heh, going global!!!
Heres a story to read, happen sometime back, an interesting read into pedals not from consumer point of views.. And the goose in title, has nothing to do with da goose round here!
Disclaimer: i didnt write this, its all cut and paste from somewhere else. Person who wrote this, heh, those who knows, will know, those who are not sure, just read it as a story. Behind the pedals that we love to gas about, buy, stomp upon...
The Goose, the Middleman, the Idolmaker and Gomer Pyle.
Now that I look back on it all it becomes clear to me what I got myself in to. Basically two different cultures, outlooks, lifestyles, dreams - I don't know - whatever, collided years ago and it just took this long to play itself out. Two different streams came together, merged and, now, split apart again.
Meet Gomer
You can call me Gomer. For my part I was, I am and I will remain a guitar related electronics hobbyist. I built gear for my own needs and I built/rebuilt/refurbished the gear of other local players when they sought me out through word of mouth and I could fit it into my schedule. I did no advertising. My bench fee was zero. Nothing. I only charged for parts. Most of the work was on vintage amps which I just liked looking into, looking inside, which was enough to satisfy me and make it enjoyable. After so many Deluxe Reverbs or Bassman's I'd quit working on those and would just wait until something different came along; some other model needing work done and I'd do it; again just for parts cost and the opportunity to look inside at a piece of history. It wasn't a "biz", I already had a well paying job which I liked and I was good at. Audio electronics was a hobby and a self-directed study. I don't understand why it can't just be that anymore.
There are plenty here among us who have run through old amps or fixed broken pedals - the work, usually, is pretty simple. Get it up and running safely while leaving as much as the original as possible. This can be as simple as changing out the electrolytics. If you've got to do more extensive work you let the guy know what it is you need to do, what it's parts cost will be, get his go ahead and you do it. If it was a pedal and I couldn't find the schematic I drew it out myself. It it was gooped I ungooped it. When you're done you bag/box and label all the parts you've replaced and you give them back to the guy whether or not he knows what they do. You tell him to keep these parts because he'll never know what a buyer down the line might want when he goes to sell it, if he does. That's it for me. That's all it was ever meant to be. That's all I wanted to do. (For the record I have only asked for a schematic one time and I already owned the one I asked for... I wrote Doug Hammond several years back under the pretense of getting a schematic of a his. I already had the schematic but it was the only way I knew how to say hello. I wanted to meet him and get to know him and I'll be forever thankful that I did)
The Goose
I wandered into a local music store one year and talked to the amp tech there. (Rough estimate '97) A nice enough guy at the time. No big discovery. We had an honest talk about transformers and winding pickups as I recall. He was doing pretty much what I and several of my friends were doing except he was doing it as a "job". No mention of pedals/effects really except that he had done some work with a guy named Pedalman on modding 808s. Effects weren't really on the radar screen at that time. Nowhere near where they are now, at least. Mass internet use was just gathering steam and the earlier emphasis as I recall, or as far as I could tell, was on amplifiers. Kits were coming out which were cheap and cool. The amp tech was riding that wave as far as I could tell; slapping together amps from kit parts, relying on a healthy dose of TUT, and refurbing vintage amps. The "boutique" effects thing was hidden but nascent. The "pearl necklace" years. About the only info you could find effects-wise was through Anderton's book which, as good as it is, doesn't really dig too deeply into the arcane world of the electronic operations in each design.
I go on my way - the amp guy goes his. Years pass. (rough estimate '99) I eventually find my way, through the internet, to a strange collection of misfits who had spent years (decades for some) gathering and collecting bits and pieces of information on effects. They were sharing it, analyzing it, building new things around the information. It was fascinating, as such, to me. No more than that. It was just good reading. I didn't contribute to the dialogue and still rarely do; because I can't. It was just a good education in that you could patch together information from these guys and fill gaps you might have missed sleeping through a tech classroom or which a source like Anderton didn't cover. I learned a lot about the basic operations of effects from the members of that group. I still do. Many of them are still here. The amp guy in the meantime was still floundering at the music store when I visited again but this time there was more emphasis on effects. Nothing new again but in retrospect the timing seems more than just coincidental. Tweaking the basic OD. There was a lot of info about this particular OD becoming available and there was a movement on toward hacking it and building "companies" basically based on it. The "biz" was starting to jell. I shook my head then about it as much as I shake my head now about it. It was silly from the beginning and it's gotten even sillier. Grotesquely so. The "drama" wasn't there so much. Not nearly what it is now i.e. the pedal building soap opera which has become commonplace. I knew virtually nothing though about the emerging buyer/seller spam sites masquerading as "EFFECTS" discussions ala TGP. The little I knew was where to find the dweebs, the dorks, the geeks who were talking and teaching about effects/gear as as an electronic circuit in and of itself. I knew nothing of the emerging "tone for 50 bones" spam/shill game.
Cut ahead a couple of years. (rough estimate '01) I'm back in this same music store and I come to find out that the amp tech has been "discovered". He's apparently built some dynamic OD pedal and is taking the Japanese market by storm (not too hard to do I later found out). It's so successful that he's "designing" a pedal for more distortion; "mo' D" so I'm told. He's also got a never before heard boost pedal coming out. A "clean boost". All original so I'm told. He's building "killer" new amps too. A 20 and a 50 watter. All new designs so I'm told. Tweaked to perfection so I'm told. It was cool with me. I didn't figure he was tapping the same barrel everyone else was. I took it on good faith and his word that he was designing new gear, his designs, and wished the guy well even though now he was just a tad bit standoffish. Less accessible now, at least to me. I wasn't interested in buying anything. I was interested in talking about the gear. This he didn't have time for now, he didn't want to get into it. It was enough for me to be told that none of that really mattered anyway. This guy had had a life altering experience wherein he had "lost his high end hearing" altogether. This loss of a percept in one sense created an even more bountiful psychic instinct and insight in other ways which were inaccessible to those of us who were "only" interested in circuit anaysis. It was a "gift". He had it - I didn't, was the implication. I would never understand. It was difficult for him to explain to the uninitiated I suppose. The circuit didn't matter I was told, when you had this gift you could just feel your way around. I was assured that he knew all that "technical" stuff too but he didn't have to rely so much on it like most of us do. I was taken aback just a bit at how his disposition had changed.
Way more power than the legendary Vai fan
