Against Rabbit-Holing
I just read a moderately interesting article about a man’s relationship with his stepfather, hidden behind a piece about coffee with a clickbaity headline. I may have been missing the point of the article, but what I took away from it was this: pursue anything you love far enough and you lose your love of it; it becomes a chore, and eventually, perhaps hopefully, you backtrack until “not good enough” is actually good enough.
I love building pedals for friends but I love cooking for friends, too. I love that friends think of me when they see a pedalboard (even if, as is always the case, none of my creations feature on it), and when the Mountain Goats announce a tour.* I love that I had a hand in constructing a board for a musician playing in a major Broadway production (mentioning no names, but I’ll bet you a ten dollar bill it wins big at the Tonys, if you know what I mean...), but I also love to be able to get up early and ride my bike 30 miles around New York City. I love that I can make beer money from building, modifying and repairing pedals, but I’m also content (and relieved) to have a day job that removes the pressure of needing to make this pedal business pay rent.
Finally, I love that I can create a thing which satisfies an itch in me as a guitarist. The problem is that once you start doing A Thing in order to bypass convention, for reasons of dissatisfaction with the options available to you (no good restaurants? learn to cook for yourself!), protest against a perceived negative culture around That Thing (Starbucks or Nescafe your only convenient option for coffee? Get a French press!), or simply to have the satisfaction of having created A Thing which you could have easily obtained through other means, but which to you means much more that you created it yourself (”What’s one thing you want to do before you die?”
“Build a house!”
“Paint a self-portrait!”)...
Well, then, you’re rolling around the edge of a rabbit hole like a ball skirting the rim of the hoop in the last second of an NBA playoff trouncing -- you’ve already won, but if you make this hoop, you secure your place in history. Look, I may not get sports metaphors, but nobody remembers Michael Jordan for his baseball career, right?
The more you do a thing, the more the pursuit of perfection in that thing becomes the only focus. Which is not a bad thing in itself. But where do you get off?
Most overdrive or fuzz pedals are “good enough”. A Boss SD-1 was good enough for Kurt. There’s as much discussion around different iterations of the Big Muff as there is around who was the best James Bond (Connery is the classic, Dalton is underrated, Brosnan made one of the best films but was otherwise weak). But when you’re taking into account the guitar you’re using, your own playing style, the amp, the rest of the effects chain, the PA system/studio environment, and the relative competence of the sound engineer, a “Civil War” vs a “Green Russian” doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to the audience. And there’s an argument to be made for whether you create music for yourself or for an audience, but that’s one for another day.
The pursuit of perfection itself is noble, and impossible. The greatest warrior is not the one with the sharpest sword. The greatest chef is not the one with the hottest oven or the finest ingredients. The greatest band is not the one with the fastest guitar player, or the one with the most pristine tone, or the one with a chord sequence unheard-of prior to the creation of that song. The greatest pedal is not the one with the smoothest, most amp-like saturation, or the most high fidelity tone, or the most faithful replication of a classic tape echo. The greatest pedal is the right one for the job, and if you want to sit down and talk about it, maybe I will learn exactly what job you want it for, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll find that you can’t always get what you want, but you just might find... well, I forget the rest of the song.
Don’t buy the hype. Buy Peregrine Effects.
*admittedly the distance between my pedal-work and the Mountain Goats is not quite as wide as the point I’m trying to make in this post, but just go along with me, here, OK?
