LarryJ
Active Member
WARNING - Long Winded Post 
I have been on this forum and DFO for many years and know all of the reasons this won't work. I can probably write all of the replies I will get explaining why it doesn't. But let me tell a story anyway.
Blues/rock trio, tending towards ZZ Top and Jimi Hendrix. In larger venues we run a 2 channel PA - vocals, guitar, snare and drum overhead through one channel - bass guitar and kick drum through the other to an ElectroVoice 15" passive subwoofer.
In smaller venues the bass and guitar use their amps (both have small cabinets), drums are not miced and only vocals are run through the PA. We are experienced enough to mix this well by ear, but the kick gets lost in the bottom end noise.
The obvious solution is to mic the kick, but the bandleader/guitar player is afraid his worn out speakers won't handle that and I am not about to haul my 55 lb subwoofer and set it on a microscopic stage for what we get paid. So begins the search for a small, lightweight, and cheap, subwoofer to handle the kick drum only.
I found that a 12" didn't offer a significant enough size and weight reduction to be worth the cost. A good single 10" probably wouldn't be enough for the job and certainly isn't cheap. Then one day I was rummaging around in my attic and found an old Kustom 10" passive monitor of such high quality that today it costs $99 new. Of course it wouldn't work, but it was free. What the heck ...
At sound check it sounded like pooh - all kinds of distortion with a midrange resonance for a half second or so. We decided to try it for part of the show anyway. Maybe the bass guitar would drown out the ugliness. A drummer friend, who had come along to evaluate the experiment, said that when I was heel down he could "feel" the kick. When I was heel up he could hear it and it sounded OK to his ears. Not great, but better than nothing.
Enter a friend of mine who has a side business designing and building speaker cabinets. He measured my cabinet and modeled it in his design software. He found that, in a cabinet that small, an 8" woofer with sufficient Xmax and power rating should work much better than the 10" el cheapo midrange speaker that had proven to be adequate(?). Better yet, he had a discontinued Celestion neodymium he felt would fill our needs and that he would give to me, complete with grill, free of charge. Well within my budget!
So I gutted the cabinet, bought some plywood, built a new baffle, installed the woofer and just gigged it for the first time.
Will it fill the Superdome? No
Rattle your teeth with bottom end? No
Faithfully reproduce the sound of your painstakingly tuned Stradivarius kick drum? Not exactly.
Add enough bump to the kick to make its presence known in a small venue? Absolutely.
And at only 21 lbs and $6.
Which one would you rather load in and out?
I have been on this forum and DFO for many years and know all of the reasons this won't work. I can probably write all of the replies I will get explaining why it doesn't. But let me tell a story anyway.
Blues/rock trio, tending towards ZZ Top and Jimi Hendrix. In larger venues we run a 2 channel PA - vocals, guitar, snare and drum overhead through one channel - bass guitar and kick drum through the other to an ElectroVoice 15" passive subwoofer.
In smaller venues the bass and guitar use their amps (both have small cabinets), drums are not miced and only vocals are run through the PA. We are experienced enough to mix this well by ear, but the kick gets lost in the bottom end noise.
The obvious solution is to mic the kick, but the bandleader/guitar player is afraid his worn out speakers won't handle that and I am not about to haul my 55 lb subwoofer and set it on a microscopic stage for what we get paid. So begins the search for a small, lightweight, and cheap, subwoofer to handle the kick drum only.
I found that a 12" didn't offer a significant enough size and weight reduction to be worth the cost. A good single 10" probably wouldn't be enough for the job and certainly isn't cheap. Then one day I was rummaging around in my attic and found an old Kustom 10" passive monitor of such high quality that today it costs $99 new. Of course it wouldn't work, but it was free. What the heck ...
At sound check it sounded like pooh - all kinds of distortion with a midrange resonance for a half second or so. We decided to try it for part of the show anyway. Maybe the bass guitar would drown out the ugliness. A drummer friend, who had come along to evaluate the experiment, said that when I was heel down he could "feel" the kick. When I was heel up he could hear it and it sounded OK to his ears. Not great, but better than nothing.
Enter a friend of mine who has a side business designing and building speaker cabinets. He measured my cabinet and modeled it in his design software. He found that, in a cabinet that small, an 8" woofer with sufficient Xmax and power rating should work much better than the 10" el cheapo midrange speaker that had proven to be adequate(?). Better yet, he had a discontinued Celestion neodymium he felt would fill our needs and that he would give to me, complete with grill, free of charge. Well within my budget!
So I gutted the cabinet, bought some plywood, built a new baffle, installed the woofer and just gigged it for the first time.
Will it fill the Superdome? No
Rattle your teeth with bottom end? No
Faithfully reproduce the sound of your painstakingly tuned Stradivarius kick drum? Not exactly.
Add enough bump to the kick to make its presence known in a small venue? Absolutely.
And at only 21 lbs and $6.
Which one would you rather load in and out?
