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Bass amp next to the Leslie

K

kartiste

May 5, 2008
717
615
#1
I don't know if this is the right forum or not, but maybe you guys know. The other night I brought a new 1x15 to a gig with a band where I set up next to the keyboard guy, who brings a Leslie. He brought a different keyboard to drive it, a Hammond slab of some kind. In rehearsal, he plays a different keyboard through a small Peavey amp.
Here's the problem: for the first three or four songs, I would get this queasy feeling I was grossly out of tune, especially when I'd hit a G on the E string. I finally signaled the drummer to hold up, and checked my tuning. I was a few ticks sharp on all strings on the Snark, but nothing unusual and it usually comes in after playing a while anyway.
On the next song I glance over and the keyb guy has his left hand way over at the bottom of the keyboard. So I lean over and tell him to roll off his lows. I figured he was just stepping on my low notes and I wasn't hearing my own root notes, but rather his scale tones nearby in frequency. The rest of the gig went fine. He later protested that he hadn't been playing much down there, but I'm not so sure. Anyway, it now occurs to me that maybe the rotating woofer thing had something to do with it, maybe a Doppler shift when he was hitting the same note as me.
Have any of you experienced anything like this when the bass amp was next to a Leslie?
 
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#3
The bass speaker from the Leslie is downward firing so you won't get any usable tones from it on stage. The bass rotating assembly will create so many cross filter waves it is worse than totally worthless.

I played keys for awhile and ended up building a box for the treble rotating assembly and running the bass output and a Fender Rhodes to 100w tube Ampeg with a 2x15 JBL D130 cab.

Cleaned up the low end really well. No comparison! And no wavey-bass notes. Plus, usually played with right handed chords. No probs with the bass player.
 
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#5
Ulf_Hansson said:
Perfectly reasonable. Tell him to keep away from the bass register (there is a reason a proper Hammond band is just organ and drums).
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This should apply to ALL keys players in bands.. Stay out of the bass registers.. keeps bass happy, keeps sound guy happy.
Too many keys players - even good ones that I have come across - think every song is a concerto !!
 
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#6
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#7
JRA said:
i couldn't agree more with Ulf_Hansson , s0c9 , and https://www.talkbass.com/members/stumbo.110359/ = all valid points, IME.

cats who play keys are often offended when told to lay off the low end. use the same 2x4 club you use on the drummer: for keyboardists, it usually only takes a one-time reminder! :thumbsup:
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We had a keys guy back in my rock band days who insisted on playing the lower register on a couple of songs where he played synth lead. Can you imagine what lower register sine wave synth lead did to the FOH mix and bass?
We had a REALLY good bass player back then.. I played lead guitar.
Sound guy took him out of the FOH mix, but left him in his monitor mix. He came up to us during the break, saying a friend told him that he couldn't hear keys out front. Sound guy explained the situation.
He got really upset, claiming he'd never been taken out of the mix and was highly offended. I told him we had discussed this specific issue numerous times up to this point, and it wasn't getting thru to him. Removing him from the mix was what FOH did to make us sound as good as we could. I told him... "Drop the left hand (or move it up an octave) and you'll go back into the mix". There was no change. That was Sat night. At Tues pm rehearsal.. I fired him. He was going to quit anyway, because he was offended.
 
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#9
For FOH and monitor mixing, a high-pass filter on the keys is my club of choice—more subtle than the 2x4. Some modern dance songs require a more permissive HPF setting for the keys, but modern digital boards make it easy to switch scenes for the songs that require keys to play thick low notes.

Won't help the on-stage Leslie problem, though. For that, you do need to filter out the lows before they're sent to the Leslie—or work with musicians who listen to the band.
 
#10
s0c9 said:
This should apply to ALL keys players in bands.. Stay out of the bass registers.. keeps bass happy, keeps sound guy happy.
Too many keys players - even good ones that I have come across - think every song is a concerto !!
Click to expand...

Most keyboard players who have any formal training at all are taught from a very early age to basically play the whole song alone. That's what they're used to, & that's what they continue to do even after it's no longer necessary (let alone desirable) with a full band to cover those parts.

This is true for a lot of "bedroom shredder" guitar players as well. They have a hard time playing properly with a band because they're so used to playing the "whole song" by themselves.
 
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#11
JohnMCA72 said:
Most keyboard players who have any formal training at all are taught from a very early age to basically play the whole song alone. That's what they're used to, & that's what they continue to do even after it's no longer necessary (let alone desirable) with a full band to cover those parts.

This is true for a lot of "bedroom shredder" guitar players as well. They have a hard time playing properly with a band because they're so used to playing the "whole song" by themselves.
Click to expand...
Oh, I understand.. It's not like this guy was a "young beginner".. It's a pleasure playing with folks who are experienced enough to play within their sonic palette and not stomp other members.
I did a sub gig last Sat.. two sets. During the break, an acoustic trio did a set.. two acoustics and a fiddle.
At the end of their set, I "advised" the young fiddle player that she might play up an octave in future, as her lower register playing was being buried by the two acoustics and couldn't be heard.
 
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#12
JohnMCA72 said:
Most keyboard players who have any formal training at all are taught from a very early age to basically play the whole song alone. That's what they're used to, & that's what they continue to do even after it's no longer necessary (let alone desirable) with a full band to cover those parts.

This is true for a lot of "bedroom shredder" guitar players as well. They have a hard time playing properly with a band because they're so used to playing the "whole song" by themselves.
Click to expand...
Yeah, this. Irritates me no end. Sounds great in my bedroom, must sound even better with a live band playing along behind me, right? Wrong! It also leads to learning (by ear) your part in songs wrong, because you tend to combine another instrument's notes with your own until it "sounds right". I've had guitar players tell me "this is the way I've been playing it for years," accompanied by a look that says end-of-story, don't look at me, there must be some other explanation for the train wreck that just stopped rehearsal.
 

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