Outdoor Gig with Greenboy Bassic15

My new Greeboy / Barry Audio Bassic 15 went through its first outdoor gig yesterday.

- All bass guitar
- MarkBass Combo Head (300w @ 8ohms) is not enough clean power
- Dispersion is amazing
- Power coverage of the giant OUTDOOR park we played was amazing
- It will thump but also loves a gritty sound
- A 32lb pound cab rules.

I ran my Carvin Icon 5 string -> VT Bass pedal -> MarkBass Combo Head (Little Mark) -> Bassic15. I struggled to get a really thumpy / thick sound at first. The general advice here is to turn up low mids. I did but it wasn't enough. So I cranked the lows and made sure I wasn't overdriving anything. That did the trick.


With the Faital I never feel like I need a mid or tweeter. It definitely needs a more powerful amp. I think it will do better with my Carvin head - even though it's the same wattage, it's EQ is much better. I'd love to try this cab with a Genz-Benz Streamliner. The MarkBass totally runs out of gas. I had the lowest two EQ knobs dimed AND the bass on my VT pedal dimed. I watched my input gains (my Carvin runs a bit hot) to have clean headroom. The Faital barely moved and totally ate up the low frequencies.

 

The Faital, for me, is perfect. I don't like tweeters and this speaker does it all.

As far as the MarkBass head... I'm not completely sure it's the amp - I still think I have a bit of a learning curve with the active bass, VT, amp eq and gain settings. Today at home I tried a different setting with the mid sweep on my bass and I started to get the sound I wanted.

At the gig I had the master around noon and the gain set pretty conservative around 9 or 10. It felt like the amp but I didn't have time to really play around with it other than while playing. I had setup very early for a sound check and then there were rain drops so I packed everything up... And then set up again after it passed...

So I think it's just that I need to really experiment more with all the settings.

But man that cab sounds good! At it's nice to have a lightweight rig at the end of a show... (Too bad I was in charge of the PA last night.)

 

As I'm learning my cabinet (Bassic 15 with 8ohm Faital) I'm experimenting with the eq. I started with the general TalkBass advice of not boosting the lows but rather the mid lows. This sounds fine (and is fine) but lacked the punch-in-the-chest kind of bass sound I wanted - especially at higher volumes. In my apartment, any eq settings sounds and can have its place. But at higher volumes with less lows and more mid-lows the sound was a little too grindy for me.

So I decided to crank the lows and scoop the mids a bit. WOW! I swear the cabinet smiled at me. It had the punch I wanted. I'm also able to really push the preamp in my Carvin a bit. With my other cabinets I also had the mid-sweep neutral. But now I had it boosted in the very low range of it and it sounds good.



Right now my main head (Carvin BX500) is out for a repair... So I'm using my MarkBass combo head.
The MarkBass eq is
Lows at 60h (MarkBass says this is a 'shelf below 60' eq)
Mid Lows at 360 (MarkBass says 'center frequency at 360')
Mid High at 800 (MarkBass says 'center freq at 800)
Highs at 5k (MarkBass says this is a 'shelf above 5k' eq)

I have the Lows & Mid Lows at 9 o'clock and the Mid Highs and Highs at noon. Although when I turn up I like the Lows all the way up. I have the VLE & VPF filters off.

Oh - these settings are for a band situation to get loud and 'thumpy'.

Thoughts?

Thank you!

 

Glad I'm not the only one!

 

That's what I've been experimenting with since that gig. Increasing the low mids on the bass definitely helps.