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MIKE: Hi. This is Mike with Ashdown Engineering. This year, at the Summer NAMM Show, we're rolling out a couple of new and interesting products. First, we have the Superfly programmable bass amp, 500 watts in small package weighing in at 15 pounds with ultimate portability. You have a handle built into the amp integrated here. You can also attach and it ships with shoulder straps that mount on the side as well as rack mounting brackets.

Also this year, we're introducing the Ashdown effects pedals which are currently shipping as well as the Superfly. Here we have the Ashdown Subharmonic. [MIKE PLAYS BASS THROUGH ASHDOWN SUPERFLY] This is the amp straight up, no octave or harmonic yet.

The Superfly, like we said, is programmable so you can scroll through patches. That's kind of as brighter sound with a more old school [MIKE PLAYS BASS THROUGH ASHDOWN SUPERFLY WITH ANOTHER PRESET], and when you thrown your octaver on, you can get some really great dance and dubby and reggae kinds of sounds [MIKE PLAYS BASS THROUGH ASHDOWN SUPERFLY AND SUBHARMONIC].

From the front panel of your Superfly, you have access to a 7-band graphic equalizer, and you also have access to your compression ratio adjustments. Superfly also has a matrix editor software available from the Ashdown website which is AshdownMusic.Com. From that software, you also have access to all of your other compression parameters, and you can also operate the equalizer in a full parametric mode.

Just to give you an idea of some of the range of sound that we have on Superfly though, I'm going to go through a couple of presets for you.

First here, we have kind of a little darker, more of an old-school, good for like old R&B type of stuff, you know.

[MIKE PLAYS BASS THROUGH SUPERFLY WITH OLD R&B PRESET]

Then 'well go to a brighter, more modern sound, more suitable for rock, funk.

[MIKE PLAYS BASS THROUGH ASHDOWN SUPERFLY WITH BRIGHTER PRESET]

Superfly has 99 presets, the first 20 come from the factory. From there, you can sculpt them however you wish and then send to anywhere that you would like to on your preset bank. So, we'll modifyn this sound a little bit and then we'll move it. Maybe you want a little more mid range out of your bass.

[MIKE MODIFIES PRESET ON SUPERFLY] Oops. Alright, it's sort of like that. T's got a more little sound to it, so I'm going to save that. Right now it's patch 91. When it's stored, it flashes and then it asks you where you would like to save it, so from there we'll scroll down our presets, we'll store that as patch 80, so now patch 80 is saved. This has a couple of benefits: You can save sounds that you like, you just have them available, but also if you're in an intensive pro performing environment, you have a sound that you use from song to song, you use the different song, say the bridge or the chorus of the song, you can save them in groups. So like for song 1 of your set, patches 1 through 5 are the sounds that you use, but patch 1 is also a sound that you want to use on song 2; you can make that patch number 6 and then whatever goes after that within that song would be patch number 7. So you have ultimate flexibility in a lightweight package. It is foot controllable via MIDI, and as I said earlier, with the software you can access the Superfly via USB.