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Time to settle down
G is for Guitar and “Get a life”
Many of you will know that I am a keen musician. I blame this partly on my parents, who insisted on taking me to a brass band concert before I was even born. I didn’t stand a chance. Church helps too, there’s always music there. And so it was that I started taking up musical instruments left right and centre, starting with the piano, moving on to cello, and not stopping thereafter. The list isn’t exactly endless, but it’s fairly sizeable. The main problem with this, though, is being able to afford the instruments themselves, which don’t come cheap, especially if you want something decent. So for many years I have had to get by without certain things, in some cases just the accessories, but in some cases the instruments themselves. I’ve never owned a saxophone, for instance, much as I’d love to.
My first bass guitar was a pink (probably used to be red, but faded in the sun) Squier with a warped neck, which made playing anything but open strings uncomfortable and bone-jarringly out of tune. Still, for £100 it wasn’t bad, considering it came with a whopping 80 watt amp. The bass was replaced several years ago, thankfully, with a wood body Aria (I’d give the actual model, but since it’s a “Research and Development” model I think it’s more of a one-off, so comparing it to the mass-produced model that resulted from it might not actually be particularly useful). The Aria is a dream to play, and has a lovely warm tone to it. The amp, however, was always pretty ropey, so it wasn’t a huge tragedy when it stopped working. It was something electric, I know that much, and it just played a very loud humming noise while it was turned on. So I left it turned off, gathering dust in the garage. Until just before we moved, when I took it to the dump. Sad, but somehow very therapeutic at the same time.
