Damn, but that's expensive!

It's always a bittersweet feeling when you sell some of your musical gear. Typically, I'm only selling stuff because I'm planning on buying new gear with the money I get, but even still... When I sold my Epiphone Sheraton last night I was sad. But that's only because the guitar I plan to replace it with (either an SG, Les Paul doublecut, or possibly a Strat) hasn't made it's way into my hands yet. And probably won't until I find the right deal, which could be a little while.

But on the topic of gear, I'm going through one of those phases where I'm thinking of changing a lot of my stuff up. Obviously the guitar, that's already in motion. But I'm also considering changing up my amp situation. I'm happy with my half stack, but I want to do something different with my combo. I have a Fender Hot Rod Deville 4x10, which while good, is frankly just too loud for what I want it for. I'd hope to use it for a home palying and recording amp, with the possibility of doing some small club gigging with it. However, it's so powerful that I can't even turn it past 1 on the volume at home. "Hey, great!" youu're maybe thinking. "Plenty of headroom." But I like to push the tubes by getting more of my gain from the volume rather than the gain knob. I typically think it sounds warmer, and breaks up better. And I can't do that with the Deville. So oddly enough I'm looking for something less powerful. Realistically, based on what I can currently afford and what I think sounds good, it would probably be something else in the Fender family. But yesterday I went to Boston Guitar Works in Brockton to try out some stuff they have there.

Boston Guitar Works is the premiere store in the area for hard to find, smaller company, boutique gear. In the gear world "boutique" = "expensive". And I finally got to play the amps I've been dying to try out: Bad Cat. I've heard nothing but great things about them, and now that I've played one, all I can say is: "Wow!"

Actually, that's not true. I can also say: "Holy shit!"

I tried a couple of them, but to give an example, one that I played was the Bad Cat Classic. It has a power switch, standby switch, and two knobs: Tone and Volume. And it sounded amazing. There's no gain on it, but once I threw on a Fulltone OCD gain pedal---which I'll probably be buying regardless of anything else, as it's the best sounding gain pedal I've tried, and I've tried a lot; that is, unless I can wait until the ZVEX Box of Rock pedals come out at the end of Spetember, because I hear they sound amazing, like a cranked Plexi, in which case I'd seriously consider that instead---it was pretty much damn near perfect. Compact, 20 watts, one 1x12 speaker, class A...this little amp only runs for about $1,500 new.

Ouch! Did I mention that Bad Cat is NOT cheap. That's one of the "lower end" models, too. The prices only go up from there.

There is one selling on Ebay right now that I'm watching with quite a bit of interest since it's only currently at about $525. Granted that's with about 4 days still elft on the auction, but I'll be keeping my eye on it.

Ahhh, new gear. I should really just concentrate on the guitar for now.
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By the way, in a bit of sad news. On my way to Boston Guitar Works, I passed by where Derringers used to be. You know what's there now? Condos. Yeah, there's a little bit of my personal rock and roll history definitely now gone forever.