Creating work while hindered by Pandemic & excessive Heat

[nevetslab]

On 10" speakers for bass... I never understood why they have become such a standard item. If you want BASS stop muckin' around - get an 18" on the job! Ah for the good old days - 1974 I saw Hot Tuna at Lenox Mass, Jack had about 16 cabs stacked up on stage, all JBL 18's powered by 4 SVT heads. Didn't need any PA, the sound from his rig just walloped you in the chest. As it should. Even a single 18 is awesome for most purposes. Remember, it's a BASS not a treble. Rant over.

I was a big fan of Jefferson Airplane, saw them several times here in LA. Jack wasn't using a huge rig like that just yet. I can't remember WHAT he was playing thru. Paul Kantner was playing his Rick thru Acoustic 260's, which had just come out on the market in the mid-sixties.

All I had back then were JBL D140F's and D130F's. 18's on their own, while having loads of bottom, just don't have the 'zip' that 10's have. Four or eight 10's, to my ears, have a much nicer overall tone than the larger cones. Mesa and Aguilar 412 bass cabinets also sound quite nice...having discovered those earlier this year while still making my way thru the bass cabinet inventory weeding out the broken cabinets and restoring them. I've never owned any multiple-10" spkr cabinets until a few years ago, having cobbled together an Eden 210 cabinet, both blown, but found some other's in the CenterStaging throwaway piles that I was able to extract, and populated that 210 cabinet. Though it's now parked up at a friends' house in his practice room. Since I've been here, if I needed anything, that's always been one of the nice perks.

[Enzo]

Bass and bottom are not the same thing. 18s can make some convincing bottom, but 10s are RIGHT NOW, punchy, in your face. an 8x10 cab has over 600sq.inches of cone, versus 250sq.in. of a single 18.

How about a 4x10 with your 18.

[nhbassguitar]

1. 10” speakers work fine for bass if they’re designed for it and if you use enough of them. Their advantage is their ability to produce mids and at least some treble due to their relatively low cone mass. They respond much faster to transients for the same reason. So, they’re a lot more-flexible than 15s or 18s. If you spectrum-analyze modern bass tracks, you’ll find that much of the energy exists above where most 18s have ceased being able to do any reasonable amount of work. Even Jamerson’s work was largely in the low mids. If you array enough 10s (or even 8s as some manufacturers have done), you can get impressive bass *and* impressive mids at impressive volumes.

Arrayed smaller drivers also help focus the cab’s output above frequencies where bass cabs (irrespective of driver size) cease to emit a spherical waveform. This is because the sum of the closely-spaced drivers creates a single large planar wavefront due to driver coupling. This is of huge value when the audience is in front of the band and there’s no PA support for bass (which is becoming rarer each year).

I’m not saying there’s no place for 15s and 18s. There is. But as part of a larger SPL-delivery ecosystem.

2. The days of big bass amps on stage and FOH handling only vocals and maybe drums as well are for all intents and purposes gone, and I say good riddance. I have extensive experience with high-volume bass amps. I spent literally years standing only a few feet in front of them, playing mid-’70s Precisions and Jazz Basses. My biggest rig back in my club days was an SVT and a pair of 810 cabs. This was before club sound system began including bass guitar. It was terrifying. (The sentence I use the most these days is, “What?”) But we had to do it that way because the science of proper PA bass bin design didn’t exist yet. Engineers were just guessing on enclosure volumes, port dimensions, and damping schemes. Those bins were awful, even the name-brand ones. They were efficient, sure, but they were large, heavy, underdamped, and peaky. And, driver technology hadn’t progressed to where it is now, where we have bass drivers that can comfortably do 10 mm Xmax all day. Back then you were lucky to get 2 or 3 before turning your prized heavy-magnet bass driver’s cone to confetti. So, my point is, we said why bother hauling in all that crap if it’s just going to sound like crap anyway. Keep the bass amp on stage and use reasonably-sized FOH speakers for the stuff that doesn’t go below 100 or so Hz because they do that job well. It wasn’t because we thought bass amps on stage sounded great out front; it was because we knew it would sound better than the only alternative, which had not yet matured.

[nhbassguitar]

A 410 with an 18 is of no value unless the 410 can't go low enough for the intended application but the 18 can. However, there's lots of 410s out there that will run lower than many 18s can at identical volumes. It all comes down to the driver+cab designs, not the cone sizes alone.

Also, mixing dissimilar cabs absolutely requires the system use a crossover so the two cabs don't run in the same frequency range and cause comb filtering, which can create phasing and frequency-response hell. Now we're leaving the realm of bass head and cab, and getting into the rackmount world. That may or may not be desirable from a logistics/operational perspective.

[drewl]

That's why you run a 15" with 4-10"

Best of both worlds.

Last time I had to cover for our bassist I used my '73 Marshall 50watter through my 70's Marshall 4x12 B bass cab with G12H30's.

Plenty of great sounding power for the club we played.

[Enzo]

If you spectrum-analyze modern bass tracks,

Danger Will Robinson... Live is a different animal. Tracks are engineered to listen on the "average" sound system. A great many of which don't respond to bottom that is easily heard live. In the 1969-70 era, an SVT and a pair of 8x10 cabs sounded just great. And an 8x10 and a cab with 15s side by side sounded fine. ANy phasing issues that might cause sure never reared their heads then. Kinda blew the previous hero, Acoustic 360, right out of the water.

And our little 100 watt six-channel PA was never going to help with the bass. SOme bands were lucky, they had a Shure Vocal MAster. It even had REVERB. And feedback switches!!! The two speaker columns had nothing larger than 8" in them.

[drewl]

You guys are showing your age!

Of course we could never afford anything good starting out.

You can imagine how happy we were when we hooked up with a real singer with TWO Peavey CS400's, with MONITORS!

He's in a popular tribute band these days.

[Leo_Gnardo]

You guys are showing your age!

Don't I know it. As for bass, whatever passes for bass with a pair of ten buck earbuds these days, that must be O.K. Feh... Whether it's a bass rig, sound reinforcement system, or pipe organ, I crave the sort of bass that blows back your hair (If you have any left ), thumps your chest, tickles your belly (and other parts if you're a girl ), rumbles up through your feet, and even makes your eyes lose focus. Yessssss, that's the stuff!

[Enzo]

Hunting for that fabled note that makes you poo.

[nhbassguitar]

Danger Will Robinson... Live is a different animal. Tracks are engineered to listen on the "average" sound system. A great many of which don't respond to bottom that is easily heard live. In the 1969-70 era, an SVT and a pair of 8x10 cabs sounded just great. And an 8x10 and a cab with 15s side by side sounded fine. ANy phasing issues that might cause sure never reared their heads then. Kinda blew the previous hero, Acoustic 360, right out of the water.

And our little 100 watt six-channel PA was never going to help with the bass. SOme bands were lucky, they had a Shure Vocal MAster. It even had REVERB. And feedback switches!!! The two speaker columns had nothing larger than 8" in them.

An 810 with 15s running next to it, running in the same frequency range, cannot possibly sound "great" unless you define "great" as a giant s__tshow of phase cancellations and a laughably irregular summed response curve. That's why you almost never see that sort of nonsense on stage any more. Does some minority of bass players still do that? Yeah, Flea for instance. But his tone is just plain awful in my opinion. Ragged response, no beef, just this horrible wash of decibels consisting of God knows what sort of sewage. There's a reason why sound reinforcement companies never ever EVER mix non-indentical cabs/drivers in the same frequency range: It doesn't work. If musicians want to do it and get that sort of sound on stage, terrific. But just because you saw something done in public by Some Famous Band doesn't automatically grant it scientific merit. And, waveform theory and the rules of psychoacoustics don't magically change as soon as one walks from the audience listening area (FOH) up onto the stage.

Any bass player who mixes cabs on stage would be far better-served by using an array of identical cabs. There will always, always be an improvement. That's my point.

(Though the point is moot in most cases since the responsibility for reproducing bass transferred from stage amps to sound systems decades ago. Which brings up a whole 'nother issue I won't go into.)

[Leo_Gnardo]

Hunting for that fabled note that makes you poo.

That's around 6 Hz, can be accomplished with "sonic weapons" but not so much PA systems. FWIW the venerable Hartley 24" woofer claims to be capable of reproducing this frequency, for those who wish to avoid Ex-Lax, castor oil & other such nostrums I s'pose. The Hartleys are intended for home use. The sonic weapon version is a truck trailer much like a tanker, with air compressors filling it and a "chopper" fan at the business end to create high intensity waves that can umm, "disable" unruly crowds. Bring a roll of TP...

[Enzo]

Oh it is a fable, or was to us anyway. No one ever expected it to work.

And nhbassguitar, welcome to the forum, and thanks for the judgemental tone. I sure wish I had someone 50 years ago to tell me our shit show was laughable. I don't know what Some Famous Band was doing live, we were too busy making our own music. We never got around to deciding on speakers scientifically. I am sure we did it all wrong.

I'd buy you a beer, but I am sure it would be served at the wrong temperature and couldn't possibly taste good. Oh well.

[nhbassguitar]

Enzo, if you'd care to debate the science behind what I've said here, I'm all ears. But you're clearly over your head when it comes to this topic. That's why you've started throwing pies at me. This was a chance for you to learn from someone who (get hold of yourself now...) actually knows more about a subject than you do. Pity you've squandered the opportunity, especially in light of your being an admin/mod. Your pride got in the way.

To everyone else who was part of this, I hope you've been able to come away with a few pieces of information that will help you in your work, or perhaps explain some of the things -- good and not so good -- you see and hear at live shows.

[Enzo]

Uh huh...get over yourself.

[nevetslab]

That's around 6 Hz, can be accomplished with "sonic weapons" but not so much PA systems. FWIW the venerable Hartley 24" woofer claims to be capable of reproducing this frequency, for those who wish to avoid Ex-Lax, castor oil & other such nostrums I s'pose. The Hartleys are intended for home use. The sonic weapon version is a truck trailer much like a tanker, with air compressors filling it and a "chopper" fan at the business end to create high intensity waves that can umm, "disable" unruly crowds. Bring a roll of TP...

I'm surprised we haven't seen any of these crowd-dispersement weapons deployed by the secret police to disrupt the protestors. I've never seen them in use, nor any idea if they're still in the military arsenal. Of course those would also be causing the troops and the city police to poop in their pants too.

Back to the days of getting what gear we could afford to work, and after dialing in my bass rig on stage so I could hear it and the rest of the band, it always drove me crazy to be told to turn it way down, as at the back of the hall, all you could hear is the bass. Only time we ever had monitors was when we pooled our gear with the other band, and cobble together stage monitors with the combined larger PA rig. That never did solve being able to hear the bass on stage as I'd like. As usual, I'd have to wander the stage a bit to find that 'zone' so I could hear, then move the vocal mic/stand there.