Ashdown Bass Drive Plus - £45 posted £45 Guiseley

[Schlippy]

Ashdown Bass Drive Plus for sale, it's obviously been in the wars but these behemoth pedals are built like literal tanks and it's no worse the wear for it functionally, despite missing its insignia and the battery compartment cover.

 

 

This is a lovely, warm, low(ish) gain true bypass overdrive with a tube-y character to its sound. No clean blend, but it does allow you to saturate the high and low ends of the signal separately, along with a bias control to affect the overall tone of the output. Input gain and output volume dials complete the controls. With the input gain and both drives fully cranked you're venturing into mid-gain territory but a B3K this is not, it's a relatively subtle low gain drive for the most part.

 

Only getting shot because of the size and weight of the thing; it weighs a full kilogram and realistically I'm not going to give up the amount of board space it requires (roughly a six inch square footprint) for a low-to-mid gain drive that I have very little practical use for. Not gonna lie tho, I'll miss it when it's gone, there's something really aesthetically pleasing about these daft monster bricks that Ashdown put out, silly backlit input gain meter, chonky rollbars and all.

 

Here's one of the only YouTube demos I could find where you can actually hear the thing, they appear to be using an active bass running into the pedal fully cranked so bear that in mind, it doesn't sound this full-on with a passive bass. WARNING: contains Rob "ugly-ass cheapo 6-string" Chapman, so if your tolerance for smug, self-satisfied gurning is low I'd give this one a miss. Review starts at 2:20:

 

 

 

 

 

 

No box, obvs. 45 notes posted.

 

...and just for completeness sake, here's a pic off eBay of a complete one; not my picture but you can see what's missing on the bottom, it's just the metal from the aperture offset by a few millimetres and held in place by a screw:

 

[paul_5]

Incredible pedals. I sold mine for the same reason as you - it was just too big for my board. GREAT for keeping in the studio though.