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Dear Bass-Bash buddies, I'm sorry to start your New Year with unwelcome news, but I'm sad to announce that the 2025 Bash was the last one that we'll be doing. As you know, our Bashes have always been massive value-for-money, largely because Mrs. Scrumpy and I were able to hire our wonderful hall at a much-reduced rate. For various reasons, we have both recently retired as Trustees, meaning that the cost of hiring the hall this year would be the full commercial rate of £232! Thank you all for making this such a joyous event over the years. If anyone else decides to continue with a S-W Bash, you can be sure I'll be there 🙂 Here's wishing you all the very best for 2026 and beyond! Mike, Gabrielle & The Scrumpettes.

So, I bought Kev's Squeezer, and it's great! Not quite as difficult to use as I had heard, I was expecting far far worse. So far I've factory reset it and just been tweaking existing standard patches, learning the menus etc. Theres a lot of silly unusable demo sounds (why do synth pedal makers do this?!? It seems like only MXR bothered to focus solely on usable bass synth sounds, not just silly "look what I can do" sounds.) There's a few presets like Double Chin that can be tweaked to be something quite useable, but unfortunately there's only like 5 sounds that are worth using. I plan to download some of the sounds from the cgraham site which has a bunch of simple useable sample sounds etc, but I need an SD card reader. My main takeaway from using this for a few days is how much I love the Future Impact. Way better tracking, way easier to dial simple usable sounds on the fly, and has a global master volume!!! Pretty annoying having to turn down the volume on single patches, or having to enable 'all params' via the Squeezers menu just to turn down the clean blend volume on any patches - why are the Paul Turner patches so loud for example lmao? The clean blend is boosted so much. Volume jumps across default patches is a problem in general, tbh. I have spent years making lots of very useable/recognisable synth sounds on the Future Impact (with 99 patches, that comes with even more useless filler than the Squeezer...), so I'm sure in time I'll get the Squeezer to a more useable state but for now, it's a lot of squelchy fun! (Quick photo of my board last night, currently switching the Squeezer in/out for The Pill side chain compressor)

I saw Johnny Dibble reviewing the HZ on YouTube. I asked him what he thought was best out of that and the cort space 5 He said that the feel of the Cort was better feel wise ,but the sound of the HZ was better than the Cort. It’s great that headless basses are becoming more popular at last . However it does seem that there doesn’t seem to be one that covers everything up to the £1,500 mark. I stand to be corrected of course ,but it seems that people are not happy with the Ibanez EHB pickups ,the pick guards of the Hils or the pickups on the space 5 etc The quality control of all those basses seem to be criticised too . Maybe with persistence from those companies and others something really good may emerge within the next couple of years .

Cromwell - Reverend Bizarre

https://www.guitarguitar.co.uk/product/250930448791008--fender-made-in-japan-traditional-late-60s-jazz-bass-3-colour-su

Hmm not sure the Chelsea clientele would agree...

Do Fender still make basses in Japan? If not, they should so we can have better quality than US instruments for lower prices

All excellent points! The EBS and Orange blocks both do the breakup with completely different character so it'd be great if they re-visited Peggy! Struggle to work out why they made the new Mesa blocks seperate clean and drive blocks instead of 1 block like the original amp. I spent a good while with mine last night and started to get my "I'm seeing digital so I'm hearing digital" head on - So I pulled out the old board with a Tonehammer Pre on it for comparison, thinking I'd hear/feel something different and it'd be the death of the Anagram... didn't quite work out that way. There was little to no difference in response between the Anagram and Tonehammer (this was using the Super Cali amp block without cab block), I think the Anagram may be the closest to analogue feeling I've come across for base clean tones! What a belter of a unit this is!

Now we have the singer in place we are refining the early set list, chucking out some of the male vocal songs and putting on ice some others. It's great having a confident singer who knows their range and just gets what the band is all about. She's given us all homework and we will have some cracking songs for the next rehearsal. The only thing we are struggling with is song structures and fade-out endings, but more practice will get us there. Feeling really good about this band, just eager to get gig-ready!!

I found that on guitar, I prefer to get the sound/gain from lower wound pickups cranked more, rather than higher wound cranked less. Gibson SG for example, I prefer the 490T pickups to the 498T, just sounds better to me.

Another ex-user here. I've had One10 x2 stack, a Super Twin, then One10T + One10 stack. Enjoyed them all, but I've gone back to my first light weight love: Mark Bass. My first actual love was a pair of Marshall VBC412 cabs with separate big iron Hartke and Ashdown heads. I am never lifting all that again! It might not even suit me these days as my musical tastes have changed a lot. It's been about 18 months since I quit my last band and if I ever look for another I'd be perfectly happy to swap to IEM and no backline, but the last band was big band jazz without any PA support - piano, bass, guitar all had their own amps - so if I did that again I'd still need an amp. The brass and reeds are loud enough without any PA in the venues were were doing.

A fender Mexican production jazz bass V based on the Roscoe beck, with the Same pickup configuration, asymmetric neck. Jonny

Website is terrible and it doesn't look auspicious for bass given the GUITAR! (and bass) show promotion.

Land rover fans would.