[JohnDaBass]

Is someone going to post a review of the bass cab shoot out at this year's Bash? @Phil Starr

[Ashweb]

On 24/09/2021 at 21:02, scrumpymike said:

PM sent.

Replied to PM - Hopefully money sent OK. Let me know if any problems.

[Phil Starr]

On 25/09/2021 at 06:14, JohnDaBass said:

Is someone going to post a review of the bass cab shoot out at this year's Bash? @Phil Starr

hi John, I'll try to write something up whilst I still remember. It wasn't a formal shoot out this time with the numbers we had and the fact that i forgot to bring the sheets which would have made it a blind shoot out but we had a lot of time to compare cabs and talk through some of the differences we could all hear.

[stewblack]

That splendid little 6"er if yours I played with deserves a mention.

Quite extraordinary.

Packed a punch for such a small package.

[Rich]

Yes! What a ludicrous little cab (in a really good way).

[scrumpymike]

Bash T-shirts  Just confirming that all mail-order T-shirts were sent out today by first-class post.  If you're expecting one and it hasn't arrived by Friday, ping me a PM.

[Phil Starr]

9 hours ago, stewblack said:

That splendid little 6"er if yours I played with deserves a mention.

Quite extraordinary.

Packed a punch for such a small package.

 

7 hours ago, Rich said:

Yes! What a ludicrous little cab (in a really good way).

I was so pleased with the reaction to this. I started off with a collection of the BassChat builds we've been designing and publishing on here. I'd set it up to give me time to set up the shootout and the 6 was a last minute addition. and I hid it amongst the 12 and 10" cabs. I tried them all out with my Peavey Minimax and left the 6 plugged in. I think it was Rich who played it first. To be honest when he kicked off I wasn't certain which cab it was myself and had to sneak a look a little twiddle of the tone controls and it sounded great at what was quite a volume. I've loved playing this at home for practice as it does sound nice in a small space but this was something else. It's a single 6" speaker (Fane 6-100) in a 10litre cab made to match one of those little guitar amps you buy for your kids when they start out. Anyway it's designed to be as loud as possible but sacrifices all the fundamental with a nearly flat response down to 75Hz which means it will give a strong second harmonic down to just below bottom E. It also goes up to 7kHz so doesn't need a tweeter for bass and so avoids crossover distortion and all the unnecessary tizz of a cheap horn. It will do 93db/W and handle 100W thermal so can reach 113db with some limitations at the bottom end. Anyway that's the technical bit I'll let @Richand @stewblacktell you what it sounded like as I'm biased. This is what it looks like (grille removed)

[Pea Turgh]

I’d actually been thinking of re-housing the Fane driver I bought for pimping  my practice amp.  This is fuelling my desire to get the drill out 😂

[Phil Starr]

On to the 'shootout' which was a bit curtailed because I wasn't sure I was doing it until the day before. My usual partners in crime Stevie and Chienmortbb(John) were swamped at work and moving house respectively so i was on my own. I forgot John normally brings the sheets to hide the speakers so it wasn't a blind test. The advantage of this is that not having to hide things meant we could move things in and out and try more speakers.

 

The set up was a WAV recording into my RCF mixer and then fed through 4 Aux channels into two Peavey IPR 1600 PA amps. I used a RCF ART10 as a reference speaker, everything was set flat and I adjusted the volumes of each channel so that the levels were the same on a C-weighted noise meter. We were peaking at around 98db so it was pretty loud. We started off with the BC110T design, The BC Mk3 12" speaker that Stevie designed and I think around 20 people built, A MarkBass NYC 121 and a Genz Benz Focus 112.

 

The first thing to note was the 'reference speaker' the RCF ART310 it was a useful reference because i know it to be a pretty honest speaker but for bass it was just too bassy, it's designed to be on a pole of course and on the floor the reinforcement meant the bass was just a bit over the top, I'll need to rethink that for next time and maybe put the reference speaker on a pole. However it might be a consideration if you are thinking of going the FRFR route with a PA speaker.

 

First up then was the BC110T Basschat easy-build lockdown cab project - Amps and Cabs - Basschat TBH there wasn't a lot of comment about this speaker. The sound was a lot more usable than the reference and the general feeling was it was a giggable option. For a speaker that would cost £150 to build and given the company it was in that was probably a good result.

 

Next was the big brother The BC 12" Mk III Stevie’s 12” FRFR Cab Build Thread (Basschat Cab v3) - Amps and Cabs - Basschat containing a Faital Neo driver and a high quality Celestion Neo tweeter. We'd previously tried the Mk2 version against the Barefaced Big Baby and it was preferred by some people. As an improved version the MkIII is a serious speaker. The reception for this was great, immediately liked with at least one person wanting to get on and build one and there was a general concensus that everyone would be happy to gig this speaker.

 

Third was the Genz Benz Focus, I was quite impressed with this, all the speakers so far were FRFR bass speakers designed to be uncoloured and I was behind the speakers, it sounded very like the BC12 from there, so much so that I went out front to have a listen. this is a great honest speaker, a bit of tizz from the tweeter and the concensus was that the BC MkIII was better but if you ever get offered one used it's really worth a look.

 

The final speaker in the test proper was the MarkBass NYC. An interesting speaker because at the last bass bash it had been the 'Marmite' speaker. 40% had put it no 1 and 60% last. The comments here were all of the nature "it sounds like a bass is meant to sound" "it will probably sit well in the mix" No-one here preferred the sound to the other speakers though to be fair it's a decent mid price option. There were some comments that it would work well with Mark Bass amps.

 

that was it as far as the 'shootout' element was concerned. I can't give an opinion as i was stuck behind the tables operating the gear most of the time. If anybody there  wants to comment that would be great. there was a clear winner, the BC MkIII. I missed a real opportunity because @Stub Mandrelhad brought his GRBass cab and we had a couple of BF cabs in the main room. However Jim had his Greenboy 115 and we swapped that in for the MB. I didn't have time to match the volumes with the meter so it may have been louder than the others as i relied on ear to set the levels. It was a seriously impressive sound which I did manage to hear against the MkIII. There's a real slam about this speaker with the use of the dedicated 15" bass driver and the midrange was nicely detailed pulling out some details I didn't hear in the other speakers. It is a sizeable speaker though. As a no compromise speaker I haven't heard better yet. the feeling in the room was that if the BC MKII was like listening to your bass through decent headphones then the Greenboy was more like being in the recording studio with the big studio monitors.

 

So that's it, the method would have worked well and If i'd had time to try a range of speakers and organised the ones I Wanted earlier it would have been more informative, maybe next year.

 

 

[Woodinblack]

We also tried the TC RH112 speaker, which performed ok, a fairly solid bass speaker that wasn't too coloured, probably due to the depth.

But still, out of all of them the BC12" Mk III is the one I would have gone home with. Oh wait, I did!

[Rich]

I agree about the Genz cab, it sounded excellent. But the BC12MkIII blew it out of the water -- the clarity was just out of this world, not a trace of harshness or mud at either end of the spectrum. As a two cab solution (or one cab for smaller gigs) I would snap them up in an instant. I do play quite a lot of larger gigs so my ideal one cab solution would be the Greenboy -- as Phil says, it was pretty much the BC12 but bigger. Both of them have left me dissatisfied with the sound of my EBS 2x12. Great, more GAS just when I thought I was ok.

The BC12 was definitely my winner by an absolute street. It's a credit to all those involved in its development.

Edited September 28, 2021 by Rich

[Phil Starr]

Thanks guys, as I said I spent most of my time behind the desk so didn't really get to hear much until we started playing with the Greenboy so yours are the definitive views.  Stevie deserves pretty much all the credit for the MkIII as he did all the development work. John and I were very much the supporters egging him on.

[yorks5stringer]

I felt the MarkBass sounded the least articulate of all the cabs and very middy. The sample track used for all as well as having bass had a drum machine backing and this was noticably muted with the MB. I was a bit dismayed as it was my cab, but as others ( might have?) said, all it needed to do in a band setting was reproduce the Bass and  leave the rest to the drummer, guitar and vocals etc.

[Frank Blank]

On hearing the postman struggling to cram something through the letterbox I assumed a) he'd finally cracked and decided to hump the attractive front door (it's the stained glass window with the sunset that does it) or b) Chez Blank had been targeted for an inordinate amount of junk mail this morning. In fact it was the rarely seen option q) arrival of Bass Bash T-Shirt, addressed to none other F Black, whoever that is? As he appears to take the same size as me in T-shirts I have appropriated it.

 

Cheers Stumpybike.

 

😉

Edited September 28, 2021 by Frank Blank

[Rich]

Tsk tsk Mike. Fancy getting Frank Plank's name wrong.

[Rich]

1 hour ago, yorks5stringer said:

I felt the MarkBass sounded the least articulate of all the cabs and very middy. The sample track used for all as well as having bass had a drum machine backing and this was noticably muted with the MB. I was a bit dismayed as it was my cab, but as others ( might have?) said, all it needed to do in a band setting was reproduce the Bass and  leave the rest to the drummer, guitar and vocals etc.

Yes, this is very true. The Markbass cab is not pretending to be an FRFR cab at all, and in that respect it does its job admirably.

[stewblack]

Vis a Vis the 6" pocket rocket. I had sauntered into the side room out of nosiness and was handed a bass 

A very solid, Fender P with a few extra bells and whistles, very nice instrument.

I was focused on getting a sound I liked rather than on the amp/cab I was going through. 

There was a line of small cabs dwarfing the even smaller 6" and I assumed it was one or other of them.

Genuinely astonished when I discovered which it was.

I honestly think gigging with a couple of them would be a serious proposition. Never easy to tell with no kit in an empty room but there was all the good stuff coming out of that tiny cab.

[Frank Blank]

38 minutes ago, Rich said:

Tsk tsk Mike. Fancy getting Frank Plank's name wrong.

 

Easily done, it's the cider and the endless pasties, it's enough to drive a man to distraction.