Overwater Progress Standard Bolt-on 5

Progress Standard 5

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.

The body of this bass is White Ash with a figured European Walnut, and combined with the Pau Ferro it you get a very musical combination of deep and mellow yet fast precise in a super balanced way that in my opinion makes this a master build. The bass sings in such a natural way that it just keeps inspiring you to find new ways to play.

The pickups are the OW SB5 which of course is matched perfectly to the bass

The preamp is an OW 3 Band EQ, which is a bit different compared to a lot of other pre-amps.

The original pre-amp was designed by Dennis Cornell (Cornell Amplification) and Chris May 20 years ago, but has now been passed on to the legendary John East who has upgraded the pre-amp to perfection.

The preamp has a couple features that I really like. First off, the whole EQ stack works dynamically, which means when dialling one EQ it is affecting the rest of the EQ stack.

Another thing I appreciate is that the bass frequency changes from 100Hz to 40Hz when you are cutting bass. With this little feature, you can cut bass away without cutting the body of your tone away, and in my opinion this should be in every pre-amp out there.

The push/pull master volume lets you add in more brightness when you pull it, giving you a more sparkling sound!

Yeah, I know that I say this often, but I just want to play this bass as often as I can.

What a master built!