Jackson Music Report

Yesterday I made it out to Jackson Music Centre on Grand Island (as promised last week). They had a huge selection of guitars, but not all that much in the bass department. They did have a Fender Jaguar bass. I had not seen that one in person before, so that was cool. All in all the bass selection was utterly dominated by Fender, with maybe 4 Korean-made Spectors, some Ibanez Soundgears, a couple of the newer Tobias basses, and maybe a couple Epiphones. Similarly the bass amp selection was nothing that I couldn't see Long & McQuade offering at the Bloor location.

I did manage to try out one cool pedal, the MXR M-80. I had seen these around a few places, but yesterday I finally got one out and put it through its paces. It actually came off as potentially a very useful pedal, in the right context. Certainly it has a range of very usable distortion tones, this is due, in no small part, to the fact that there is a blend knob. It's very easy, in my experience to lose the bass in the mix entirely without some kind of clean tone blended in.

Other than that, I learned that some stuff isn't appreciably cheaper on this side of the border. Strings, however, are a lot a cheaper in certain cases. They also had the ones I like, DR Sunbeams. So I suppose that it may be worth it to at least stock up on those down here.