Advice on how to play "loud" šŸ˜

@joergkutter I have this dream where I own a selection of pre-amps (Ampeg, Tone Hammer, Darkglass, just the necessities) and a light weight 1,000 watt power amp that all fit nicely in a gig bag. In this dream I also have 700+ watts of cabinets and a really helpful old chap that drives me around.

My reality is that I donā€™t have any of those things and Iā€™m not in any position to be dropping cash on extra gear.

Iā€™m just really excited for you! Youā€™re doing exactly what I hope to get to do!

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Thanks - I feel quite fortunate that things have developed in this way for me :smile:

And, not just by the way: keep on dreaming - without dreams we are standing still!

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have you tried to set up the EQ flat ? (pots + graphic EQ)

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I will try that tomorrow in the rehearsal room, but I donā€™t think it will make much impact. I suspect it is more likely the reason @eric.kiser suggestedā€¦ will find out!

Thanks, @terb

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maybe ā€¦ but I compare to my Ampeg which is a 220w : I never have any problem to be heard even when playing heavy psychedelic stoner/sludge one meter away from the drummer :grin: and I never need to crank the volume pot all the way up, so the EQ settings might be an easy thing to try !

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Thatā€™s it!

What speaker cab are you playing through?

The terms ā€œgainā€ and ā€œdistortionā€ are often associated, but gain on an amp is just a volume control, the distortion only comes past a certain threshold.

Iā€™m guessing this is your primary problem. Too much sound in a room = mud that you canā€™t do anything about, no matter how you tone shape.

BUT, while I agree with @howard about experimenting with a mid boost, you may also want to try doing some subtractive EQ, see if you can identify any boominess and roll off a little lows (maybe in conjunction with a mid boost) so thereā€™s more room for clarity overall.

Also, maybe you can talk you guitarist into rolling off his bass EQ? Boomy guitar amps make me homicidal. That and poorly EQā€™ed floor toms (especially hit by drummers who play too loud), sucks all the bass guitar off the stage.

And yes to everyone who suggested ear protection! Spending $250 on custom molds and swappable filters was one of my best gear purchases ever.

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Being in construction Iā€™m familiar with ear protection in the form of the little foam ear plugs and ā€œheadphoneā€ style ear protection, but are you referring to something that kinda looks like a hearing aid when worn? And would swappable filters be used to be able to hear more or less sound/tone?

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Yes, to both questions. That are a lot of different looking models. The custom molding is supposed to give a more comfortable fit for long wear. Also, makes them easier to insert and they should stay in place better.

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Will find out today and report back to the forum :grinning:

Yes, I learned that now, and that is also what I had in mind in my original post - I didnā€™t want to increase the gain any more for fear of risking the onset of (unwanted) distortion.

Will indeed do some experimenting in the rehearsal room today.

Very good point also. The guitar player is considering bringing in a keyboard player as well, but I already told him that I donā€™t think there is enough ā€œroomā€ for a keyboard, neither in his compositions, nor, in fact, in the sonic space. And there, I hadnā€™t even considered him already infringing on bass territory also :grin:

Iā€™d be very curious to hear more about these. Naively, I would have thought these were just pieces of rubbery foam, but for USD 250 it must be something entirely different. From the word ā€œfilterā€, I take it they can do some sound-shaping along with the attenuation!?!

Thanks for the input, @JoshFossgreen!

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@eric.kiser: as mentioned in my reply to @JoshFossgreen in this thread, Iā€™d be very interested to learn more about these ā€œdevicesā€, which must be way more than just pieces of porous foamā€¦

Thx!

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Update:

OK, so it seems indeed that one of my ā€œproblemsā€ is that the amp head is driving the ā€œwrongā€ cab. The cab they have in the rehearsal room is an SVT410HE with 8 Ohm impedance and thus only ever will give me 250 W (with 4W, it should give 500 W, if I am understanding this right). This is only ā€œfixableā€ with a different cab, right!?
See exhibits 1 and 2 here:



Oh, and what is that Level Control dial doing???

Apart from that, I played around with the EQ, and - long story short - I could notice an improvement, both with respect to how much I had to crank up the amp, but also with respect to hearing myself play.
Maybe one of the other bands using this amp/cab combo also had issues and fixed something in the last 10 days, where I hadnā€™t been in the rehearsal room!? It is a bit odd that the improved sound situation was only due to me fiddling with the EQsā€¦

Anyway, thanks again for all your input and suggestions.

Now, I am still curious about those 250 dollar ear protection!!

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yes, solid state amps change their output power depending on the load (= the impedance of the cab) (on tube amps itā€™s a little bit different because there is an output transformer with different outputs for different cab impedances).

so, yeah, you have 250w under 8 ohm and 450w under 4 ohm (itā€™s not linear but almost). and with your 8 ohm cab, obviously you canā€™t have more than 250w. to ā€œcorrectā€ that you have to show 4 ohm to the amp, and there are two ways to do that :

  • change the cab for a 4 ohm one
  • add a 8 ohm cab in parallel of the existing cab ; because 2x 8 ohm in parallel equals 4 ohm

about the ā€œlevel controlā€ on the cab, itā€™s a volume control for the horn of the cab (which manage the highest frequencies).

Iā€™m not very surprised to read that you could improve the situation by tweaking the EQ :grin:

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First, let me +1 everything @JoshFossgreen and @terb said about EQ. Depending on the room, equipment, piece of music, etc. it is your best tool for getting rid of muddiness.

As for the equipment, regardless of all the watt and ohm talk, that is some really nice gear. New, that head and cabinet would have cost around $1,200 and under the vast majority of circumstances it should be plenty for a practice space or even a small venue. Just because you can add an additional cabinet for more watts/volume doesnā€™t mean youā€™ll want what you get.

Yes, you will be able to fully utilize the power of the head but putting such a massive amount of sonic pressure in a small space can reach a level where it is more painful than effective.

Recently, I came across a general guideline to know how many Bass watts are needed in any given situation. You take the total number of watts being used by all guitarists and multiply by two. If you have two guitarists and each one is using 125 watts, they have a total of 250 watts together, and the bass will need 500 watts to keep up.

Maybe @JoshFossgreen, @Gio, @muff, or one of the other folks that have played out a lot can comment on how accurate this calculation is.

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yes and I add that 100w for a guitar amp is an insane power. such amps exists but in a rehersal room you have your volume knob on 1 or 2. of course there are mad people who play very loud on small places but thatā€™s obviously a bad idea.

just to give an idea, my main guitar amp is a 36w and Iā€™ve done a lot of concerts with it, and even almost all the time I used the half-power mode (so 18w). I also have one or two 100w guitar amps but I never use them, thatā€™s just too much to be really useable (+ a tube amp does not sound good if you canā€™t open a bit the volume knob). you donā€™t need much power on a guitar amp (if itā€™s a good quality one at least).

the rule of doubling the guitar power for the bass generally works but there is another rule : a tube amp ā€œfeelsā€ double the power of a solid-state amp (because of the dynamics). it may be important, as the bass amps are often solid-state and guitar amps are relatively often tube amps.

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Yeah, the tube watts to solid state watts comparison has eaten up a lot of reading time for me. I get that watts are watts but I still havenā€™t found a good simplified answer to help me understand why tube watts are louder.

Eventually I found a reference that said you get a close enough approximation with

ā€œ5 tube watts equals 40 solid state wattsā€

Which seems oddly specific when they could have just said, multiply by 8.

Then there is the idea that to get a clean clear tone you need to have a power amplifier with twice the watts of your speaker cabinets. If thatā€™s true, then you end up with numbers like thisā€¦

Guitar at 125 watts, Bass Cabinet at 250 watts, Bass Amplifier at 500 watts!
Or.
Guitar at 250 watts, Bass Cabinet at 500 watts, Bass Amplifier at 1,000 watts!!!

Iā€™ve read that some professionals design their rig this way but it seems to be an extreme that most folks donā€™t bother with or canā€™t afford.

I would really like to hear what others think of how all these numbers fit together.

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I would not go that far :sweat_smile:

obviously a watt is a watt but :

  • a tube amp has more dynamics because of the design of tubes and the very high tension involved (several hundreds of volts)
  • the rated power is often the clean power. but when overdriven, and because of the dynamics, a tube amp can sometimes bring a much higher peak power. for example, the Marshall JCM800 (ref. 2203) is rated at 100w but is known to have a peak power of about 180w.
  • a tube amp has more harmonics because the tubes are very imperfect devices and the THD (total harmonic distorsion) is much higher than what you get with MosFET or other solid-state devices. harmonics are frequencies that are added to the original signal (and they are an important part of the particular warm tone of tube amps, by the way)
  • tube amps are usually high-end compared to solid-state amps, and they benefit better components, including better speakers : when we talk about converting an electric power into an air pressure, the speakers play a major role obviously ! and speakers can have very different efficiencies (measured in dB/w/m)

when I told about my main amp that I use at 18w : this is a boutique high-end amp, based on the 1963 Vox AC30TB. it is very very dynamic, has a lot of harmonics, and is loaded with high-end speakers with an efficiency higher than 100 dB/w/m (which is very high).

remember that the dB scale is logarithmic, which means that -3 dB will be half the acoustic power for a given electric power. and a speaker rated at 97 dB/w/m is not ridiculous at all ā€¦ thatā€™s what you can find in the Marshall 4x12" cabs of the Plexi era ! which includes the very popular SuperLead (ref. 1959)

What I want to say is that, yes a watt is a watt, but there are other important factors that result in major changes in the effective acoustic pressure.

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250 into a 4x10 should be more than enough for that room.

for ideal output, whoever owns it would simply throw another identical cab in there. No one would ever complain about quiet bass again. Of course everyone would be deaf too, because thatā€™s enough to play a medium sized venue :slight_smile:

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Man, there is so much great information in that post. Thanks @terb. :slightly_smiling_face::+1:

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Anything I add is just going to confuse more, I think. I have gotten away with a 50W valve head into a 1x15 reflex with horn and also with a 4x12! There are really no hard and fast rules, there were but we broke them! Terb is right enough though. Iā€™ve never needed to rise above 50W, I just added or took away cabinets. The valve head has 4, 8 and 16 ohm out so I can mix and match. The only time I ever used more was through a loaner at a festival.

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@funplumbin1, I meant these:

Yeah, some pianists/keyboardists have this strange idea in their heads that theyā€™re allowed to use the bottom half of the keyboard when thereā€™s a bass player in the room.

That doesnā€™t seem odd to me at all. EQ is powerful. I would try cranking the level control on the tweeter too, might help give you more clarity in the high end (which you could tame with the EQ to taste).

+1

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