Well, you get what you pay for...

Unless you're paying for a copy of "Absolute Beginners Bass Guitar - Omnibus Edition", in which case you'll have paid for it on the fourteenth of june, and still not received it (as of today, the 8th of July) because it's still currently on order with music sales, also known as "we're still waiting for it, so you can too"*. This from the same company that was friendly and helpful with my tuner being out of stock. I guess the "friendly and helpful" bucket has run dry.

But today's moan isn't about those guys, it's about my guitar stand, which, chosen in a "I don't know what things cost/this's cheaper than I thought it would be" way, chose yesterday to spontaneously break.

Yep, you get what you pay for, and I suppose it should have come as no surprise to me that the neck support on the stand was held to its retaining bolt by a pair of tiny and badly-done spot welds. A real Friday Afternoon piece of work right here.
The seller, to their credit was pretty apologetic (not that they really needed to be because they're not responsible for the crappy welds), and say they're going to fire off a refund, which at the minute, I have yet to receive. So I started a thread on the bass forum, as well as looking at the local music retailer's selection of stands, which (being made by reputable companies that specialise in making guitar stands) look well finished, reassuringly sturdy, and cost about six times what I paid for mine. Expensive? No, that's just what these things cost, it turns out.
So I'm looking at another tripod style-stand. This time, I'm after a self-locking one, so it secures the bass as well as holds it off the floor. That should set me back about £30 and I think it'll be money well spent.

So there we go.

*In fairness, I should point out that I didn't order the book through Amazon, their link was just the first one that came up. That said, I do try to avoid buying things from Amazon where possible.

Finally, I can hear myself

Well, another cool gadget turned up a few days ago.
Having learned early on that you can't just plug earphones into a bass and expect to hear yourself playing, I resigned myself to having to wait for an amp, which is still several weeks away from being ordered. Eventually though my finances took a small detour, as I took some money out of the "saving for the amp" tin and put it into the "I need to be able to hear myself play" tin. And only a couple of days later, the nice delivery woman turned up with something cool and shiny for me to enjoy playing with.

Having been told they were "good" by the folks on the fine bass forum that I seem to be spending a lot of time on recently, I went and grabbed myself a Zoom B1Xon. This little gadget has a whole host of useful features including a metronome, a tuner, and (importantly) a headphone out. It also has 8 banks of patches all of which are customisable, so I can change the sound of the bass to within an inch of its life, and to top it all off, there's drum accompaniment in there as well, so if I just feel like practicing along to a digitised drumbeat, I can do that too.

I'm still waiting for my skillbook to turn up, and I've opened a seperate support ticket with the retailer - still waiting for them to get back to me though, which is a bit of a pain.
Following lessons on youtube is pretty cool and all, but there isn't really anyone offering a full variety of free and comprehensive tuition, which is kinda why I ordered the skillbook in the first place.

Oh well, I hope it turns up soon.

Finally, as a humorous aside, I went searching for a guitar case a couple of days ago so I could keep the bass safe if I wanted to take it out of the house. I found one I liked the look of, and scrolling through the specifications, I had to giggle at some of the stats.

That's a heavy guitar case! Obviously it's just a typo, but it made me giggle all the same.