I want to offer up a heart felt and major league thank you to all the folks who made this happen: The editor of Mad Mod Daddies’ mag Fast Car, Steve ‘Scary’ Chalmers; Santa Pod for letting us in; Dave Hogg and Tim Wilton of Vibrock; the Anglia TV folks and most of all the hardcore of UK bass heads, who get a roll call of honour at the end. An especial thanks to Geoff “Firestarter” Kerss who used his fluid dynamics skills to park and point our fleet of bass wagons. He designs exhaust pipes for top marque car makers.
And a big slobby man-kiss for Midge and Glenda from Fast Car for coming to Witness it all. It was all they did, apart from eat the food and drink Red Bull.
I arrived at the front gate of Santa Pod and there were seven or eight cars and vans there already, a half hour before I’d said we would need them. I filled up with goose bumps. Bless them, they hadn’t even gone in the gate to park and wait but had hovered respectfully outside the gate. I waved and blew kisses like a big wet girly and then trundled into the Pod office to have a quick gush and thank them. They were polite but utterly and completely unimpressed by a few ice cars. This is the home of UK drag racing after all.
Quarter miles finishing in three hundred mph and jet cars. Huge events run by Hell’s Angels (proper righteous businessmen I gather) and even Formula One super-secret launch testing. We were not big potatoes. Drove back to the lads and waved at them and then I thought I’d pick where we would go.
I was quite wrong. For one, I missed USC this year and so hadn’t seen the great big area of new hard top exactly where I’d done this on grass in the past. (Proper money being spent by the Podsters on the infrastructure. I’ve watched it down the years as miles of barriers appeared and more tarmac gets laid. ) But while I manoeuvred about the site, the guys, quite oblivious to me, simply went and parked up in the single best place. I was quite superfluous.
As I’d driven up the lane earlier, I’d spotted this cameraman filming cutaways of fields and thought, “That’ll be my crew then, getting peaceful background to the World-Split-Asunder story.” Turns out I was right and was introduced to the film crew a moment later.
After a brief conflab with them to make sure they got what they wanted, a smart pickup rolls up and the two bearded scientists climb out, Dave & Tim, who look all rugged and quarry-grade outdoorsy. Like blokes out of a Spielberg movie about blokes who blow up rocks a lot. They had come all the way from Derbyshire to look at the nutter who had hired this meter from them before. That’d be me.
They had disbelief issues and just wanted to see what on earth we were up to with their respected tool, the Vibrock V901 Seismograph.
The Vibrock explosives experts agreed to operate the ground-shake-o-meter and we picked a spot to embed the three-dimensions accelerometer in its billet-cut box into the hallowed turf of Santa Pod.
I asked our fluid dynamicist to park the cars. They were grouped together so snugly that I could just get into the middle by one route only. I declared a brief meet and delivered the feels-a-bit-silly but crucially vital Risk Assessment. I explained how much effort and time had been expended in its production, I printed it out and gave a copy to the TV company who like that sort of thing and said.
“The grass is slippery. It will be very loud. May contain nuts.”
Geoff ‘Firestarter’ Kerss doesn’t really look like a normal bloke. He looks like a mad scientist. Cutting a striking figure at a similar height to the Iceman, but thinner, I see him as what Beaker the Muppet grew up into after his apprenticeship as lab assistant for Dr. Bunsen Honeydew. I suspect him of literally R.E.M. night-time dreaming about how to arrange these cars. He was really cool about the forum flurry beforehand only chipping in to let me know which days he could attend (or not) and offering, dead casual like, to array the bass. Having been on the scene he knows each install, even back as far as the amazingly old and amazingly yet potent Hifonics/Cerwin Vega install in the Transit van of K&M Acoustics. This meant he directed each one. Parked and pointed to the inch so that their bass could emanate out onto the turf where our about to be utterly astonished explosives engineers were crouched with bits of yellow squeezy-foam in their ears over the V901 Seismograph.
At first I made them all hop up and down on the turf around the meter – looking a bit daft but thirty or so blokes and two girls hopping up and down made the V901 trigger and we registered a wobble.
Then, we went for it.
Everyone was asked to play a 40Hz tone and let it rip by way of a signalling system to a conductor where they could all see. The world went BURRRRRRR!! and the meter spat out some paper.
We got a maximum ground movement velocity of 4.5mm/s which equated to a detonation of 250 kilograms of explosives at a range of 500 metres and showed that the ground wobbled right on the 40Hz frequency!
It was working.
Ian Iceman Pinder asked plaintively, “When can we do 25Hz?” as his bass eats elephants.
So we went lower, straight to the 33Hz CRF or what has now gone into the folklore as the Clitoral Resonance Frequency. As related to me by Todd Ramsey about his chum’s girlfriend. They had a big body shaking bass install and he had a test tone CD. They experimented and found 33Hz to be the one. (“Ohhh YESS THAT’S the onnnne!”) I wrote about it in Max Power and it went deep into Ice culture in an instant. So deep, in fact that I reckon some reading will even think I’m claiming it as mine when it ain’t. Well it was Todd really but I did report it.
This time was less impressive as the deeper note was less resonant with Mother Earth. Her Dynamo Humm was going to be a bit tougher than that. We got a 3.5mm/s velocity and it was declared equivalent to 170kg of boom at 500 metres.
Then I simply asked for whatever made their world rock the deepest and hardest. Iceman gave in involuntary ****-eating grin and reached for the Slow Jams. Manjit the Geordie Boy and Mazdawg the Quietly Insane and all the good but absolutely and totally bonkers participants got ready to turn their cones inside out for posterity and fame.
Then they dropped it.
Never have I been so close to my limit for vibration comfort. My hearing was protected – after all, this was bass, not just high frequencies, although some of the cars here are more than capable of hearing health harm in truth and depend on the users’ discretion. The air was grasped as though by Sauron’s Evil. The very breath was being gradually pulled from your chest, your intestines roiled like my delighted Id as, despite the absurdity, the sheer strangeness of what we were doing, for just that moment, I knew in an epiphanic instant that my career was experiencing a peak, right there with all these lovely people. And as the bass faded back and the Skylarks tumbled from the heavens above Santa Pod in acoustic shock, I felt a perfect love.
But it was just Manjit sneaking up behind me to give me a startling grope.
The cameras were running and we recorded the moment when our explosives scientists explained we had achieved a quite mad 6.325mm/s velocity in the Vertical axis (Longitudinal and Transverse being the L & T axes I guess) which meant we had shaken the ground as hard as fully three hundred kilograms of high explosives going off a mere 500 metres away would have done.
The first time we did it, we reckoned a 3.6 on the Richter Magnitude. The second time, 4.2 Richter, this time however, we calculated a value of 5.4 Richter Magnitude.
This is incredible and as I said to camera for the TV guys, had you been asleep in bed or rutting in full reproductive anger to actually make babies as against recreational sex, you would still have leaped out of your bed and run screaming into the street. Only I don’t think the words were quite as well chosen at the time. (You always think of something better after the chance, don’t’ you?)
Now for the hard science.
While Richter Magnitude is what made us go to Santa Pod and start this thing up all those years ago, which incidentally has never been done before or since, even by Americans, the assumptions you have to make about a 10km proximity of the epicentre and so forth, do really render the figure a soft-science item.
However, the V901 Seismograph is a precision instrument and there exists a tightly knit global community amongst companies like Vibrock. They know their USA counterparts. We know the USA bassheads – or can get hold of them. The conversion directly to explosives mass-distance-equivalent is easily calculated with a straight line on a graph (although I confess I didn’t check to see if it was log-log graph paper) and so can, like all science be reproduced.
We will be applying, with due scientific rigour and witness statements and so forth, to the Guinness Organisation in an attempt to gain recognition for setting an inaugural and totally credible first ever Ground-Bass-Shake world record.
Those present at this history making event were:
1. K & M Acoustics’ Mike Winstanley - 12x18in CV subs 6,600w RMS 156 dB; 6.5cubic sealed each, in a Ford Transit. Accompanied by Richard Atkinson and Anthony Hart
2. Ian “ICEMAN” Pinder - 6 X HCCA 15s 24,600w RMS 155.5@ 25Hz
3 Paul “Mazdawg” Coughlan’s huge Rockford ‘Bass Burb 18,000w RMS
4. Gareth “Scruff” Senior - 10x JBL GT5 12in 6,000w RMS. 152.2 dB drag 36Hz - 154.2dB @ 25Hz Propper Droppers with Mate Ashley Parfitt in tow.
5 Manjit Singh in the Rockford Bassmechanix van - 12x15; 8,000w RMS 156dB in EMMA with spar Andrew Ackerly
6 Geoff “Firestarter” Kerss - Transit Connect 4 x RE MX 18s, 12,000w. 158+dB on a tone 154.5dB average on music.
7. Alex “Loudvanman” Mitchell - VW T4 Transporter, 6 x DD 15's walled at C Pillar, 18,000w RMS, dB unknown but savage
8. Big Boy Mark Smith - 4 x Orion HCCA 15s 10,000w RMS 154.4dB@ last drag
9. Matt “thejoose” Sprigg - 6 x 12in SPL Dynamics SPL Subs and 9,000w RMS - 155.4dB @ 39Hz
25. Jerry aka “BIG RED” (Team Fusion ) VW T4 8 x 12s 150dB+ 2,500w RMS
TOTAL POWER ROOT MEAN SQUARE = 179,600WATTS
PEAK POWER = 360,000 WATTS
After all the serious stuff, we got down to some heavy bass larks, running ‘hair tricks’ with Iceman’s insane air-blasting bass behemoth.
If you sit in the door way of his Astra, your hair flies out perpendicular to your head when the bass hits. To her credit, tough as nails and pretty with it, reporter Emma Baker from Anglia TV sat through repeated buffetings while both her cameraman and the Fast Car stills man Chris Wallbank got the flying tresses recorded. Sat alongside her, the lass Puddlez’ hair was far longer and went utterly berserk when the low jam flowed!
You can see some more hair tricks at Modified Nationals 2008 and Streetlife 08 articles, which have videos embedded within them including one of Big Mick, Metallica’s sound engineer having his heavy metal mangled!
THE CHALLENGE
We think you can reproduce this, USA, but we reckon you won’t shake the ground like we did! I know you can make meters move but we are talking Ground Pounder. Pavement Shaker and rrrreal loooows. So, like my mates at Audio Control like to say…
TAKE IT OUT AND MEASURE IT!
We can help hook you up with the USA Seismic monitoring and explosives consultancy folks through our chums with the beards and hard hats over here. You bring the bass and someone who can see the physics of sound in air like Keanu Reeves can see the Matrix to park the bass wagons best. Ours is called Kerss and it’s pronounced curse. You can’t whup us ‘cos we are decadent Brits and we know about excessive behaviour far past yours!
OK, that’s the Trash Talk as you fellows like to put it but in all honesty, give it a go, chaps, it’s jolly good fun!
We’re waiting to hear from you.
Adam Rayner
online editor Talk Audio & ICE Contributor to Fast Car magazine
SPRING 09: Over on Steve Meade's site a forum guy posted something we hadn't worked out...
"That is absolutely insane. After some quick calculations based on only the setup info you gave, thats ~1,923,616.82 in^2 of cone area. Wow."
So we went lower, straight to the 33Hz CRF or what has now gone into the folklore as the Clitoral Resonance Frequency. As related to me by Todd Ramsey about his chum’s girlfriend. They had a big body shaking bass install and he had a test tone CD. They experimented and found 33Hz to be the one. (“Ohhh YESS THAT’S the onnnne!”) I wrote about it in Max Power and it went deep into Ice culture in an instant. So deep, in fact that I reckon some reading will even think I’m claiming it as mine when it ain’t. Well it was Todd really but I did report it.
