I just got a woody.

Maybe someday I'll convert the preamp in my Laney to a Nitro. Oh boy.

Teh_bleeding, that is a pretty fucking dope pilot light, IMO. If you don't use it for this build, you should definitely use it in something else.

Went paintballing today, I'm really bad at it. I only got 2 kills and got shot on my knuckles which is teh pain. I didn't really get hurt though other than that, I'm almost disappointed.

Welp, I've got a CAD 179, Oktava Mk-012 and a Heil PR40 coming my way soon-ish.. I never told you guys but that ribbon microphone never came because as it turned out account I used to pay for it at the time failed and I was never notified through email because it is not my card. But I am bidding on a pair of Cascade ribbons that might be pretty dealsy if the bids don't get nuts.

I am kind of saying, fuck it. Time to get some good microphones. I am about to be recording a lot of music and am trying to take this shiz seriously. I think this will get real interesting. With 8 channels I could record drums taking up 5 mics and possibly 3 stringed instruments or a ribbon mic or what the fuck ever. Though, I guess if the ribbons become mine I'll have to get a preamp..

Would it be possible to make something like, for example, something simple like an old Marshall capable of switch between guitar and bass friendly filters?

Also, do any of you guys know much about bass speakers? I think I am going to use the 4x12 I've inherited for bassing purposes, I just got figure out what I'd throw in there.

Shit, man! You will have a fine little mic locker before too long. All three of those are good-and-proper mics. There is actually a deal on Cascade Fatheads right now, I think $129 each direct from Cascade, but with bare-bones finish and stock transformer.

Re: ribbons, depends on the source. I am not familiar with the output level of the Cascades. Dan/newholland has a pair, and IIRC he's just using the stock preamps on his Focusrite rack-inyourface, same deal as Geoff and I have. (Dan's has the two ADAT ins and inserts on 5 & 6 and can do 176.4 & 192khz sampling rates; otherwise it's the same deal, same line amps and mic pres.) My RSM-4 generally goes through an external preamp, but largely because it's a primary source whenever it gets used, and a "character" one at that. There is truth to most ribbons being generally lower output, but so's a 57. Blast it with a loud enough source. Now, on quieter sources noise from the mic pre being wound way up becomes an issue. And a nicer mic preamp or two is never a bad thing to have kicking around. There's the same argument for really high gain pres and the Shure SM7, but most of the vocals on the Garda EP were cut with an SM7 straight into a Soundcraft Ghost- Chris and I were overloading the board with the Neumann M149. (Used on Promise and the clean parts in Con Ed. I cut some of the backups at our place with the KSM27, and some of the gang vocals and screamy stuff is Beta 58s handheld.) The Ghost is a nice enough board, but the mic amps are utilitarian in nature. (Vocals on that there record sound okay, methinks?)

There are plenty of decent mic pres floating around these days. The price of a middling import guitar will buy you a quality mic amp.

The amp or the cab? The Marshall Superbass was a bass head originally, as was the Fender Bassman; there's a bass JCM 800, the Ampeg V4B, etc. Chris-from-the-forums would know better than I re: filters in the amp... would that necessitate two separate EQ paths? The cabs... Some of those olde cabs were meant for bass use. IIRC- I'll have to ask Chris from Garda about this unless one of youse guyse remembers- there's "bass cone" Greenbacks and H30s; also, see below:



12-inch bass speakers? I'd be inclined to go for a PA speaker or the like. 12s are sort of a black sheep for bass. Remember the fundamental of the low E is 40hz, and you probably want something flat-ish compared to midrangey guitar speakers. EVMs would probably work, though they'd cost you an arm and a leg, and weigh a metric fucktonne. You'd have a hell of a cab, though. CL80s might work? Neodymium speakers are punchy in my experience, and they don't weigh a damn thing. Ken the has my old GK Neo 4x10 and it weighs less than my AC30. An Ampeg 4x10 weighs about 120 pounds, give or take. If I was building a bass 4x12, I'd be looking at PA speaks. Or start hitting the gym.

It would seem to be possible. If the power amp was up to task, it might conceivably be doable in the normal older two channel amp style, where two inputs do different things, like for instance, the fender bassman. The bassman's power amp and transformers are not really suited to bass use at all though. Something built with a high power tube like a 6550/KT88 and some hi-fi style transformers might do the trick. Really, in a way this is what the old tube Sunn Model T heads kind of are. They work very well as bass amps, and make fucking massive sounding guitar amps as well. An Ampeg V2/V4 would be a similarly useful weapon. The EQ on the Ampegs is crazy flexible: set on one extreme you get a fuckload of low end, on the other, a midrangey rock guitarcrunch with an interesting unique character. They sound fucking massive when fed with an HM-2 as well.

A friend of mine does some harsh noise stuff live, running his rig basically through a guitar amp(an ampeg V2), and as i was watching him it occurred to me that it might be fun to experiment with a PA inspired 4x12ish cab for portable oddnoise uses. Like, a 15" with two 12"s and maybe an 8" with some sort of three way crossover built in? Try to get a sort of wide coverage going on? I wonder how big it would have to be to isolate the various sections, or if it would help at all to do so. Alternately, a standalone crossover and a pyramid of 3x 2x 1x cabs might be interesting.

Otherwise, and for more practical applications, i would probably just have two cabs for the two uses. It would need a new speaker baffle cut(and some way to remove the old one, which if it is a cheap cab might be a bit tricky/glued-in/particleboard, but i think you can fit a couple 15" speakers in a 4x12. Cab may not be deep enough technically for full effect, but i suspect that it might sound better than a quad of guitar 12"s for bass.

As far as bass speakers, because i don't mainly play bass, i would go for the cheapest option available, probably something from Warehouse Speakers or Weber, depending on what they offer these days.

http://wgs4.com/catalog/bass-pa

https://taweber.powweb.com/weber/

Looks like warehouse has less than before? I thought they had a few bass options. Both places seem a bit pricier than they used to be, as well.

I am looking at those Weber 12" bass speakers, look dopeness. I am gonna keep an eye out for a V2. Could make a good bass amp with the ability to provide me with some options for overdubbing geetarz.

The V4B is always an option, too. They show up every once in a while, and are usually not expensive. (Sometimes they are beat to piss.)

I could try. I had a drawing setup to do something like that based off of a sunn model T. It was basic sunn model t: 5F6a tweed bassman front end, hifi poweramp (for your super lows), and it had a bunch of switches in there to switch the hi-pass filters between 22's (marshall/fender.sunn) and 68's (orange/matamp). Now, the sunn clone i built has A LOT of thump with the 22's, and is very very dirty, too dirty for bass, so i'm not sure how 68's will work. The 68's would for SURE add more dirt to the signal, so it would need a lot more tweaking on the preamp to keep it clean, mind you though, my voltages on my preamp tubes are way lower than they should be, because my amp is a shitshow, so its not really able to do clean in its present state.

Those switches would add some thump to the front end, while the hifi poweramp would be able to push them through. Now, i'm not sure how well it would work because it was based off of the FMV/TMB tonstack and not the Baxandall like most bass amps have, but i'm sure you could tweak a baxandall the same way. Oranges and matamps have a baxandall on a rather guitar oriented poweramp, i figure if you put it on a hifi oriented poweramp able to push lows, and then put in switches to cut out bass on the front end, you could have a convincingly switchable guitar/bass amp. Your only issue after that would really be speakers, because bass and hifi speakers sound like crap with guitar, and vice versa.

After unloading my Splawn I suddenly have craved Marshall toans. So I took the KT77s out of my Laney and put the original winged C EL34s in today. Sounds so good man! Brown, it sounds brown. The KT77s were lavender-grey. Now I just wish my tubescreamers worked. And also maybe that the amp had a little more gain.

Put the HM-2 in front of it. That should do the trick.

It didn't.

Why the fuck am I still awake?

Put the 5150 in front of it?

Today will be a full day of learning to program.

Today will be a day of beginning the Leaf Wars anew.

The 5150 is in another part of town. I bet if I ran the Laney real clean and used the preamp out or something in the loop, there would be some sort of result.