Bass Gear - Page 141

Gear news can sometimes slow down in December, especially with NAMM around the corner. But that didn’t stop some companies from announcing some new bass gear that caught readers’ attention. Here are the top 10 reader favorite gear stories from December 2017. 1. Willcox Guitars 2018 Saber Bass Wilcox Guitars is updating their bass lineup by replacing their outgoing Saber...

Cort’s Artisan Series has expanded with the introduction of the B6 Plus AS electric bass. The six-string, open-pore model features bolt-on construction and a “warm open sound with excellent sonic dispersion,” the company says. Cort builds the instrument with a swamp ash body and a five-piece neck made with panga panga and walnut. The fretboard is also panga panga, which...

Aguilar Amplification is kicking 2018 off by unveiling the SL 212, a new bass cabinet in their superlight SL series. Weighing in at 45 pounds, the 4-ohm cab is fitted with two custom-voiced woofers with Neodymium magnets and a phenolic tweeter with variable level control. It can handle 500 watts RMS. “We spent a lot of time working on the...

One of the great things about writing the Bass of the Week column is that builders send us photos of some of their best work. This recent Sadowsky NYC Will Lee 5-string hit my inbox and stopped me in my tracks. Built with a chambered swamp ash body, the bass’s candy apple orange finish and black pearl pickguard are enough...

After releasing the RockBass Corvette Basic 8-String bass earlier this year, Warwick is now offering a set of strings for 8-string basses in their Red series. The Warwick Red 8-String set includes four strings plus four-octave strings suitable for all long scale eight-string basses. “The strings of the Warwick Red 8-String set are Roundwound, medium gauge (.017″, .040″, .025″, .060″,...

Luthier Aaron “Ray” Ross has been cooking up a new style of bridge this year, and he’s created an amazing bass to showcase it. His 27th bass features the new saddle-less “universal bridge.” “Coming up with something new is a violent, painful way to create, this took 4 months of agony and hand work,” Ross writes. “I was a little...

If you’re looking to blow up your bass sound, Death By Audio has you covered with their new Absolute Destruction pedal. Utilizing a power amplifier IC, the unit offers a distortion as well as what its name implies. “Showing little to no respect for what instruments normally sound like, or even what many people want them to sound like, we...

Fodera is gearing up for 2018 by announcing the 35th Anniversary Monarch 4 Deluxe. Celebrating the company’s flagship design, the new bass is described as combining classic Fodera tone and looks with modern electronics and playability. “For this bass, we’ve adopted an early Fodera wood combination of a Mahogany body, Quilted Maple top, and a Pau Ferro fingerboard. In the...

Electro-Harmonix reached into their past to reissue the Op-Amp Big Muff Pi from the late ’70s. The new pedal is faithful to the original 1978 design with a few new features including a compact, die-cast chassis, and true bypass switching. “The pedal relies on op-amps rather than transistors and three gain stages rather than four, to create its signature sound,”...

British double bass luthier Neal Heppleston sent us photos of his Panormo model to check out, and I’ve been obsessing over it. Each piece of wood is jaw-dropping, but moreover, it seems every little detail is a work of art in itself. Hand-built in his Sheffield shop, the bass is designed after the work of a famous 18th-century luthier with...

London’s Fredric Effects has expanded their tonal palette with the BugCrusher, an analog sample rate reducer that produces an aliasing effect. Although its name makes it sound like it is a BitCrusher, Fredric writes that’s not the case. “Despite the name, the BugCrusher is not an actual BitCrusher. Most BitCrusher effects will have sample rate (x-axis quantization) and bit depth...

Ashdown has expanded their lineup of signature gear with the Norman Watt-Roy Special Edition OriginAL Pre-Di. Watt-Roy, who is best known as the bassist for Ian Dury and the Blockheads, helped create the unit. “Strictly limited to a run of 50 special units, the special edition Norman Watt-Roy OriginAL Preamp Pedal has been tweaked to Norman’s specification,” Ashdown writes. “As...