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Rig for ultra low notes around 20 hertz

#42
Alex Xander said:
To the OP -
I have built around a dozen basses with 39”
scales, but generally only tune to F#, which has a fundamental frequency of about 23hz. My gigging cabinets are all also DIY, mostly of my own design.

Three things -
1. The longer scale definitely helps discern pitch, but in a bit of a backwards way. The note becomes more piano like with increased harmonics. You get less fundamental.
2. Forget trying to reproduce the fundamental. If you can reproduce the second harmonic with any authority, it will be plenty fine. Probably better because you won’t be wasting watts filling the stage with mud.
3. The lightbulb moment for me was purchasing a Broughton Resonanant Frequency Equaliser. I cut everything below about 50hz, while adding some resonance at that point. I can highly recommend that pedal for live use of very low tuned basses.

Here’s a bass built for a very specific purpose. Despite most of the note played having fundamentals of 35hz and below, the bulk of the energy is still around 80hz. You’ll need headphones.



And here’s some more normally voiced basses tuned that low.



Click to expand...

That F# disappeared through my phone's soundcard (as expected). I'll try it in my car tomorrow 😂
 
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#45
Hands down check out Stereo Integrity for a woofer that can handle 20hz with ease. The clarity of their woofers are unmatched. Especially for the price. Talk to Nick Lemmons. He will even build custom ones upon request. The beauty of his products besides the sound quality is the small size cabinets they require
 
#46
Attempting to recreate Sensurround - the theatre shaker from the 70s? Banks of horn loaded Cerwin-Vega subs at the back of the audience tuned to a single generated frequency - 19Hz if I remember correctly - used for the films Earthquake and Midway. Couldn't hear it, only feel the vibration. EDM played in a boom car doesn't even go that low. A compressed air driven diaphone (fog horn driver) might do it.
Lowest frequency I ever fed to a speaker was 10Hz - to make the cone move so to test for any rubbing in 8" extended range drivers that came from a supplier with lousy quality control. Silent=good speaker. Sound=reject.
 
#47
Sensurround didn't go anywhere near that low. Maybe the low 30's and only with larger clusters of cabinets (B-36(c) IIRC, I supported one of the Sensurround demo tours on the road back in the early 1980's).
 
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#49
Michedelic said:
Just curious, what’s the point? Other than that, haven’t you looked at PA subs? In addition, why would you want that on stage, when it’s the PA’s job to deliver those kinds of frequencies anyway. IF that’s desired.
Click to expand...
I recently got into doom metal amd would like a heavy end to things.
mcnach said:
The problem is not so much in the amplifier side of things, but the speakers. You're going to have a hard time finding a speaker cab that would reproduce 20 Hz with any kind of volume. Is this what a sub woofer is for?
Click to expand...
That was my suspicion and concern. I think there are one or two times this could be used but I don't think this would be cheap.
agedhorse said:
The challenge with the speaker side is the need for very large enclosures and costly drivers and a lot of power to achieve any meaningful volume at 20Hz. It’s an incredibly complex challenge with a lot of significant and costly obstacles for what’s almost certainly questionable value. It’s very, very difficult to discern pitch information below ~40Hz as well.
Click to expand...
 
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#50
micguy said:
Here is a rig that will actually do what you want. I actually know Tom Danley (the guy who developed this). Note that the size is... a shipping container. It comes with it's own diesel generator, which solves the power problem (40,000 watts in this case). Now the challenge is how it fits (or not) in the venue. The point is that what you are asking is...probably ridiculous, unless you're playing very big places, have a very big budget, and a big crew to move your rig. And you can't forget to add fuel to the subwoofer before every show. It's probably a good idea to have a diesel mechanic on your crew, just in case..

Matterhorn​

[edit]
In March 2007, DSL produced the Matterhorn, a single subwoofer made from an intermodal shipping container. Danley designed the Matterhorn to meet a military specification, to produce a low frequency sound in the range of 15 to 20 Hz, to be measured at 94 decibels at a distance of 250 meters. To accomplish this, Danley arranged forty 15-inch MTX subwoofer drivers in a tapped horn configuration, each driver powered by its own 1,000 watt amplifier. A diesel generator was included inside the container for operation in the field.[22] The subwoofer has a flat frequency response from 15 to 80 Hz, and is down 3 dB at 12 Hz.[23][24] The Matterhorn has been called the World's Biggest Subwoofer.[25]
Click to expand...

If that “cabinet” were placed next to a house and driven at full power, would it be called the SmatterHorn?
 
#51
FullumMusic said:
I'm with @micguy on this one. Not just as a bassist but as a fan of music, a sound engineer, and someone who works in music technology. Yes, you don't have to reproduce the fundamental to "hear" the fundamental based on your brain's computation of the harmonics you're hearing.

But hearing your brain's composite of a fundamental frequency is not the same as shaking the room and everyone in it with an actual low frequencies. If i pulled the fundamental frequencies down on my bass, bass synths, and 808s in the dance music and some hip hop i produce, the dance floor would die. They don't put subs in dance clubs and car trunks because people like the sound of a bass's midrange. They put subs in so people can feel the bass and kick.

Now, reproducing notes down to 20Hz from a physical stringed instrument is tough. A synth can make a near-perfect Sine wave, which will probably push the subs better than any other shape. But still, on my 4 or 5 string basses, i want A LOT of fundamental because i want the dance floor to feel me. It's not a choice everyone wants and it's not for every type of music. But it's still a valid option, especially with the subs attached to PAs these days.
Click to expand...
I enjoy the kinesthetic shake of my instruments and am trying to see if I can take it pasts the limits. I think a big part of enjoying bass is the movement of the things around us. I guess the subwoofers are part of this?.
 
#53
agedhorse said:
Sensurround didn't go anywhere near that low. Maybe the low 30's and only with larger clusters of cabinets (B-36(c) IIRC, I supported one of the Sensurround demo tours on the road back in the early 1980's).
Click to expand...
You'd know more than me. Did any of the later Sensurround productions have the LF effects recorded on the magnetic track rather than locally generated and triggered? Seems I heard simulated Doppler frequency shift in Midway when the planes flew overhead.
Also, for the subject of this thread - I play classical organ. The lowest standard pipe - low C pedal, 16ft tibia is pure fundamental a hair above 32Hz. You cannot hear that, it's just a throb in the air. Major cathedrals have a 32ft rank, square wooden pipes, 16Hz pure fundamental sine wave.
 
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#55
direktor said:
So I think what I’m hearing is…

….theres a chance
Click to expand...
1725686737748.png


🤣
 
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#56
Short4since64 said:
You'd know more than me. Did any of the later Sensurround productions have the LF effects recorded on the magnetic track rather than locally generated and triggered? Seems I heard simulated Doppler frequency shift in Midway when the planes flew overhead.
Also, for the subject of this thread - I play classical organ. The lowest standard pipe - low C pedal, 16ft tibia is pure fundamental a hair above 32Hz. You cannot hear that, it's just a throb in the air. Major cathedrals have a 32ft rank, square wooden pipes, 16Hz pure fundamental sine wave.
Click to expand...
The limiting factor is the folded horn speaker… BUT I misremembered the model number. It was the E-36 (not B-36) which came in 3 varieties and in order to get down into the 20Hz range it took multiples plus flair extenders or the ability to drive into an auditorium’s corners and use the corner as a flair extension.

Thus it’s sort of possible, but these were also very deep cabinets (~4’) and adding the extenders made them even
“huger”. They were also very, very heavy, a 4 man lift.

This was very much a purpose built cabinet.
 
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#59
SerfBassie said:
I enjoy the kinesthetic shake of my instruments and am trying to see if I can take it pasts the limits. I think a big part of enjoying bass is the movement of the things around us. I guess the subwoofers are part of this?.
Click to expand...
If you have a DAW handy and can find a soundboard-sourced live recording of one of the bands that inspire you (youtube can a good source though you have to be able to tell the few legitimate accounts that put official, authorized videos up, as opposed to the thousands of dudes with cellphones), put the audio tracks in your DAW and watch the spectrum analyzer while you listen. I expect you'll find there's far less energy in the extreme bass than you think.

Using a live recording as a source means that you can hear how the band gets mixed at shows. Taking into account that on a good recording the tracks probably got re-EQed a bit for home and headphone, but the engineer still won't be able to add a whole lot of what wasn't there in the first place.
 
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#60
SerfBassie said:
I enjoy the kinesthetic shake of my instruments and am trying to see if I can take it pasts the limits. I think a big part of enjoying bass is the movement of the things around us. I guess the subwoofers are part of this?.
Click to expand...
The short answer is yes. If you want to put low frequency sound waves into the air, you need a speaker designed to do that, and most of the speakers that do that are subwoofers designed to only reproduce low frequencies.

Also, the sub is only good for the sub frequencies, and you need a proper bass speaker or PA full-range to produce the rest of the frequencies.

--

The longer answer is, it gets complicated trying to do that in a useful way that sounds good when you're creating those frequencies on a physical instrument like a bass guitar.

The easiest wave-shape for a speaker to recreate, especially at low-frequencies is a perfect sine wave. Speaker moves in one direction, gradually stops, goes in the other direction, gradually stops, and back again. Other wave-shapes start adding complex or difficult movements for a low frequency speaker. Think about a "pure" square wave that goes back and forth between 1 and -1 digitally with no in-between. It's at value 1 and then the next sample it's at -1. The speaker can't do that. It has to travel through space and time to get from fully extended to fully retracted. Or something with a lot of upper harmonics. Tons of little micro-movements within the overall movements of out and in. (It's obviously more complex than this, but as a general idea.)

Pure sine waves are easy to make with synths, either digital or analog.

Bass guitars don't make pure sine waves. When you play those low notes, all the harmonics of the note are in that note. A string moving on a bass guitar and transformed to electrical signal by a pickup is very different from a nice "clean" synth waveshape.

So if you're running a full-range driver & a sub, there needs to be either a crossover splitting the signal to the mains and the subs, or the mains need a HPF to remove the lows, and the sub needs a LPF to remove any signal above what the lows. That's the basic setup.

But, you might find that the signal going to the sub needs to be treated differently from the signal going to the main speakers. It might need different compression and gain, and by nature of how much energy and space low frequencies need to be realized, every room you bring your rig is gonna need your rig set up completely differently to make the sub & main bass speakers to sound good together and in the room, without just booming or turning to mud or sounding like you're playing bass and then WHOAOAOAOAAOAOA you hit a sub-heavy note and it drowns out everything else in the band, or just sounds like the sub is shaking without filling the room.

Not to discourage you from getting those earth-shaking notes. Just to know it's gonna take a bit to work and sound good. It's not just "plug in a sub and away i go."

Or you can just play venues with subs and go direct and let the PA system & sound engineer do all the work for you. ;) 😆
 
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