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Sound Ideas With Mark Wright: Urban Legend – Speaker Size
Meet Mark Wright –
No one escapes the frustration of finding the right tone and gear to meet their unique requirements. For most of us, whether touring professional or weekend warrior, it has become a lifelong endeavor. Unfortunately, the results are often prolonged as we shoot ourselves in the foot by relying too much on unfounded assumptions.
These articles will attempt to help in our personal quest as we dispel common myths, theories and preconceived notions about tone and gear.
Let’s begin by tackling one of the more frustrating urban legends: speaker size. We all have our driver of choice. Every day I hear players saying, “I only play 10’s because they’re the fastest”, “12’s are the only drivers with enough punch”, and “15’s are the only way to go because of their depth.”
Why are we so adamant about speaker size? Why do we dig in our heels so deep about what’s right & what’s wrong? The main reasons seem to stem from our personal experiences and what the current popular opinions are from other players. Of course there’s advertising, magazine articles and current trends as well. All of these combined help determine our belief system about which drivers will work and which ones won’t whether it’s reality or not.
As we filter everything through our past experiences, it only makes sense that this would become a main ingredient in forming our thinking. If every 15″ driver you’ve ever played happened to be slow, floppy, woofy and undefined, common sense would dictate that you do not like 15’s. Our experiences (for better or worse) formulate our prejudices.
What about current public opinion? As a young kid growing up, our family bought and drove Chevys. It was almost like talking politics or religion if a friend’s family drove a Ford. Them’s fightin’ words! Looking back, it seems ridiculous. I wanted to fit in, so I preached the virtues of driving a particular brand of gas guzzler.
It’s really no different today when we ask opinions on speaker size. Many players will defend whatever they have invested in to the death, even if they have never tried another size driver. No one likes to admit they didn’t make the best choice.
What’s the correct answer? It may be different for everyone, but there are certain truths that can be applied to help us understand speakers to make a better decision.
We all know that a Luthier building a custom bass can change the tone and playability by opting for a different bridge, pre-amp, pick-ups, pick-up placement, frets, neck, bolt-on, neck-through, body wood, strings, etc. This is a fact that we don’t argue with because it’s a no brainer.
In the same way, there are at least 31 plus different physical parameters, component materials and Thiele-Small Parameters that make up the characteristics of a speaker driver. A few examples are power handling, frequency response, impedance, Xmax (Maximum Linear Excursion) and SPL (Sensitivity). An array of building materials can be used for the voice coil, magnet, basket, type of cone edge, etc. Change any one of these and you’ve just changed the tone of the driver and cabinet. Most of the time more than one parameter is changed from brand to brand and model to model which makes a huge alteration.
Manufacturers have been making midrange sounding 15″ guitar speakers for skinny six string guitar players for decades. They’ve been making eight inch subwoofers for years as well. Change a little here and a little there and you can make a 15 sound like a ten or an eight inch sound like an 18.
What does this mean in real life? It’s not the best idea when attempting to solve your tone and gear problems to be so obstinate about what driver size will work for you. Not all tens are the same, not all 12’s are the same, nor are all 15’s the same. Each loudspeaker cabinet manufacturer either orders what’s available from a speaker driver manufacturer’s stock or they have them built to their custom specs. Line up 20 different ten inch drivers and they will all sound completely different.
Again, what many players say is, “I only play tens, I never play 15’s.” What they actually mean is, “From my personal experience in testing cabinets, the limited number of tens that I have played sounded better for my style of music than the limited number of 15’s.”
On a related note, speaker cabinets are actually built around the speaker driver. In other words, the 31 plus parameters of the driver dictate the cubic inches, porting size and length (ported or sealed). You can’t just stick any old brand of driver in your existing cabinet and expect great results. There are times when a different brand or model may be close enough to work, but remember these specs can be all over the place. The cabinet is built around the driver!
There are many resources online that go into more depth about speaker parameters if interested. The goal wasn’t to do an exhaustive thesis on speaker design, but to simply open our eyes to possibilities that we may not have considered. There may be other speaker sizes out there that might meet your needs better than the ones you have been so passionately defending.
Chevy, Ford? Oh, grow up.
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Photo: Self-portrait by Melissa Auf Der Maur
Melissa Auf Der Maur is a Canadian bassist who played with Tinker, Hole, and The Smashing Pumpkins. She released her own work and is a photographer with photos published in Nylon, Bust, and National Geographic. She released her ‘90s Rock Memoir “Even The Good Girls Will Cry” on 17 March 2026.
KB: Did you always want to be a singer-musician growing up?
I’ve played music my whole life. In school, I played trumpet and sang in a children’s choir, so music was always within me. My mother was the first female disc jockey on the Montreal airwaves; her record collection played a huge role in my inspiration and love of music.
KB: When did you start playing bass, and why this instrument?
When I was 19, the early 90s music explosion began to percolate in tiny clubs around the world. I was lucky to be a ticket girl at Montreal’s underground music club. In one year, I saw Hole, Sonic Youth, Smashing Pumpkins, White Zombie, and The Breeders – all had female bass players. That’s when the seed was planted. By the age of 22, I was the bass player of Hole.
KB: Which brands of basses have you used in your career, and which one are you using now?
The first bass that I learned on was a vintage Squier Precision. Hole was sponsored by Fender guitars, so I upgraded to Fender Custom Shop Precisions. That is all I play, but I have a cool vintage 8-string Greco that I use on recordings to thicken up guitar parts.
KB: What equipment do you use or have you used with your basses?
Ampeg SVT amps and cabinets, a couple of Sans-Amp pedals, and that is it.
KB: How did you become a member of Hole, and what is your fondest memory of that time?
Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins was helping scout a replacement for (RIP) Kristen Pfaff, Hole’s bass player. My band, Tinker, opened for them on the Siamese Dream tour, so Billy had seen me play and could vouch for me. Courtney trusted her talented friend, and that was it. I initially said “no thank you” due to my commitment to my photographic studies and the drama and chaos surrounding the band during the “Live Through This” album release. Courtney took it as a good sign that I said no, so convinced me to reconsider, and soon after, I accepted their invitation, in the name of helping put females in the male-dominated landscape of rock music. My fondest memory is every show we played as a mostly female band, symbolizing what a woman could do in a rock band. Every show had a purpose: get more women to play music.
KB: You are a photographer as well. What makes a great picture? Do you shoot in color or b/w?
I started shooting photographs at age 15. Initially only shot black & white and worked in the art school darkroom. In university, I took a color photography course, and shifted mostly and forever to that, because it was easier to process film on the road when I joined a rock band. I experimented with many cameras, point and shoots, manual, polaroids, medium format, and vintage finds. The trick to a good photograph is to shoot many and all the time – the magic is in the edit and selection process.
KB: Are there artists you would love to collaborate with or wish you had?
??I’ve been lucky to collaborate with some of my favorite musicians in my career. I would still love to collaborate with a new generation heavy electronic artist on an analog bass, heavy electronic drums, and synths collaboration project. Take me out of my usual zone, merging the past and future: my love of 80s dark new wave and new artists exploring that genre. It was very futuristic back then, and we are now, after all, living in the future. I am in the mood to play bass to heavy beats I want to dance to.
KB: What are your 7 favorite bass lines in music across all genres? And why these 7?
“Mountain Song” – Jane’s Addiction (love a rambling, rolling bass line – feels like the ocean waves)
“Black Top – Helmet” (was the first bass line I taught myself)
“Gold Dust Woman” – Hole from “The Crow 2” Soundtrack (it was my first bass line contribution to the band)
“Get Ready” – The Temptations (Motown just feels so good, because of the bass)
“Lucretia My Reflection” – Sisters of Mercy (makes me want to hit the dance floor and play bass simultaneously)
“Be My Druidess” – Type O Negative (full chord bass playing at its best by iconic, demonic, Peter Steele, RIP)
“Romantic Rights” – Death from Above (1979 – unique distorted overdriven tone, combined dance rhythm and melodic intelligence, all in one shot – also! Shout out to a bass & drum only band, which is awesome, and we should have more of, but the bass player needs to be a killer to fill that role.
KB: What are you currently up to?
Releasing my ‘90s Rock Memoir “EVEN THE GOOD GIRLS WILL CRY”. Visceral healing process, it was to get it out of me and write it, but I suspect the real magic will begin by putting it into the world and reflecting with others on what the magic of the ‘90s was all about. Powerful music decade that carried us into what is now a brave new world of digital corporate weirdness – may the past shed a light on our future. That’s my hope for this book release and tour.
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