You Get What You Need - If You Can Work Out What That Is

I'm pretty sure that Mick Jagger was not setting out an approach to purchasing equipment when he wrote the immortal lines

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes
You just might find
You get what you need

When I was thinking about buying a camera a couple of years ago, what I really wanted was a Fuji GFX 100. A medium-format monster, a snip at £7,000 for the body and £3,000 for a lens. Call me a killjoy, but with my skills and lifestyle, I just couldn't justify that. That's Holy Grail stuff. Also, the probability of me damaging or losing a £10,000 camera are much higher than that of damaging or losing a £500 camera. After watching many reviews and looking at the major camera makers' websites, I came up with this... I wanted

Fuji's simplest camera with inter-changeable lenses that is good enough so I can't blame the camera for a bad picture

That existed: it was the X-E4 that I still use now. And it's a nice bit of kit.

When it was time to trade in the Epiphone Les Paul Standard 50's, after thinking in terms of this and that and an SG, I realised that what I wanted was a

"7-lb Les Paul": two humbuckers and controls in parallel, meeting the selector switch, with a 24.5" scale length, for under £1,000

There is no such Les Paul, but there is the PRS McCarty 594 SE, which the guys at GuitarGuitar in Epsom had in stock the day I visited. It too is a nice bit of kit I now own.

Recently I thought that it might be nice, as well as time, to move up to a Real Valve Amp. Fender of course. (Really? There are other amp makers? Who knew?) What I wanted was

a Fender valve amp that can be played at bedroom volumes at the edge of break-up

which I knew to be ridiculous even as I thought about it. The 12W Princeton Reverb, the 5W VibroChamp, and never mind the 15W Blues Junior, are way too loud at natural break-up. However, I have mastered the art of getting snarly tones at around 70dB, so I don't need to rely on valve break-up. And I'm not going to be distracted by the Tonemasters and their power attenuators. Tonemasters sound almost like valve amps, but not quite. They are for pros who need to heft amps from gig to gig. Mine will be staying in one place. So the only choice is between the '65 and the '68 Princetons. The '68 has a more immediately appealing sound, but it's a little less well-defined than the '65, and I want that clean, clean sound.

So the '65 it is. GuitarGuitar do a 30-day return. What am I waiting for?

Around the same time, I wondered if I might to get a telephoto zoom for the X-E4. Like it or not, many of the good shots available in London do need to be picked out of the surrounding visual sludge by cropping or zooming. It happens that there is a very good third-party lens - the Tamron X-mount 17-70 - for the Fuji. If I were to get a telephoto zoom, and didn't want to pay Fuji prices, nor carry around the weight of solid-metal Fuji lenses, that would be the one. So I know what I need.

What am I waiting for?

I'm waiting for my inner Scrooge to stop telling me that with my appalling guitar skills, cack-handed photographic skills and warped eye for a picture, plus my unwillingness to actually go out and shoot pictures, I cannot "justify" the expense.

If I was a forty-year-old married man with a mortgage and two children needing private education, this might be a reasonable reservation.

But I'm not. I'm an older man on the last few laps. Possessing nice gear is one of the small pleasures of life, even if one doesn't use it as much or as well as a pro would. Heck, all of it can be sold on the second-hand market.

And I don't go on holidays. Now there's an expense I really can't justify.

If it ever happens, I'll let you know. And I'll try to get some culture under my belt to write about as well.