BigRedX

This what I have been saying for years. EQ in the analog domain can cause changes in phase at certain frequencies. Something that is very detrimental to a good solid bass sound. It is always best to EQ in a single place in the signal chain. If you need to have two sets of EQ controls then you have the wrong equipment for your sound.

If you are playing to a fixed BPM you can work out the required delay time in milliseconds with a bit of simple maths.

If I was going to invest in hardware synthesis again, I'd probably get a second hand Nord Lead, which was the best synth I've ever owned. Unfortunately lots of other people seem to have discovered how good these are, as the second hand prices have increased considerably since I sold mine... I couldn't afford a Juno at the time, but several musicians I knew in the early 80s had them and I was always completely underwhelmed when I had a go on one. I seemed to be nothing more than a 6 voice SH09 which I did own and was used mostly for background sequencer parts and percussive noises controlled by an MC202. Since the Juno lacked CV and gate inputs it couldn't even be used like this. I won an Akai AX73 in an E&MM competition which had almost identical architecture to the Juno but had the additional disadvantages of an extra octave of keys making it huge and unwieldy (and more so in the flight case it came with) and parameter access programming. I think I stuck with it for a couple of months before I had saved up enough additional money to trade it in for a Casio CZ5000.

And here is the obligatory gig photo from Sunday:

Hurtsfall supported Byronic Sex & Exile at The Angel in Nottingham last night. Got a small but very enthusiastic audience out on a Sunday night for two fairly niche acts, but we made some new fans and it looks as though we'll be playing the final night of this year's Goth City festival in July as a result. Sound wasn't quite as good on stage as last time we played The Angel, nothing that we couldn't cope with though. BS&E were fairly quiet FoH so I'm wondering if there has been a policy of turning the bands down since our last gig here. No photos on Facebook yet, but I could see people taking them, so I'm sure there will one or two up in the next couple of days. Next up it's three weekends of gigs with In Isolation during March followed by Hurtsfall on "Goth Friday" in April. Busy times...

If you're prepared to go on the waiting list for the announcement of the next batch an Audiothingies Micromonsta 2 will do pretty much everything that the matrix could for about £250. Me, I'm perfectly happy with the soft synths that come with Logic.

My parents had little interest in listening to music for enjoyment in the house, even though my dad could play the piano competently, and it turns out that mum is very musical and later in life she has been a member of several serious choirs and now in her 90s plays in a oldies Ukulele band that probably gigs more frequently than I do! For a long time the only music playing device we had was an ancient valve-powered radiogram that was guaranteed to damage any records you played on it. My musical tastes are entirely formed by discovering Radio One in 1971 and deciding for myself what I liked (70s glam rock) and what I didn't (just about everything else). I don't have kids but if I did I would very much hope that the music they enjoyed would be completely and utterly impenetrable to me, in the same way that my parents couldn't understand in the slightest what I found interesting and enjoyable about the music I chose to listen to.

In that case, pretty much any analogue style polysynth with 2 oscillators and 2 full ADSR envelope generators per voice, VCF capable of going into self oscillation, plus the ability to work as a proper monophonic synth will do the job. No-one making 80s "classics" at the time was using a Juno. And almost no-one bought one out of choice. We bought them because it was the cheapest polysynth on the market and we couldn't afford the synths we really wanted like the Jupiter 8, Oberheim OBXa or Prophet V. Had any of us been lucky enough to score a record deal with an equipment advance, the Juno would have been gone and replaced with something that actually sounded good without needing to be be swamped in chorus effect.

Having spent some time with the Deepmind (our synth player has one) comparing it to the Roland Juno series of synths does it IMO a massive dis-service. Certainly it is capable of Juno type sounds but it's got 2 oscillators and 3 envelope generators so you are by no means limited to the weedy and disappointing sounds of the Junos.

My local musical instrument shop in the 70s was a Traynor dealer. Since they mostly sold "home organs" along with a few Grant and Kimbara badged copy guitars and basses, I never saw the brand as anything to get excited about back then as I lumped them in with all the other low budget crap they were selling. Besides back then in the UK everyone wanted a Marshall or an Acoustic 360. However my band at the time would hire one of their 6-channel (valve?) mixer amps for a few days whenever we were recording which worked well enough I suppose.

If the bass goes through the PA then it really doesn't matter what cabs you use, as they will make zero contribution to what the audience hears; and depending on the size of the stage and what the rest of the band have in the foldback, their effectiveness as personal monitors may not be that great either. Pick something that fits the image of the band and/or genre of the music and be done with it. If you rig is 100% responsible for what the audience hears then the choice of cabs is more important. It's a fact that identical cabs should give you a more consistent sound throughout the venue. It's essential to remember that if you do mix different cabs, what sounds great to you on stage may have turned your tone into something entirely different in various parts of the venue.

So long as they had used a different delivery service otherwise your second pedal is likely to end up at the same Argos as the first.

There's no need for coil tapping. The pickups under those covers are essentially 4 coils each covering 2 strings. The switch then selects which coils are connected to give Split P, Single J, and Stingray configurations.

Here's a photo of the original Enfield bass with it's integrated pickup and electronics: Yours appears to be a much later design using the same pickups that were available separately. It's only less versatile in the fact that it uses passive balancing of the volume differences between the different coil options and there's no active EQ which IMO you really need in order to get the proper Stingray and "Modern Jazz" tones. If the controls on yours are typical Jazz VVT you should be able to trace the wires back to the two volume controls which should give you the signal + and - for each pickup which can then be cut or de-soldered and attached to the relevant terminals to the J-Retro.

That's a weird thing... Not even vaguely like any of the Enfield basses I tried, hence the confusion. @Andyjr1515 The original Enfield pickups and associated electronics while working in roughly the same way appear to be completely different to ones that were sold later as for fitting into other instruments. I was mistakenly under the impression that the Enfield branded basses had stuck with the original designs while less versatile self-contained pickups were only sold separately

If the bass is definitely passive, then there shouldn't be any problem with adding a J-Retro. I only really know about the original versions of the Enfield basses and they definitely had active electronics which were there to balance the changing pickup outputs as well as more conventional tone-shaping functions.

The Enfield basses I tried most definitely had the sorts of controls that you would expect on an active bass. After all what is the point of offering a pickup with the Stingray coil configuration and position if you don't also have something that replicates the sound of the Stringray pre-amp. My impression was that the the instrument had been designed to replicate the sounds of the four most common basses (P, J in both passive and active varieties, and the original Stingray) as well as all the additional possibilities given the pickups and their associated electronics. You bass looks much simpler. Since the original electronics for the Enfield basses were designed in conjunction with John East, it's probably worth getting in touch with him to get answers you need.

@SamPlaysBass, I'm going to rain on your parade with a few practicalities. I play in a couple of bands that do slightly smaller gigs than you appear to - mostly 100-500 capacity venues with the occasional 500+ venue. In the days when I still had a conventional bass rig I can honestly say that my choice of cab(s) made a absolutely no contribution to the bass guitar sound the audience heard. They also made very little contribution to what I heard on stage, as the moment I stepped away from being directly in front the cabs I could hear more bass guitar from the foldback than I could from my rig. Some gigs we played I was being asked to turn the rig down to such an extent so as to not affect the FoH sound, that could hardly hear anything from it even when I stood directly in front of it with the higher speakers right next to my ears! The bass always goes through the PA and IIRC I've had my rig mic'd up on less than a handful of occasions, and since there was also I DI feed from the amp and the driver that was mic'd was chosen seemingly at random rather than spending the time listening to each in turn to decide which was the best sounding, I have no way of knowing exactly what contribution this mic was making to the FoH sound. That's before you deal with the fact that one driver close mic'd in a 6x10 or 8x10 cab does not sound the same as the whole cab from several feet away. Sure the conventional rig looked great and everyone in the bands pulls their weight when it comes to loading in and out, but I could no longer justify to myself taking up all that space in the van and on stage with equipment that made no contribution to what the audience heard and very little contribution to what myself and the rest of the band heard on stage. I'm lucky in that the genres of music I play these days having a conventional backline is not an absolute requirement from an image PoV. I also play a lot of gigs supporting fairly well-known bands from the 80s and 90s and there seems to be a fairly even split between those that still use the same conventional amps and cabs as they did "back in the day" and those that have ditched the backline entirely (occasionally the guitarist may be using some tiny valve combo). I certainly don't miss having to lug big heavy bass amps and cabs about. These days the heaviest items in the load are the drummer's hardware box for one band, and the synth player's over-engineered K&M keyboard stand in the other! And even if I was still using a conventional rig, I certainly wouldn't want to be dealing with the hassle of carnets etc. for using it outside of the UK. I'd be looking at hiring something on the European mainland for that part of the tour. So if it makes you happy, go ahead and agonise over which cab(s) to get, especially if the van space, stage space and the load in and out are no concern. But don't kid yourself that it is making any contribution to the bass guitar sound the audience hears at most of your gigs or even what the rest of your band can hear on stage. Is it really worth the effort?

Misaligned Fender necks were a symptom of the late 70s when the pin router templates had become so worn that the neck pocket dimensions only had a passing resemblance to those originally specified. Nowadays with CNC machines used on all mass produced instruments there is zero excuse for this happening.

Nor does the eBay section for some reason.

Since all my important playing (in front of an audience) is done standing up, I do all my practicing standing up too.

Does the Trace Elliot have a crossover built in? The stand alone pre-amp version of GP11 did.

The performance I went to see was very reminiscent of Cabaret Voltaire's less rhythmical output, but with little of interest to see (no back projected films) and more musical pretension.

I saw Evan Parker doing his "electro-acoustic" thing at the Huddersfield "New Music Festival" about 10 years ago. IIRC there were ten of then on stage - 5 playing recognisable musical instruments and 5 with laptops manipulating the sound in real time. Unfortunately for someone like myself who was heavily into avant garde post-punk electronic bands in the late 70s and early 80s it wasn't particularly new, radical, or shocking at all. At least back then, that kind of sonic manipulation was genuinely hard to do, because of the more primitive nature of the equipment available.

IIRC the existing preamp in the Enfield is tied into the pickups to keep the relative levels consistent when you swap between "Precision" "Jazz" and "Stingray" coil configurations? You don't really want to be adding any extra electronics to this.