Overwater Scott Devine Model

J Series Scott Devine Model

Founder of Overwater Basses, Chris May has been working closely with session and freelance bass players for over four decades in order to create basses that perfectly suit the needs of the high performing gigging musicians out there.

Overwater Basses began in a tiny basement located on the famous music street, Denmark Street in London. But the superb quality of the instruments quickly saw them outgrow their humble beginnings.

One of the reason for Overwater’s ever-growing popularity is the fact that they treat the basses as an acoustic instrument first and foremost. Hence the basses are born with a super organic and natural sound that is really easy to work with before you even plug them into an amp.

Scott Devine of Scott’s Bass Lessons has a long history with Overwater Basses. Starting out as an intern making bad coffee there, he quickly worked his way up to building the actual basses. But Scott’s undeniable talent and love for playing the bass instead of building them was too strong. This saw him break out on his own and found Scotts Bass Lessons, which has grown into a massive online success. But as you can see, Scott’s and Overwater’s special bond was never broken, which has resulted in Scott’s own signature Overwater bass.

The Scott Devine J series is a 4 string 33” short scale bass which sports an incredibly full and rich tone. It actually caught me by surprise how well this bass performs, and I have a feeling that Chris May’s work does that to a lot of people!

The body wood is swamp ash and the fingerboard is birdseye maple, which is a perfect combination for a fast and funky bass.

The super tight maple neck and string through construction makes sure that you get that super punchy and pristine sound that this bass delivers.

The string spacing is 16.5 mm which by normal standards is quite narrow, but this supports Scott’s own playing philosophy, which relies on economy of movement.

The pick-ups are Overwater own OW 4 ‘Noiseless’ J/J 4, which are fully shielded internally. They are technically ‘single coils’ – but they use a separate ‘ghost coil’ wired in parallel that cancels hum and kills the noise without changing the sound of the pick-up. Such a clever design!

The pre-amp is also Overwater’s own OW flat response Buffer Pre-amp with passive EQ.

The idea behind this design is that on normal passive bass pre-amps you have a loss of signal (especially the high frequencies) from the bass to the amp. Even if it’s just through a standard 3 meter cable, you can easily hear it. Therefor Chris and Scott put a buffer in the preamp to ensure that there is no signal loss at all.

The EQ is passive, so the control layout is Master volume, Pickup blend and Passive tone. So a very classic setup with a modern twist.