I – as usual – have struggled with not working today. I’m back at work proper tomorrow so it’s very reasonable for me to have a day off, and I’m officially off sick, recovering, but that doesn’t stop me from guilting myself. I’d actually planned to use today for working on the house trim but then remembered that I needed to get the tyres swapped on the car. That’s a 3 hour process (seemingly regardless of whether I book it in or not, once time I booked it in and it took 4 hours so…). Anyhow, after that I decided to go look at a guitar amp.
Because see, yesterday, I bought myself a bass guitar.
I can actually play a bit now, although I need something in front of me – I don’t know anything by heart apart from These Boots Are Made For Walking. So anyhow. I bought this guitar which needs some love. Quite a bit of love, really. It’s a 1960’s hollow body Norma – which is basically the equivalent of an Argos/Walmart guitar – they were made super cheaply in Japan when Japan was busy churning out the stuff that China now churns out. But they’re moderately uncommon now, and I thought it was a fun thing to have.
But see, the amp in that picture is just for show. It’s my guitar amp that I brought from the UK without twigging that it’s just a plain transformer in there, so it’d need a step-up transformer to work, or a new transformer. And guitar amps aren’t well suited to bass guitars.
Which leads to the mistakes. I went to see a guy who was selling an amp on craigslist – now had I remembered the advert when I got there I should have been more suspicious. He seemed like a nice enough guy and I’m going to choose to assume that his story was true (his wife’s died, he took up the bass while she was sick, but got a better amp). However. He was in the process of soldering a connector onto the speaker cable and explained that when he’d tried it today the speaker didn’t sound great and he’d switched it for a spare he had around.
And when we powered it up it crackled. And the power light flickered. And in the end I agreed a price for it as-is suspecting a dry joint somewhere.
And there was:
However, fixing it hasn’t fixed the amp. Which is annoying because now I have two projects instead of one. And this one is barely worth fixing at the price of its replacement.
*sigh*
