In the last week or so it’s become abundantly clear to me that I’m not going to be able to buy a new bass cabinet. I’ve been thinking about switching to guitar anyway. Not out of some misplaced sense of vanity, but out of necessity. Every band I’ve played with in Tampa Bay has needed a good lead guitar player (Catdaddy Pirates’ first guitar player excepted). I wouldn’t be thinking along these lines if I wasn’t convinced that I could do the job well.
What has me thinking about it now (other than the fact that Bad Hat Harry needs a lead guitar player) is that I’ve set my sights on some replacement speakers for my bass cabinet. They’re marked as being guitar/bass speakers, but I can’t imagine they’d have the bottom end that a proper bass speaker would. So… essentially, it seems like loading my speaker cabinet with these speakers would turn it into a guitar cabinet. I know we’re getting into semantics here, since you can get a fairly decent bass tone through the clean channel of a guitar amp. But it’s given me yet another good reason to consider making the final push toward taking over guitar chores.
The speakers in question are Jensen’s MOD10-50 model. I know the purists will howl about how Celestions are the only proper speaker of the modern guitarist, but let’s be realistic. If I could afford to replace the speakers in my cabinet with Celestions, I could afford a new bass cabinet. The Jensens are $40 each (Celestions are $125 and up). This is a no-brainer.
I won’t get into the semantics of switching to guitar. It’s possible I’ll never do it. After all, at least initially I’ll be using these speakers in a bass cabinet, playing them as a bass player, until I can replace all four speakers. And who knows? I might suck as a lead guitar player. There’s also the rather annoying necessity of finding a bass player for the band (when bass players seem to be a rarity in Tampa Bay). So… we’ll see. What will be will be. But these speakers are definitely pushing toward something that has seemed almost inevitable for some time now.
