I've always loved effects pedals. When I was 15 years old and just starting to play live, I put together a small board with four or five BOSS and MXR pedals. It was probably the most fun I've ever had with pedals because I had the benefit of ignorance. I had no internet forums telling me what was hot and what was not. I had no way of correlating the music I loved to the pedals that were used to create it.
The first time I ever experienced "gear envy" was whilst playing at a small festival a few years ago. It was the largest show that I had done/would do with that band and we were top of the bill. One of the other bands who were playing were sound-checking as we arrived and because I had always had a healthy fascination with tech stuff I headed over to have a snoop about and to suss out the stage, etc. We had played with this band a number of times before; a fairly typical indie band, all good musicians but nothing special. All talk and no trousers, as they say. However, just recently they had been picked up by a small label and were just starting to make a name for themselves off the back of the success of bands such as The Pigeon Detectives and Arctic Monkeys. "All of this is what the point is not" (see what I did there?), they hadn't improved much since the last time we'd seen them except that they were sporting brand new pea-coats and winkle pickers that they had bought to celebrate their signing. That, and the lead guitarist's pedal-board. It looked like something out of Alien, all twinkling LEDs and a sea of cables weaving in and out of pedals like black spaghetti. I was in awe.
This experience has always stuck with me, the mix of wonderment, envy, deflation and unworthiness. The truth is, they sounded exactly the same as they had done before, in fact I don't think I saw him step on a single pedal during their set. But from that moment on, I always felt an overwhelming feeling of dread as I would unveil my modest, five pedal set-up at gigs.
As I've grown older and (hopefully) wiser, music has become an even more prominent force in my life, but this fascination with pedals has never gone away. I've found a guitar and amplifier set-up that I love and that don't get in the way of my music but I've yet to find a pedal set-up that I am content with. I think this comes down to pedals being cheaper and seemingly more disposable but getting in the cycle of buying and flipping pedals hinders my creativity.
I guess this is the point I'm trying to get across; I feel that collecting pedals and making music are counter-intuitive. I think of the two things as separate passions in my life and never the twain should meet.
I have an obsessive and collective personality and this manifests itself in many ways with gear. I feel like I have to have what my favourite artists have or that I must use the most expensive and therefore the best as though I would be selling myself short as a musician if I don't. I think everybody has these insecurities to some degree and it's this that music equipment makes and dealers prey upon. This is nothing new of course, I'm not so naive as to think that musicians are the only victims of commercialism and consumerism but I do think that when anchored to something like art and creativity, capitalising on these insecurities can be damaging.
I am an artist and I try so hard to be true to myself and my own ideologies but I am also a slave to music equipment and its marketing. That's as honest as I can be.
I feel, as I imagine many other people do, this enormous pressure to have an obnoxiously big pedal-board with all the latest and greatest "must have" stomp-boxes and yet, I'm happiest when I'm not worried about signal flow and buffer placement, cable capacitance and impedance matching. It all comes down to my obsessiveness at the end of the day, everything has to be perfect or I can't have peace of mind. Some nights I lay awake at night, worrying about my drive section or the fact that my beloved Memory Man "pops" when I switch it on or off and frankly, life's too short.
That's it basically, sorry for rambling but maybe there's somebody out there reading this who feels the same and is consoled by the fact that they're not alone. We just need to keep telling ourselves this:
"I don't need a Klon, I don't need a Klon, I don't need a Klon, I don't need a Klon."
