My Pedalboard Is Having A Midlife Crisis
For my 65th birthday, I bought myself a new guitar pedal. As is often the case with things I buy these days, the impulse came from YouTube, where I often go to hide from the world that’s going on outside my music room.
Like many folks, I really don’t have a relationship with mass media any more. I’ve pretty much ceased all exposure to network news, sports—I went so far this past year as to skip almost all of the football season. I “watched” Bears and Bulls games on The Athletic app, through score updates and the Fan Chat. I don’t listen to Sports Radio anymore, which I did for many years, as a kind of ambient soundtrack.
Now I listen to podcasts and watch YouTube.
This is probably not healthy, so I’ve tried to supplement with reading books and playing guitar. Let the gods be merciful and make those two activities grow to an ever higher percentage of my waking hours! But no, I don’t picture myself ever giving up YouTube or podcasts.
Both of these “formats” are great at helping people connect with folks interested in the same shit they’re into — and both mediums, when done right, let individuals shine forth with the full wattage (high or low) of their personalities. I should also say that for me, the YT and Podcast input has also lead to many (many) books and an ever-increasing appetite for both reading and music making, so there’s a good effect there too, maybe?
Rabbit Prints…
(A note to non-guitar players: skim or just hang in here through these fine grained passages…I do hope to return to the bigger picture, sooner or later.)
One of the truly great guitar YouTubers is Cyberattack, a 100% Jersey guy who is both a gifted musician and a hilarious, self-deprecating person. I watch a lot of his stuff because he has cool ideas, sweet riffs, and does his own 90’s era computer game / cartoon adventure graphics to bring it all home. He did one of his many ranking videos — about all the Strymon Pedals he’s ever owned—and after seeing Steve Gerlach’s Outronaut use some of these pedals to raise the roof at Daly’s barn last year, I was in for the full magilla.
His “Utra Tier” pedal, the very top-of-the-pyramid Strymon, was the Irridium: the pedal that started the whole Amp-In-A-Pedal movement several years ago. He swore by it. Said that every single thing he’s ever recorded for YouTube has gone through it.
And in that moment, I knew I was going to maybe probably get an Irridium for my birthday.
A Window Opens
You see, I’ve had this really cool music room for a while now, and sometimes I go in it and make some noise. But as the birthday card I received from Ava this year describes, I have now crossed a certain threshold:
And one of the things a Great Old One can’t do anymore is play the electric guitar loud enough that neighbors can hear it. Just, not on the menu any more. But being a “Great” Old One, I also can’t really get off playing quietly enough that they can’t.
So, the big attraction of something like an Irridium was the idea of playing nice and loud again—but having it set up with headphones so no-one else can hear me. And thus, an intense month of further YouTube researches began, seeking out all the lore of the Amp-In-A-Pedal world. And oh my, what a world it has become!
The Simplifier DLX
I won’t take you through the entire Amp-In-A Box criteria and review odyssey: that’s not my Medium niche. (But if you want to PM me and talk about it, I am here for ya.) However, for my more general readership I just want to register the hilarious irony of a pedal called a “Simplifier” that looks like this:
In brief though: this thing is divine. The answer. And with all due respect to Cyberattack, it’s knocked the Irridium off the throne. The Simplifier DLX can be set up in a dizzying number of ways, and it replicates, with almost frightening accuracy, the tones of the three amps that gave us rock and roll as we know it today: Fender Deluxe; Vox AC30; and Marshall. It outputs in stereo, has a great (and switchable) reverb; and you can either have two amps switch between flavors, or play in parallel stereo mode…which is ridiculous but also awfully fun. That’s the DLX part, I guess—and DLX it is.
The upshot is that I can go absolutely bonkers with the guitar, it sounds robust and real, and nobody — not even the kitties, can hear it. Speaking of kitties — here’s the super-cute hand painted(!) image of our Trio that Elena gave me for my Birthday:
All Together Now
What’s even more fun for this Old One is that now other pedal-purchases from prior years have become relevant again. There is a kind of orchestration of capabilities that’s intoxicating. I have been disappearing into the guitar room multiple times a day, emerging hours later with a very cold cup of coffee, renewed callouses, aching hands, and very happy ears. It’s also possible my chakras have been reset.
However, I find myself at a crossroads, so to speak….
Okay, since this is turning into a photo essay, I’m going to just rerun the current pedal board image:
What you see above is a pedalboard having a mid-life crisis, as its owner retreats from the real world of rehearsal spaces, basements, and bars, into a pair of headphones and contemplation of his very-own navel. On the top, reading from right to left: we have a tuner, a nice Xotic Compressor Pedal, an RC Booster, and my beloved Supa Trem (accept no substitutes). These all hail from the era of live playing, where everything was pretty simple: along with a few others (rendered superfluous by the Simplifier) the board was all about volume, sustain, and a little razzle-dazzle with the tremolo. Mission: make a loud Telecaster sound good.
Get Steven C Lindstrom’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
But now, as I whither and gray, I’ve begun to give-in to what all the kids are doing these days (well, these decades): plugging in and letting the algorithms take over. The bottom row (again, right to left) begins with a loony tunes sound processor called a Microcosm; a configurable to a fartheewell Boss RC500 (Two Track) Looper; and a Digitech Timebender—advanced for it’s time and still 10x the delay pedal I really need.
But I want to say some more about the Microcosm, which I bought two years ago, and I’m finally starting to learn. When I posted on FB after buying this pedal, I wrote simply “Knew Knobs” with an accompanying picture. Alan (one of my pals from the old “playing together in a room” days) replied “Knoooooooo!”
I had to laugh then, and now must tip the cap at his sagacity. He knew what was at stake! A mutual friend of ours, Alex Abajian, was more enthusiastic: “Welcome to the Klub! My fave pedal…. Chase Bliss’s ‘Thermae into the MC and ‘Gertrude’s Yur Plasmologist’ 😉” If I were to summarize my advances learning this pedal, I might say that now I have a pretty good idea of what Alex was talking about.
But looking back at this older pedal post, I felt rather melancholy.
Songs for The Departed?
I constantly have thoughts these days, about how I might have done more to connect with several people who have left this particular world behind. Alex Abajian is definitely one of those folks: he died suddenly & unexpectedly just a few months after making the post referenced above. I also think of my old friend and band-mate Nick Rudd, especially when I’m reading books or listening to the Hermitix podcast, which he would have loved (a lot). I suppose I think of Nick consciously and unconsciously, whenever I’m playing guitar or plotting out few chords or lyrics. …And I often think of my mom and my dad, of course.
I want to dilate a bit on Alex here though, as his parting is certainly the most pedal-board relevant. To begin with, he was exactly right about the Chase Bliss Thermae, which was discontinued shortly after his post, and quickly became something of a holy grail. It’s secret sauce was some chip they no longer make — so now if you can find one, it’ll be worth gabillions. And the Thermae was evidently the little cartoon-cats on the cat’s pajamas when paired with the Microcosm, just like he said. (Well, sorta like he said anyway.)
Had I known he would be gone so soon I might have made bold to ask him over to show me the ropes with the new pedal, and thereby thrown a spark on some music-making kindling. Maybe??
I always wanted to play some music with him but I wasn’t sure he “thought of me that way.” I also selfishly day-dreamed about asking him for help with midi, back before AI took over that role.
For my part, I always thought of Alex as a musical titan: he’d made a couple superb records with Simon Rivers of the Bitter Springs under the name Pills By Post. (Hit the link to hear the great single pictured below.) Simon also played with Vic Godard and The Subway Sect, one of my favorite bands of ALL TIME, so by association, I was a bit over-awed.
What’s (at least mildly) ironic about this is that as I drift ever-more in Alex’s direction musically, and pedal-board-ishly, I am drifting at the same time decidedly in a direction of social withdrawal. Swimming along in this drift is a continued investment in a musical environment that doesn’t really need other people.
So, for now, I’ve become a solo artist. Something I have never been terribly good at.
I dream about this general theme rather often. There are a wide variety of venues and plots, but the basic thrust is that I’ve been (finally!) thrown out of my own band, which is kind of funny because it is essentially something I did to myself in real life. And as I sit here now, believe me: I accept it, I’m good with it!
But my unconscious seems never able to get enough angst. I think my unconscious liked having a band and a practice space. I don’t blame my unconscious but come onnnn dude. Give it a rest!!
It Only Takes One…
As Jack Black had it in School of Rock, it only takes one great show/song to save the world. And I do have a belief that all of this alone-time will ultimately bear fruit. What’s taking me so long is a desire to fuse the two worlds: precisely the ones represented by my evolving pedalboard.
Flow
What all the kids do now is plug in their Microcosm’s and Thermae’s and strum an A into an array of pedals, and bleep and bloop themselves unto nirvana. Or, if they have talent, they’ll fingerpick a Dm into the upside down. Watch as much of Mark Johnston’s Microcosm deep dive as you can stand, or anything on The Pedal Zone channel, and you’ll see two kings of the fingerpicked Dm and their emotional and gooey pedal love. I’m sure they both have records and I’m equally sure I would not like their music at all. Though I will consult both of them when I try to figure out which midi-controllable delay I’m going to buy to replace my trusty old Timebender.
Form
What all these kids lack is the narrative-armature I rely on whenever I’m listening-to, or especially, writing a song. Now, don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of songs I don’t know the lyrics for that I love and mumble along with confidently. But I can’t for the life of me create one of my own songs without knowing the lines. (This is also a constant feature in my angst-y music dreams: misplaced or lost lyric & chord charts — but the show must go on!)
I mean, all I have to say to readers of a certain age is: “Wake up Maggie I think I got something to say to you…” and you’ll all know exactly what I’m talking about. For me the words are the drill that asks for the next chord and vise versa.
Unlike Rod however, all my writing has been done with a guitar in my lap and a computer screen with a Word doc in front of me. Other than that, probably the same basic setup, and aims. Neither Rod nor I are bleep and bloop guys. Maybe one day I’ll write an opening line that good. Or 1/10th that good??
Hope springs eternal!
Tomorrow, Still Calling
A while back I posted a YouTube playlist called This Is Tomorrow Calling and wrote a little Medium piece about it (hit the link if you want to read it). It featured a lot of my favorite songs from the bands that occupy the overlapping rings of Alex Abajian’s interests and mine. For a variety of reasons, I’ve never made music that sounds like any of these bands, though I have always wanted to. This is the golden spike that will someday (soon I hope!) join the two tracks on my pedal board. My idea is to let the machines and the algorithms take over…just a little. Or, use them to set a beat that isn’t my default Americana limp. Then use them to create a new kind of song-armature. At least new for me!
But yeah, that’s all going to take some lyrics. And there’s no machine…
Well, there is I guess, but…fuck that.
So this next one’s for you Alex. And for you Nick. Thanks for your patience.
I swear it’s comin’ soon!
