Vox Pathfinder Amps

I was thinking recently that surely running around in South America is an animal called an Illo. After all if there is an Armoured Illo there must be one without armour, otherwise how could you tell the difference? Well one is definitely armoured so the other one must not be. And thus it is with the Vox Pathfinder Amp. There are at least two, the ordinary Guitar amp and the Bass Guitar amp. The problem is they’re superficially identical.

They even have the same number of knobs and sockets. They sound slightly different and are designed for the different guitars. While you can plug an ordinary guitar into a bass amp it’s always considered to be bad form to plug a Bass into a guitar amp. I was always told it’s because the lower bass frequencies don’t do the guitar amp speakers any good. I don’t know if that’s true, I’m not an acoustic engineer.

At 38x14x17cm they don’t take up a massive amount of space and make great practice amps.

The top of the box has 2 sockets at either end so you input at one end, tailor the sound to what you want, and it comes out the other end from the headphones/lineout socket. They’re both 4,5mm so you might need an mono to stereo to 3.5mm adapter for headphones. If your headphones have 4.5mm and are mono then you won’t need adapters. Obviously.

Start with a knob marked ‘Drive’ then there’s a push button marked ‘Bright’ and knobs labelled Treble, Bass and Volume. None of these go all the way up to 11, they actually stop at 10! But then it’s only a practice amp so that should be OK, yes? I mean, you do have neighbours don’t you? But then, if you don’t have neighbours you probably won’t need a practice amp and can just plug in to your stage amp.

You can take this from a decent bright enough sound to play some funk or dial the treble down to something almost exactly unlike an acoustic bass if you’re playing a bass guitar, with the obvious caveat; unless you’re using an acoustic bass.

Value for money? At the time of writing you’ll pay around £87 to £99 (bass) for a 10W amp where you probably won’t, if you’re just doing this in your bedroom or at home, crank it up beyond 4. Or you could go for 40W competitors that’ll set you back £230, and not get beyond 2 before you get people banging on your door or walls screaming at you to turn the noise down, and you are a considerate people person aren’t you?