Bi-amp? That's Not The Half It

[stewblack]

Misleading title alert. Just in case one of our resident pedants starts chewing on his logarithm tables, I know what I'm about to talk about is two thirds, but you see I preferred the title as is. A bit snappier I'd say. 

Anytwittwoo, I was thinking of that old saying, with which I am sure we're all familiar, 'a bi-amper is just a tri-amper who doesn't really mean it '

This thread is also my 'best thing delivered during the lockdown' thread but you can have too much of a good thing where titles are concerned. 

Hands down the bestest thing I've sprung for since being holed up is my Super-X-Pro crossover by Behringer. 

It has opened a Pandora's box of sonic possibilities and is, in short, enormous fun. 

Having played with the two way crossover for a few weeks I decided that it's time I looked at the possibility of a three way. Fnaar. 

I pressed my little monitor into service and oh my golly gosh! Sounds like nothing I've ever heard before. 

At first I thought the experiment was a bust. Muting the low and mid outputs produced something akin to the old plastic radio which I used to listen to Luxembourg as a boy. 

But this is actually where the magic is. mix with the mids and the little speaker is actuallyadding purely the fresh, sparkling edge to the sound. Being able to control that without affecting any other frequencies is a joy. 

Similarly the bass. On its own just a huge wamping blooob of a sound. But compress the bejasus out of it, fold in a but of mid from the two 8" speakers and ay curumba! I spend hours just muting the outputs, singly and in pairs, and chuckling. With just a hint of manic about it. 

I'm probably just doing something everyone else has been doing forever with Helix and earphones. But I don't care. It's amazing. It's fun. 

Honestly it must be great to find what you're happy with and just stick with it. But I can't be what I'm not. I'm a restless soul, the joy for me is as much in the journey as it is in the destination. 

ps

Oh and did I mention how simple it is to set up? Everything stays connected, just one mains lead two speaker leads and the input on the little top cab. 

OK I keep a couple of pedal snakes coiled in the back of the rack box in case I decide to use effects for a gig. But again, they're right there. No rummaging for them in a box or bag. The psu for the effects already plugged in and attached to the amp end of the snake. 

Different effects for different parts of my sound. Oh what fun it is to be alive. 

pps

The Super-X-Pro has an adjustable limiter AND a HPF. 

ppps

😁

[stewblack]

OK, so.... I was so pleased with the warm and heart-felt response this post got that I thought I'd come back and give you all an update. I bet you can't wait 😁

I managed to run the rig at a decent volume and placed my Future Impact synth pedal in the effects loop of the amp controlling the midrange. 

Lawks a lummy. This is the answer for synth sounds and other extreme filters. 

By careful adjustments to the two frequency controls I made sure the synth didn't drop out altogether. Keeping the top and bottom perfectly clean and letting the pedal play with the mids is just brilliant. I'll try to record it but it won't be easy to capture. 

I reckon it's the midrange we 'hear' and the top and bottom we are aware of in a different way. I'm not expressing myself scientifically here  not trying to. 

The bottom end kind of fills us up with bass, the rhythm pulsing through us, the tops give us rhythm too, but in that clacking ticking kind of way. Like you hear from a double bass. The middle, if you like carries the melody. 

BTW mute the mids and it has a bit of dB about it  boom and rattle 

[Jus Lukin]

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Edited March 4, 2022 by Jus Lukin

[yorks5stringer]

41 minutes ago, stewblack said:

OK, so.... I was so pleased with the warm and heart-felt response this post got that I thought I'd come back and give you all an update. I bet you can't wait 😁

I managed to run the rig at a decent volume and placed my Future Impact synth pedal in the effects loop of the amp controlling the midrange. 

Lawks a lummy. This is the answer for synth sounds and other extreme filters. 

By careful adjustments to the two frequency controls I made sure the synth didn't drop out altogether. Keeping the top and bottom perfectly clean and letting the pedal play with the mids is just brilliant. I'll try to record it but it won't be easy to capture. 

I reckon it's the midrange we 'hear' and the top and bottom we are aware of in a different way. I'm not expressing myself scientifically here  not trying to. 

The bottom end kind of fills us up with bass, the rhythm pulsing through us, the tops give us rhythm too, but in that clacking ticking kind of way. Like you hear from a double bass. The middle, if you like carries the melody. 

BTW mute the mids and it has a bit of dB about it  boom and rattle 

Sorry Stew, but I'm not bi-curious.

[stewblack]

22 minutes ago, yorks5stringer said:

Sorry Stew, but I'm not bi-curious.

🤣🤣🤣

[BigRedX]

I used a bi-amp rig all the way through the 90s: Peavey Bassfex which split the signal using the crossover module into a stereo power amp feeding  1 x 15 and 2 x 8 cabs. It was done mostly so that I could have the effects that tended to suck all the bass power out of my sound on the higher frequencies only and get them much louder in the mix while still having plenty of thumpy low mids. 

Live it was a bit of a nightmare because it meant I had to have two bass DI's to get the full sound in the PA and many sound engineers couldn't get their head around the fact that the output from the low frequency send was much louder than that from the high frequency (as it should be). Once we got our own permanent sound engineer things were better.

These days I do the same thing with my Line6 Helix and then recombine the signals to give the PA a single feed which makes everyone much happier.

[stewblack]

3 hours ago, BigRedX said:

I used a bi-amp rig all the way through the 90s: Peavey Bassfex which split the signal using the crossover module into a stereo power amp feeding  1 x 15 and 2 x 8 cabs. It was done mostly so that I could have the effects that tended to suck all the bass power out of my sound on the higher frequencies only and get them much louder in the mix while still having plenty of thumpy low mids. 

Live it was a bit of a nightmare because it meant I had to have two bass DI's to get the full sound in the PA and many sound engineers couldn't get their head around the fact that the output from the low frequency send was much louder than that from the high frequency (as it should be). Once we got our own permanent sound engineer things were better.

These days I do the same thing with my Line6 Helix and then recombine the signals to give the PA a single feed which makes everyone much happier.

Nice. I have a sneaking suspicion that my days of sound engineers went the way of back stage hospitality, groupies and decent pay, a distant memory, sadly. So this is all about experimentation, having fun, defining my personal sound and actually making life easier when turning up at different venues. No matter how big they are this rig can handle it. Different acoustics can be catered for easily, I have, effectively, bottom middle and top controls, easy. Set up and pack down will be much quicker now - so much of my stuff is permanently wired up.

I used to have something similar back in the day but really it was just a pile of amps and cabs bodged together. The crossover has made all the difference to this.

[Passinwind]

On 30/04/2020 at 08:12, stewblack said:

OK, so.... I was so pleased with the warm and heart-felt response this post got that I thought I'd come back and give you all an update. I bet you can't wait 😁

 

But, but...I needed time to come back with a quality post to really show the love.  Yeah, that's the ticket!

Here's one of my many multiamping follies: http://passinwind.com/RaneRPM26zBassRig.html

And for those who prefer to avoid clickbait in these troubled times:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 3, 2020 by Passinwind

[stewblack]

Oh man. If I wasn't married already...

[FinnDave]

I don't think there's 10% of that that I understand!

[Passinwind]

On 03/05/2020 at 10:42, FinnDave said:

I don't think there's 10% of that that I understand!

The cool thing about the Rane is that you can add or subtract blocks at will, and put them in any order you like. You can also make blocks switchable on a pedal, and even use an expression pedal for some parameters. So you could turn off a tweeter  in your "dirty cab" when using distortion, or add different EQ and compression settings to the dirty signal, and so on. There's a good Windows GUI and lots of memory for presets, all of which makes it a lot more user friendly than you'd think at first look. But to be honest, I use it more for testing crossover alignments before building passive ones than anything else. Burning an hour or three on the computer is much cheaper than buying box loads of big inductors!