SamPlaysBass

Cheers Merton, very kind of you. Bruce loves a challenge, shoot him a message!

Genuinely fantastic basses, everything I’ve ever wanted from a working, gigging bass. Beautiful details and great support from Bruce. I’m really happy with mine. Bruce’s workshop is great as well!

I owned an Ashdown CTM 100 a few years back and I’m currently using the SVT CL above. The Ashdown wanted to distort earlier and didn’t go as low and deep as the Ampeg. The Ashdown had a brilliant distorted sound, proper Live At Leeds. It didn’t have loads of low end, but I was using it through an Ampeg SVT-HE 4x10 cab which isn’t known for its low end so YMMV. The Ampeg is deep and rich. Much less keen to distort, but it does have three times the power of the CTM 100, resulting in greater headroom. Voicing wise, I prefer the Ampeg, but if I was playing in a band where bass was front and centre, the Ashdown would clinch it. I really love the Ampeg for what I play, which is rock and soul based blues.

Alex is a fantastic guitarist with a bright future ahead of him. Tasteful! Thanks for coming! It was a great gig. Thoroughly enjoyed.

Beings I started this thread a few years ago, here’s my current set up! The Sampeg SVT CL into a Fender Neo 8x10. Overkill in every sense of the word. Tone and volume for days, though I usually keep it sensible. Usually… Sounds incredible. @Bassworks JPJ4 featuring in front - a wonderful bass, outstanding craftsmanship. Hot take, but an 8x10 is far, far easier to move around than a 4x10, even up stairs. Happy to arm wrestle anyone who thinks otherwise.

Absolutely drooling over this. I've looked at the Epifani's and the Nexus heads at some point over the last 18 months and nearly pulled the trigger. Seriously good rig!

Yes. This is the only logical explanation. A modular 8x10 for under £400 🤯 😉

Epifani stuff comes up every now and then and for relatively little money. Super high quality and great sounding, even after a few years. Time to cash in on the bargains. Haha, I think it's quite funny that new-school cabs are lighter than old school heads and by quite a margin. My Ampeg SVT CL weighs about the same as my Fender Neo 8x10 and that's massive!

This is exactly the sentiment I was talking about - a perfect example of good performance from a brand that isn't flavour of the month and a huge saving to boot. Wonderful looking rig. I think Laney offer some serious bang for buck, especially when you buy direct from their eBay store. Laney stuff in general is solid, well made and sounds good. I honestly don't understand why we don't see more of them around, but I think the 'flavour' element of Barefaced, Aguilar etc. means that people will pay a premium for those brands. Nothing wrong with that, either. The 16 ohm cab thing is weird, though. Good plan to work around it. Trace stuff of that vintage is outstanding. That's a great looking GP11 and I reckon that head is probably heavier than the cab! Still, plenty of power to blow the bloody doors off, punches well above its weight. The equivalent Aguilar set up would be well over £1500+ brand new (a Tone Hammer 350 head and an SL210 cab). £150 all in is a bargain.

Does anybody else enjoy picking up gear that was flavour of the month but is now no longer as popular? I’ll start. I picked up a TC RS210 yesterday for £225. That’s on the cheaper end of the scale these days, especially considering they were around £600+ 10 or so years ago. And d’you know what? It’s fantastic. I bought it to add to my ‘small’ rig. It started off with a singular RS112 that Thomann was selling off cheap around 10 years ago. This led to me acquiring a second RS112 a few months later to make a small stack as my old Trace rig wasn’t best equipped to deal with the 4 flights of stairs to get to the main room in Clwb Ifor Bach (big up, Cardiff bassists). After a raft of heads including a Markbass LM3, a GK 700rb and a TecAmp Puma 900, I eventually picked up a tatty RH450 from Marketplace for peanuts. They sounded fantastic together - you could really tell that the RH and RS series were designed to work hand in hand. During the RH450’s tenure with me, I replaced a pot, superglued the buttons back together, changed the knobs to less broken ones and I had a rig that I was very, very pleased with; moreso than the other, more expensive heads. A good deal on NOS RH750 from PMT a few years ago led me to picking up a brand spanking new one for £350. I sold the RH450 to a mate of mine, which paid for itself and then some. I ran that rig for a few years but always fancied adding an RS210. Lo and behold, one came up yesterday about 20 minutes from my house. Done deal. I still remember the marketing videos coming out on YouTube when they were launched 13 or so years ago. I remember TC pushing this series quite hard, and the fallout on TalkBass about the 236 watt power section not being very honest about its output (it is, in fact, plenty loud enough for any situation). The design is coming up 15 years old now, and TC stopped making them long ago. In fact, TC has undergone a bit of a personality transplant and isn’t really a contender in the bass amp market any more. These were certainly flavour of the month 10+ years ago, with Mark King and Nathan East appearing all over the marketing material. Fundamentally, these were and still are fantastic amplifiers and cabinets. They’re not perfect (the coating gets a bit flaky, the knobs are made of pastry, and they’re no longer contenders in the ‘lightweight’ category) but for several hundred pounds less than a mid-tier, 500 watt head today, you can get a fantastic sounding and extremely practical stack that will happily see you through many, many gigs. You just have to wait 10 years or so… 😂 Anyone else buying up not-so-cutting edge equipment?

Fantastic, thank you! And of course, pop down at the end of any gig and have a play and a chat. I do, playing with CB warrants a fatter, warmer p-bass tone so I’ll always favour the P pickup in that scenario. I prefer passive electronics as well because I find myself constantly adjusting the EQ on every active bass I’ve ever had - I find a single tone control to dial out the highs when I need to much more useful. That could all change in the future though! The passive Bartolini PJs are really, really nice and the whole bass is a complete slap weapon. Both pickups on, it sounds incredible and has that inherent slight mid-scoop that makes it perfect for slap. It’s just as happy being a thumpy P bass though!

Found the same on my Spector, and I’m not very vertically gifted (5ft 9) so the 35” scale, top horn not being around the 12th fret and the small body made it feel like I was playing a bass that was way too big for me. Swapped it for a Stingray 5 (albeit with a 34” scale) and it feels like home again. The Spector’s B string was spectacular though, I just had the wrong body shape for it! Worst experience I’ve had of this was with a beautiful Mayones Victorious I had in lockdown. Stunning bass, beautifully made and a real work of art, but it gave me the most horrific shoulder ache. Couldn’t understand why until I plotted out on a mirror where my hand, elbow and shoulder were and compared it to when playing a Fender Jazz. My left arm was fully extended when fretting the first fret of the Mayones. Literally couldn’t go any further. Swapped it for a jazz many moons ago! I need basses for short fat people 🤷🏼‍♂️

You win some you lose some! That would’ve been the first gig with our sound engineer and the new Bassworks, so there were probably a few teething bits as well as discrepancies around the room. The Bassworks is much fatter and flatter than my Fender P with a Dimarzio DP122 - that’s a mid range monster. If you see us again, pop down for a chat at the end and I’ll show you the Bassworks, it’s a work of art. Brilliant video with a crazy amount of playing consistency across all basses. His style and sound come through really well on all basses. I tend to find having both the P and J pickups can get lost in a mix slightly with its natural slight mid scoop, so I generally only use the P pickup on my basses. The Yamaha sounds awesome, slightly more characterful than the Fender IMO and matches my experience with both basses. Stingray’s are Stingray’s - such a brilliant, unique sound. Stingray or Yammy P for me.

A little update for those who are interested - I've gigged a Venture V12 and 4x10 cab. Full disclosure - I'm not a Yamaha artist, but the guitarist in my band is. Yamaha invited us over to Germany for a showcase event using their nice, shiny new gear and we asked (very politely) if we could use the same gear for a gig the night after, to save us bringing our own. I haven't been asked to give an account of the Venture series and I'm certainly not being paid to promote Yampeg. My current rig is Ampeg SVT CL and run it through a Fender Neo 8x10 (all paid for by myself - no amp deals yet), and this was a cool opportunity to road test a Venture head and cab in the wild. The first gig was in what looked like a Bond villain's lair, and was essentially Yamaha's Christmas party. Matteo Mancuso was the opening act (with Federico Malaman on bass who was, as you can imagine, a monster) and we had to follow them - no pressure. I had a box-fresh Venture V12 sat on top of an equally box fresh 4x10 cab with a shiny new Yamaha BB P34 on a stand next to it. The V12 head had plenty of oomph, though I think we can disregard the '1200 watts' on the front of the amp; the wattage arms race in the Class D world verges on ridiculous at times. Big numbers don't always mean a big sound, but in this case it did provide me with more than enough volume. Unfortunately on night 1 of our test, our stage volume was pretty quiet, though I did give the whole thing a quick blast on full volume. There was quite a bit of travel in the volume knob; the first half seemed relatively lifeless but quickly became deafening once past 12 o'clock, and the volume was there in spades all the way to max. The amp sounded great but it was used as more of a monitor whilst the FOH did the heavy lifting. The room was boxy and full of shiny concrete surfaces so turning down was our best bet to sound decent. And decent we sounded, according to the videos we saw afterwards. Not much to report, other than it all worked, sounded great and didn't need to be cranked to sound good. The next night, we played at a venue called HeadCrash in Hamburg, which was much more our home territory - a dirty rock bar. Tried as we might, we couldn't arrange for a van to take the equipment from Yamaha HQ to the venue (a paltry 1.5km away) and the weather had become very British, so we opted for 6 Ubers instead. It was as chaotic as you'd expect, getting a band plus all of their equipment and luggage across town, though carrying the cab in its washing machine-sized box was much easier than expected. It certainly didn't stand out like an anvil amongst the leagues of drum paraphernalia and cardboard. Chaos navigated and perplexed Uber drivers calmed, we were soon at the venue. A light and easy load-in up the stairs and I carefully plonked the head and cab onto the stage. Job done. Under stage lighting, the rig looked mean and purposeful. The cab looks like a proper SVT cab and the head is businesslike and focused. This time, I could open up the Venture V12 and give it the beans. At 1 o'clock on the volume knob, it was plenty loud enough to shrug off a drum kit played by a drummer possessed by the spirit of Taylor Hawkins. The gain was set around 12 o'clock and I added in a touch of the SGT circuit to give it some valve crunch. Our FOH engineer blended the clean DI signal with the dirty cab sound to give a really impressive bass sound - looking back through social media videos you could hear fantastic articulation of the bass frequencies and the SGT channel sounds wicked; a really good, slightly overdriven sound that didn't lack or overpower in any frequency band. The cab was punchy and articulate, giving a nice little sizzle to the top end with the tweeter engaged. Honestly, the whole rig punched well above its weight. The Venture V12 and 4x10 cab put on a pretty fearsome roar. My only slight criticism is that it didn't snarl in exactly the same way as my all valve SVT CL, and it compressed the overdrive just a tad compared to the real deal. It didn't quite have the bell-like chime that an SVT can give you when it's at full chat. However, I can safely say that no-one in the audience would notice the difference in the Venture V12 compared to an SVT. The Venture V12 sounded incredible. I've been fortunate enough to use a big SVT for a while now so my ears are naturally accustomed to that big rig. The Venture has its own flavour, but it's certainly an Ampeg and it's a very, very good sounding amplifier and cabinet. Overall, I'd give the rig a solid 9/10 rating. Light, loud, tonally interesting and flexible with its EQ and drive/modelling sections. I'll knock off 1 point for lacking that valvey top end punch, but this amp is a different beast entirely to my setup back home, so perhaps I'm being harsh in docking a point. One place I can dock a point is the price. This rig is just over £2k brand new. It’s very high quality and very light, but when you compare what £2k could buy you elsewhere in the bass amplifier market, it makes it harder to justify. Nonetheless, should my SVT and Fender 8X10 Neo ever going up in flames and I win the lottery, I'd happily replace it with a Venture V12 and a 4x10. Or possibly two 4x10 cabs if I win the Euromillions. IMG_6666.HEIC IMG_6688.heic IMG_6689 2.heic