Fairly recently, I spent some time playing bass with a professional band again. I played with Tempest for two years, and we played all over the continental United States.
I hadn't played bass with a live band since 1996! Damn near 30 years! I had a few things to catch up on!
And I'd changed as well; for instance, I had switched to playing a 5-string bass over a decade ago, but I had never played a 5-string onstage before. I had a new NS Design Radius 5-string:
Also, I didn't have a bass amp anymore, I'd ONLY ever played directly into the mixer when I was recording during that period. And I didn't have a wireless setup. Even back in the 80s I'd played wirelessly, and given how much I like to move around onstage, I knew I'd have to go wireless again. I figured they'd have all the bugs to that figured out by now!
So, step 1, I needed an amp. I called my contact at Sweetwater Music, as I wasn't up to date on the gear these days. Tempest wasn't overly loud, as far as rock bands go, but they were still LOUD compared to playing with headphones in my home studio! And bass requires a LOT of power. Tempest's front man played an electric mandolin through an old Roland JC-120 amp; that was over 100 watts of solid state power! To be competitive, I knew I'd need something like 400 watts for the bass. The human ear isn't very good at hearing bass frequencies; people in the crowd pick up on bass through their bones! You don't want to be lacking in the low frequencies. A loud band without a lot of bass sounds noisy and annoying; a loud band WITH bass sounds powerful!
So, I wanted at least 400 watts of solid state power. And it was my experience that bass just sounds better through a speaker with a lot of area; a 15 inch or even an 18 inch speaker was going to be needed.
Dave at Sweetwater suggested an amp by a company called Darkglass; they are a Norweigian company that makes bass amps for black metal bands! They suggested the Darkglass Alpha-Omega 500 amp; 500 watts of power. That sounded good to me!
They also suggested a 15" Ampeg speaker cabinet. Now, I have some experience with Ampeg gear, my first bass amp was Ampeg, so I went along with this, for nostalgia's sake. Unfortunately, the cabinet had been designed BEFORE 5-string basses became popular. I brought it down to the rehearsal studio, and played it for the other band members, and the guitar player told me that, on a song that required the low "B" string, it mostly just sounded like nothing, he couldn't hear the low pitches. That woke me up! I returned the cabinet to Sweetwater and they recommended a dual-12" cabinet by the same company that built the amp, a Darkglass cabinet. It made a world of difference! Sounded great! Unfortunately, the previous bass players had used small, single-12" cabinets with the bad, and my 2-12 cab was taking up too much space in the travel van! This seemed just a smidge hypcritical coming from a guy who played mandolin through a Roland Jazz Chorus 120, which has 2 12" speakers and weighs over 60 pounds! But whatever. So I returned to Sweetwater and throughly checked out all the small bass speaker systems to find one that would deliver +- 3db at the frequencies of the low "B" string, and luckily Darkglass had one of those as well. It never sounded quite as as good as the 2/12 cabinet, but I have it, and I did play it with the band whenever we played closely enough that I could drive to the gig myself.
Not long before the gig started, I'd seen an ad for a very cheap set of wireless dongles on Facebook, and bought a pair. They sounded fine, and they normally worked very well.
Now, having bought all of this gear at the same time, I was a bit confused to find that, every 20 minutes or so, my signal would drop out and I'd get a split second of no sound at all. Not noise or anything, just ... nothing. Kind of embarassing! I did a LOT of searching through bass player forums and the Darkglass support pages to try to find the problem, but of course, it was the cheap Chinese wireless system that was failing me. Lesson learned. I bought a set of Xvive wireless dongles, the same the guitar player was using, and never had a problem again.
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