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.