Yes, agree 10%, sorry if I didn't make that clear earlier.
I was suggesting using a laptop power brick with an inexpensive class D power amplifier board, not with an automotive amplifier.
-Gnobuddy
I have seen/measured a couple of those. Yes, some are really horrid! Very thick cones made from milk-jug plastic, very low sensitivity, very poor damping around the fundamental resonance, very little treble extension.
What I was thinking is that something like this might work well for the kick drum, maybe the toms as well. Definitely not for the snare or high-hat or cymbals, though!
I have an Acoustic (Acoustic is the brand name) AG30, a similar wedge monitor originally designed for vocals and electro-acoustic guitar. But it also works well as a keyboard amp, or small PA system.
The AG30 contains a single 8" speaker, with a central, post-mounted Mylar dome tweeter, and built-in crossover network. The driver (speaker) looks a lot like a bigger version of typical automotive 4" and 5" speakers.
What drew me to this particular product was its very neutral sound quality, compared to affordable (cheap) small P.A. systems. With only 30 watts and a dome tweeter, it won't make anyone's ears bleed, but I have used it to play live (vocals and acoustic guitar) for maybe 50 - 60 people at an indoor charity lunch. It worked fine for that.
I have seen drivers like the one in the AG30, but designed for in-wall or in-ceiling music reproduction. Those also tend to be 8" diameter, with a rubber surround for reasonable excursion and bass response, with a post-mounted central dome tweeter, and a built-in crossover network.
The catch is that these products tend to be extremely overpriced. They are sold as luxury items to homeowners, so as with all "luxury" consumer products, they are priced ten times higher than they are worth.
But I found one of these in a surplus electronics store, for $20. At that price, it makes a nice full-range monitor speaker.
I would never play drums through my AG30, though. I think that would destroy it.
There is some interesting history behind this.
Very old traditional drums, like ones used by Native Americans and First Nations Canadians, and other aborginal and indigenous peoples all around the world) are usually not ear-shatteringly loud.
But European military forces used drums to keep soldiers marching in time. The drums had to get louder so that long columns of soldiers could hear them even from the back. Over a few centuries, those military drums evolved to be ear-splittingly loud.
Meantime there were orchestral drums (kettledrums, etc) that were a little more polite, and not quite as loud.
When big band music came along, it conscripted loud drums from the military drum family tree. The drummer had to be heard over a full horn section and a stage full of musicians. Drums had to be LOUD!
When big-band was replaced by pop and then rock, and the music got even louder, drum designs also evolved to get even louder. Rock drummers famously have a lot less discipline than military soldiers, so they abused their drums, and rock drums also got tougher and more tolerant of abuse, with tougher materials and sturdier hardware and mountings. Rock drums had to survive at the hands of John Bonham, high as a kite on heroin and alcohol, smashing the sticks into the drums as hard as he could.
And that is how we ended up with drums in popular music, that are so intolerably loud that musicians go deaf trying to turn up all the instruments to be as loud as the drums.
A few decades later, now we live in an era of 8 billion human beings on one overcrowded planet. For the first time in human history, more people live in cities than in rural areas. In cities, there is little space, and little tolerance for loud noises.
I think acoustic drums need to retrace their evolutionary steps, and go back to being much quieter, like the ancient folk drums from which they originally came.
Meantime, many remaining music venues do not permit acoustic drums at all.
Of course this is a big part of the reason why electronic drums exist now...and those are the subject of this thread. e-drums can be a lot quieter.
-Gnobuddy
Yes.
I work with large bands in stadiums where everything needs to go through the huge PA, even big drums or a couple Marshall stacks, but that happens once a Month or less, sometimes 3 or 4 Months without major acts, but the every weekend experience is Rock Bands in large Clubs, Theaters, High School gyms, maybe open air in a town Square, etc.
If "my" band is the main or only one, Sound setup usually can be made earlier and then left "ready" and then used as-is when needed, but sometimes there is no physical time for that (barely time to set up stuff on stage) or many bands play the same night, it´s common here for non-famous acts to play together to pool "attracting power" so a known large Club sets up one day "Punk Night", another the "Reggae Night" and so on, each night typically shared between 8 bands which split expenses (such as PA/Lighting/Publicity/Security) and pull Audience, say 1000-1200 people among all, not bad.
Problem is detailed Sound setup for everyone is impossible, Music must run practically non-stop or Audience cools down, so no more than 5 -10 minutes TOPS to adjust some microphone booms, replace some amp (1 or 2 , not all, Bass amp generally stays, Guitar players are nitpickers) and 1! 2! 3! GO!
So I tell them to trust me and follow my instructions : "START with Drums only" because , as you said, they set the reference level and "have no potentiometers" he he (I wish they would 😉 )
Then (after 2 or 3 bars) I nod to the bass player to start, and by volume pot on his amp or Bass he is set up at exact same level matching drums, so we have a solid Rhythm Base running.
IF drums "disappear" then Bass is too loud; I must NOT reamplify drums but lower Bass, and viceversa.
Once they are set, the Rhythm/Melody instrument starts Keyboards/Rhythm Guitar/Saxophone):now the song is recognizable and audience cheers or applauds, then the main Guitar player gets in.
Again, (they are very dangerous) HIS sound must match the others previously set up.
If anybody disappears, HE must turn down.
Now we have a perfectly balanced band where you can hear everything and we have not used the PA yet, I call that "the Natural mix" .
That mix can typically be heard all over the place, you need the PA only to make it louder, but not to "correct" it.
Funny thing is this is a long description, but can be done in 30 seconds (if Band has discipline and experience) to 1 minute, and then b used for the whole show with minor adjustments.
You have listened or even assisted to countless "Live" albums or Shows which start exactly this way, there is a reason for that.
Even in massive Rolling Stones Shows!!!!
Again: the Drums set the reference level, all others match it.
Or we end with something which was famously recorded on a Deep Purple album: one Musician complains that he can´t hear something on the monitors, Soundman answers: "so you want everything louder than everything else???"
Even today, with cheap abbundant power, and sensitive speakers for Guitar and Bass, outside of a Stadium or large Theater, drums do not need to be reamplified by PA, at all. 😱
I work with large bands in stadiums where everything needs to go through the huge PA, even big drums or a couple Marshall stacks, but that happens once a Month or less, sometimes 3 or 4 Months without major acts, but the every weekend experience is Rock Bands in large Clubs, Theaters, High School gyms, maybe open air in a town Square, etc.
If "my" band is the main or only one, Sound setup usually can be made earlier and then left "ready" and then used as-is when needed, but sometimes there is no physical time for that (barely time to set up stuff on stage) or many bands play the same night, it´s common here for non-famous acts to play together to pool "attracting power" so a known large Club sets up one day "Punk Night", another the "Reggae Night" and so on, each night typically shared between 8 bands which split expenses (such as PA/Lighting/Publicity/Security) and pull Audience, say 1000-1200 people among all, not bad.
Problem is detailed Sound setup for everyone is impossible, Music must run practically non-stop or Audience cools down, so no more than 5 -10 minutes TOPS to adjust some microphone booms, replace some amp (1 or 2 , not all, Bass amp generally stays, Guitar players are nitpickers) and 1! 2! 3! GO!
So I tell them to trust me and follow my instructions : "START with Drums only" because , as you said, they set the reference level and "have no potentiometers" he he (I wish they would 😉 )
Then (after 2 or 3 bars) I nod to the bass player to start, and by volume pot on his amp or Bass he is set up at exact same level matching drums, so we have a solid Rhythm Base running.
IF drums "disappear" then Bass is too loud; I must NOT reamplify drums but lower Bass, and viceversa.
Once they are set, the Rhythm/Melody instrument starts Keyboards/Rhythm Guitar/Saxophone):now the song is recognizable and audience cheers or applauds, then the main Guitar player gets in.
Again, (they are very dangerous) HIS sound must match the others previously set up.
If anybody disappears, HE must turn down.
Now we have a perfectly balanced band where you can hear everything and we have not used the PA yet, I call that "the Natural mix" .
That mix can typically be heard all over the place, you need the PA only to make it louder, but not to "correct" it.
Funny thing is this is a long description, but can be done in 30 seconds (if Band has discipline and experience) to 1 minute, and then b used for the whole show with minor adjustments.
You have listened or even assisted to countless "Live" albums or Shows which start exactly this way, there is a reason for that.
Even in massive Rolling Stones Shows!!!!
Again: the Drums set the reference level, all others match it.
Or we end with something which was famously recorded on a Deep Purple album: one Musician complains that he can´t hear something on the monitors, Soundman answers: "so you want everything louder than everything else???"
That sounds really great, compared to what I've seen in North America, even before COVID-19 ruined all our lives.
I'm glad that music and dancing is woven so much more deeply into South American culture, so there is still some life left in live music there.
I have friends still trying to play live music. Even before COVID-19, they were lucky to get small gigs at an RV park or wedding reception or local restaurant. If you had fifty people in the audience you were doing okay. If you had a hundred, it was a great gig. And the little money they paid you wouldn't even cover the cost of gas to drive to the venue and back home.
The only reason to keep playing music under these conditions is because you love playing music.
I'm lucky. As one friend said about me, "His monster is under control". Meaning that I didn't feel compelled to be on a stage playing music for a paying audience, as he himself was.
My friend spent his whole life struggling to achieve money or recognition as a musician, and never succeeding. The music monster on my back is smaller and less powerful, so I can be contented just playing at jams for free, with no fame, no recognition, and no money.
Since March 2020, even that has become impossible, or dangerous. I do weekly online jams, but there is so much latency (delay) over the Internet connection that you cannot actually "jam" with another musician. You can only have one person at a time performing, while everyone else stays muted. It is better than no live music at all, but to me, it is a very poor second-best. It feels like trying to play a game of soccer by yourself, with nobody else on the field.
But there is a good reason why we stick with the second-best option. Five of my jam buddies decided to ignore common sense (and BC provincial health orders), and they went to a live music jam on January 3rd, 2022, as Omicron was exploding in Canada. By Jan 6 or 7, three of the five were sick, coughing, wheezing, exhausted, fatigued, with body ache and headache.
BC has virtually stopped offering COVID-19 tests now, so none of them got tested. But it was pretty clear what they were all suffering from. Each of them was miserable for 2 - 4 weeks.
Fortunately all three have now recovered, but it was yet another reminder of what we are all living with now. Singing in close proximity to other people during this pandemic is quite dangerous, as moisture particles from your mouth and lungs are forcefully ejected when you sing, and travel much further than they do when you're not singing. We've all read the news stories about entire choirs coming down with COVID-19.
Years ago I watched a DVD documentary film about Fleetwood Mac. One scene was filmed in the original recording studio, with the original mix engineer who worked on the "Rumours" album, and the original master tapes queued up on the tape recorders.
Demonstrating how he mixed one famous track, he started with all the sliders at zero, then faded up only drums and bass. And he said something like "Here it is, the heart of the track, right here."
And you could already hear it - Mick Fleetwood and John McVie together, locked tightly together into a beautiful groove that just carried you along with them.
Since then, I do the same thing when I start to make the final mix for a demo of one of my own songs for friends or family. First get drums and bass to sound right, then everything else.
Why are so many guitar players such jerks when it comes to playing nice with the rest of the band?
Perhaps it's the same fame/recognition ego monster on their backs. They want the audience to notice them, and only them. Vocalists tend to suffer from the same problem, but it's easier for guitarists to turn up their volume.
Over the course of hundreds of music jams with hobby musicians, I've noticed a related interesting thing. If most of the players at the jam are male, the music always suffers because of competing egos, with multiple musicians trying to drown each other out.
But if a good fraction of the players are women, the performance dynamics change. As a general thing, women seem to be much better than men at co-operating, rather than competing. Players start to play together instead of fighting each other. Someone will add harmonies to the vocals. The mood will shift to a more peaceful, less aggressive state. And the whole jam will be better as a result.
I'm sure there are exceptions on both sides of the gender line. But statistically, this behaviour pattern always seems to emerge once there are enough players in the room. Mostly-male jams that don't have a strong leader who squashes excessively competitive behaviour, quickly degenerate into small musical wars. I've learned not to go back a second time to those.
-Gnobuddy
Well, they say "Necessity is the Mother of Invention" 🙂
That was invented by Club owners who wanted to fill up the venue without investing in expensive bands .... where ticket sales might not cover the costs.
Here unknown Musicians in a way actually "pay to play" .... some find it unfair but I always tell them to check Reality:
you have 2 options:
1) get somebody to pay Band fee (fat chance of that 🙁 )
2) rent a space, PA, Lights, Publicity, etc. and sell as many tickets as you can to your own faithful followers.
3) what the Club offers is exactly that!!!!!
With the added Bonus that the Club can organize that; now try to get 8 Bands to do the same on their own!!!!
With the added bonus that each Band can brag "I played for 600-1000 people last Month" while actual "pulling power" is 50-100 as you correctly found.
They can later post "full cheering house" videos in their own YT channels 😉
Success is almost guaranteed since the Audience is homogeneous: "all headbangers", "all Punkies", "all Jamaican heads", etc.
Here each band is given a 60 admission tickets booklet, which they pay in full, in advance.
Hopefully they sell them to Followers so playing "Professionally" costs them nothing; any extra ticket sold beyond that they keep to themselves, not a bad deal at all.
That´s very sad and yet true.
I think it´s much better to simply enjoy playing, period, and if possible, play anywhere possible: your Sister´s/Daughter´s/Friend Birthday party, local Sports events, BBQs, veteran´s Association, you name it.
Here bands also play on weekends or holidays at some public park or square, obviously for free (the payment is the Audience respect and applause) .
They walk around to find some convenience store or small burger joint or ice cream parlor, some little shop which can benefit from having a small crowd around, they ask to plug there their 50 meter extension cord to feed the amps.
99% agree and it´s a win-win situation for both.
Thinking about it: you CAN do that too; playing at a park or square, open air, is reasonable safe 🙂
See the above playing-in-the-park suggestion.
My close experience on that: an old Faculty friend, he became a petroleum Engineer instead, was working at the State oil company and last year, since he was nearing forced retirement age, he was given so called "passive tasks" for the last few Months or so, actually meaning "you get your salary at home, doing nothing" , specifically to keep him away from the office where he might get Covid.
So far so good, but he´s a semi-Pro cyclist, always in enviable physical shape, so last August/September he and a group of 20 Cyclists travelled to a hilly area some 300 km away (around here terrain is very flat, so "no challenge") for a weekend.
20 went together, TEN came back with COVID, him included.
He f*ck*ng DIED!!! 😱
It was still the peak of the Delta infection, no Omicron yet.
BC has virtually stopped offering COVID-19 tests now, so none of them got tested. But it was pretty clear what they were all suffering from. Each of them was miserable for 2 - 4 weeks.
That.
That.
Same thing with Live mixing, if you are in a hurry.
That.
I´m a dyed in the wool Darwinist and am quite certain there is a deeply ingrained genetic reason behind that.
For the last 500000 years or at least 200000 when current Humans became more or less stable, Males HAD to be aggressive, competitive, etc, to go hunting or walking MANY miles around for plain gathering, foraging, while out of necessity Females stayed "at home" and doing common tasks, where cooperation was an advantage.
That's wonderful. I haven't seen anything like that. In America, extreme capitalism has taken over the culture to the point where few people would bother to do something like this without being paid for it. Nowadays, most people have a hard time seeing the value of anything unless there is money attached in some way.
Canada is not quite as capitalistic, so there's a better chance of that happening here. I still haven't seen it happen, though.
Agree about the relative safety, but it's a bit complicated. Currently there's a provincial health order that bans all "organized gatherings". Dunno if that would include playing music for free and possibly attracting a few people by doing so - but it probably would.
Meantime, large sporting events can be held legally in a big stadium. And you can cram a hundred college students into one lecture hall, and the government is happy with it.
But if ten people gathered in my home, I would be breaking the law.
And if you brought party hats and candles into the lecture hall with the 100 students, you would be breaking the law, as it would no longer be a legal college lecture, but an illegal organized gathering instead. 🙄
I'm sorry to hear that your friend died. 🙁
In the USA, one out of every 355 Americans has now died of COVID-19. Most people in cities know more than 355 people. Most Americans now know somebody who has died of COVID.
The number gets worse every week. A month ago it was only one out of every four hundred.
It's better in BC, but our hospitals are nearly at breaking point. 96% full, last I checked.
I don't doubt that we humans are products of our evolutionary past.
A person has to be stupid to go out and poke a ferocious and terrifying sabre-tooth cat with a pointy stick.
Women were too smart, and too valuable (they carry future life inside them). So evolution made men - biologically, men are slightly modified women - and gave them testosterone, to make them lose their intelligence, and become sufficiently silly to do high-risk things.
So the women say "Honey, please go poke the sabre-tooth cat with a stick, and I'll give you a kiss when you come back!"
And, we silly men say "Oh boy! A kiss!"
And we go off to poke the cat, and get mauled to death in the process.
Testosterone was needed to fight off predators and enemies, but these days, we have less need for it, and mostly it just makes us (men) behave badly and make poor decisions.
There is a big spike in the death rate for boys/men between age 18 and 35, when they are old enough to get a drivers license, but have too much testosterone to drive wisely.
There is a big spike in the death rate for girls/women in the same age group - because they tend to be in the car with those same testosterone-afflicted young men, who get in crashes and kill everyone in the car.
At least the over-competitive male musicians at the jam don't kill each other. They just ruin the jam.
-Gnobuddy
Oh, we STILL do that 🙂
Sabre toothed Tigers are in short supply, but does stealing fresh hunted meat from 15 hungry lions count?
For those who can stand it (although it isn´t actually gross, not worse than going to the butcher´s or the supermarket meat section) :
3 guys and a few pointy sticks ... which they don´t even use.
Agree with you, buckets of Testosterone.
😱
It probably helps that those lions have learned to be scared of humans (because of guns). Things would probably have gone very differently 1000 years ago, when lions thought of humans only as big, slow, ground-dwelling monkeys, with small canine teeth and useless claws. Easy prey, in other words.
But yeah, I certainly never had enough testosterone to suppress my intelligence to quite that degree. 😱
(I did my share of silly risky guy things in my teens and twenties, of course. Just not as silly as trying to scare off a whole pride of lions.)
The funny thing is that evolution also programmed us to look at these guys (poking lions with sticks) and think "How brave!", instead of "How idiotic!"
I have much more respect for the doctors and nurses going into COVID-raddled hospitals every day, than for the guys at the X-games in the Freestyle Motocross event ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freestyle_motocross ), jumping their motorcycles so high and so far that they shatter their wrists and crack their vertebrae when they land. You could call it poking gravity with a stick, instead of lions...and gravity wins even more often than lions do.
I wonder if any women are silly enough to actually want to go poke lions with sticks. They probably take the much wiser route, and go without meat instead. Or they tell their boyfriends / husbands "Go poke the lion, come back a hero, and I'll give you a kiss". And off go the guys. 🙂
-Gnobuddy
Nah. It's the Scottish tartan blanket. Even lions know not to mess with the Scots. (They may not know Scots skin-tone, only tartan.)
Scots have bagpipes.
Another option may be to use a retired PSU from a desk top PC. Tie the 12+ together, and 12- together, and it should be good for 100+ watts.
The 12- lines are usually less amps than the 12+ lines, bear that in mind.
Line noise will be a possible issue.
Class D are switching amps, and interference from two switchers in series is expected...which can be hard to resolve without a scope and a frequency counter.
It also means changing frequencies so as to stop interference and harmonics.
Becomes a design issue. You need experience to do that.
Those skills and equipment are not everybody's cup of tea.
Line noise will be a possible issue.
Class D are switching amps, and interference from two switchers in series is expected...which can be hard to resolve without a scope and a frequency counter.
It also means changing frequencies so as to stop interference and harmonics.
Becomes a design issue. You need experience to do that.
Those skills and equipment are not everybody's cup of tea.
Last edited:
The -12V on PC was always a very minor rail, maybe ONLY for RS232 serial ports. I wudda said PC power supplies lost their -12V a couple generations back. I was wrong🙁, but this 0.3A rating matches my memory of 5150 PC specs.
You can't power a stage-amp with only 3.6Watts on the negative rail. The +12V may drive a BTL into 4 Ohms at 16W-25W audio, and 4-ch boxes into a four-speaker array (a mini-half-stack) gets you to the 80 Watt range. (No, you don't need this "600W" supply for that, a quality 200W may do OK.)
The new PC supplies are apparently 12V only on the machines from the likes of HP, the all in one units with a laptop brick like supply.
Aaaand, silly me, forgot that the OP is trying to run straight off of batteries, which makes my suggestion null and void. Doh.
He didn´t say so, but anyway, has not appeared here for a long time.
I guess we scared him with all that talk about heavy power hungry Car Subs or stone age guys hunting Lions with pointy sticks.
Or maybe it was those aggressive Scottish Tartans 😱
I guess we scared him with all that talk about heavy power hungry Car Subs or stone age guys hunting Lions with pointy sticks.
Or maybe it was those aggressive Scottish Tartans 😱
Or he was a spammer.
I have reported several new members who have less than 10 posts, many on years old threads.
What purpose is thus achieved, I cannot understand.
I have reported several new members who have less than 10 posts, many on years old threads.
What purpose is thus achieved, I cannot understand.
I'm not saying the OP on this thread was a spammer - but I started thinking about the question you raised: "What purpose is thus achieved?"
And it dawned on me, that this forum and this thread, have now provided some free advertising for the Roland PM-100.
Could that have been the purpose?
And what happens if you click on that Roland.com link in post #1? Does that website plant cookies on your device, which then allows the usual suspects to track you online, sell the information they manage to gather, et cetera?
We live in a strange and twisted world, and these things seem plausible enough.
Incidentally, I am a fan of "Cookie Autodelete", a browser add-on that automatically deletes relevant cookies each time you close a browser tab.
-Gnobuddy
Oh, c´mon.
The question looks legit enough: a DIY minded guy wants to build something for his Son/Daughter, gves an example ....
To boot, most answers deviated wildly from what he asked.
If anything, here we have two "spammers" , one pushing obscure parts suppliers in Kolkatta or thereabouts, other pushing a miracle Guitar Pedal way beyond any reasonable mention 😉 😉 😉 😉 😉
The question looks legit enough: a DIY minded guy wants to build something for his Son/Daughter, gves an example ....
To boot, most answers deviated wildly from what he asked.
If anything, here we have two "spammers" , one pushing obscure parts suppliers in Kolkatta or thereabouts, other pushing a miracle Guitar Pedal way beyond any reasonable mention 😉 😉 😉 😉 😉
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/instruments-amp-y4-trio.383281/
I am working towards building up an all-in-one box too. I am guessing that I may have formed the basis around a unit that may not be well regarded on this site or seriously boring to attract any interest in assistance
I am working towards building up an all-in-one box too. I am guessing that I may have formed the basis around a unit that may not be well regarded on this site or seriously boring to attract any interest in assistance