BigRedX

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.

IME in venues that size the cab is entirely for looks. Why not build a mock 8x10 enclosure that can fold up for transport and can hold a smaller cab hidden inside for on-stage monitoring should you need it? Also IME you'll hear more from the PA foldback then you will from your backline unless you run it at insane levels.

Hurtsfall will be "special gusts" when Byronic Sex & Exile play The Angel in Nottingham on their Good Mourning Britain tour.

There always latency with pitch detection. That's simple physics, and the lower the note the greater the latency. You need a minimum of one and half cycles of a fairly clean signal to detect the pitch of the note. That's 37ms (at the very best) for low E on a bass which will be noticeable by anyone who isn't rhythmically challenged. That also requires the user to stick with the sounds from the GR55 or GR20 units because as soon as you add MIDI conversion to the equation in order to drive an external synth that adds another layer of processing and latency. Some of the Roland devices get around this by using signal processing/modelling instead of pitch detection as this will only add as much latency as any other good quality AD/DA system, but that's not as versatile from a sonic PoV.

IME all but the very expensive pitch detection systems are all but useless in a live situation and very expensive ones require so much additional refinement to your playing that you might as well learn some rudimentary keyboard technique which willet you far better results much more quickly.

You can get a Graphtec Ghost system that replaces the saddles of a standard BBOT bridge. If you don't want the route for the standard P-bass pickup you'll need to find an un-routed body, and anyway you'll need a different routes/cavities for the preamp and other bits.

IME having a dedicated sound engineer for the band who knows exactly how you want to sound is far more useful then any amount of additional equipment. All the bands that I have been in that had their own PA engineer were able to set up, sound check, and get a great on stage and FoH sound far more quickly, especially if the band has unusual sound requirements.

Before I ditched all my amplification, I always recorded with a mic on the cab as well as DIs from both the amp and direct from the bass. However I have no idea which signals were actually used in the final mix of the tracks, and TBH since the bass sounded exactly how I wanted it, I didn't really care which signal(s) were used. After all it's the end result that matters. Live I'm not convinced that mic'ing the bass cab is good idea. It's a lot of extra effort for both the band and the PA, it opens up the FoH and monitor mix to lots of additional LF problems, and unless the bassist is using a single driver cab with no tweeter, then a single mic close to one speaker can't really come close to capturing the sound of the whole rig. If the OP wants to go down this route, they will need to experiment to find the best mic and combine that with the best speaker and mic position and then mark that location on the cab grill/cloth, so that next time it's mic'd up they can get the mic in the same place, otherwise it won't sound the same from gig to gig.

Thanks for the extra information. Is that one or two Barefaced cabs? Do they have tweeters or just the 10" drivers? Unfortunately the sound that your hear from your cab(s) when you are stood several feet away from them, will not be the same as the sound of one of the drivers being close-mic'd no matter how flat/accurate the mic is. Have a listen to each of the drivers in turn close up while someone plays your bass, and then compare it to sound from where you would normally be stood, and you hear what I am on about. Instead I would spend some time working with the PA engineer to EQ the DI sound so that it more closely matches the sound coming out of the cab.

I've changed pickups twice. Once on a guitar that originally sounded terrible but I also replaced all the hardware at the same time it would be hard to define exactly what was down to the pickups and what was due to the other changes I made. The second time was on a fairly budget 5-string bass where I replaced the original (J-type) pickups and active circuit with a set of expensive active EMGs and their recommended passive controls, which cost about half the price of the bass. The resulting differences in sound were negligible. When I came to choose pickups for my Sei bass Martin had me spend a couple of hours playing various instruments in The Gallery and noting my comments on which ones I liked the sound of. As others have already said there's a lot more to a pickup than just it's resistance. And once you've taken all the electrical and magnetic factors into account, then you also have the consider the position of them in relation to the string length. In the end it really is just trial and error...

What are you hoping to achieve that the DI isn't managing to do on its own? What cabs are you using? How big are the stages that you are playing? Does your band use its own PA or sound engineer?

With the string locking mechanism immediately behind the nut you don't need any break angle so long as it is not higher than the nut slots. The change in angle will change the compliance characteristics of the strings but so will the fact that there's a different length of non speaking string behind the nut.

Any chance of being able to work out exactly what was going on in the original pickups and then replicating that?

Yes, quite a lot over the past 25 years, something which always bemuses me. If the bands in question were signed to a record label and appeared regularly on national TV and/or radio I could understand it, but we're just another indie band with a CD or record that we've put out ourselves. As a punter I've never asked for anything I've bought from the merch table to be signed, and the one time in the early 80s I received a rather hard to get single that I had to order direct from the band in question and wait for a couple of months for it to turn up, I was most disappointed to find that the cover had been defaced with band signatures.