If you’re anything like me and my circle of friends, middle-age saw you rediscover your guitar or bass during the various Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021.
You might have dusted off that old Squier Stratocaster that had been sat lonely in your garage or loft, and pulled out an even more unloved black tolex practice amp. You’re enjoying yourself, but your Significant Other and children are enjoying it all a little less. Especially that annoying little black tolex cube that you now keep in the spare room/office/lounge. It’s fugly, it doesn’t co-ordinate with your spouse’s carefully-thought-out interior design choices and they have to laughingly come up with excuses as to why it’s out in the open to their book club. Let’s face it, it’s a pretty naff amp too.
So I used Derelict’s prime directive (“upcycle, upcycle, upcycle”) to develop the Derelict SFA-5 (that’s “Spouse Friendly Amp”). I take stylishly timeless old 50s,60s and 70s radios and gut them, installing instead the beating heart of a low wattage valve amp (either the Marshall Origin 5-watt, or the Fender Bassbreaker 007 7-watt) , combining it with a Celestion Original Eight 1×8” speaker or Celestion G10 Greenback 1×10” speaker (depending on the size of the original radio).
So now you’ve got something that can sit on the sideboard and not look out of place with your partner’s Nordic Grey theme (you can even order them in custom colours), and they can have a story ready to deliver over the next Chardonnay-soaked evening that it’s actually a venerated heirloom from Aunt Mavis’ will that you couldn’t bear to be parted with.
But then you can plug in, and let rip with all that Marshall-y, or Fender-y loud loud richness.
