Post by Pathein.Raindrop.Moe on Dec 10, 2007 17:10:30 GMT 7
man, this article is long, but very interesting. He is Clay jones..
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.
OK, then. At least he might be some help to me I thought. I came back about a week later to get some advice about reducing the carrier noise I was getting with an effect I was trying to finish. The guts were sprawled out inside a piece of Tupperware. Not pretty but it was enough to get the effect from point A to point B, plug it in and sample it for troubleshooting purposes. I met the newly emerging guru again that day figuring, in good faith, "Hey, this guy knows something I don't. He's a successful effects builder who might be able to help me with this." The look on his face was classic. He had no idea what I was asking yet his eyebrow arched, his neck stiffened and a smirk came over his face. "You don't need that" he said, "that's a waste of time. Hold on a second…" and he left the room only to come back with a strangely painted pedal. Glossy and swirly it was. He held it up in front of me and informed me that this is what I needed. His OD pedal. I'd better get it now though because he was going to have to raise the price. A Japanese rock guitar hero had picked up on it and they were moving like the proverbial hotcakes. He was big league now and I might not get my chance again for an incredible deal. $265 if I recall correctly. He was now a Goose who's eggs were golden. That was the point where I knew this guy was full of baloney. He knew that I felt that way too; I told him right there. I left the store.
I came to find out that this builder's success reaped a windfall for the music store owner, Mr. Middleman. The pedals were built by the builder and sold through the store. Typical arrangement I suppose. The store owner had a lot riding on the deal, his cut, and the hype was heaped on. The pedal/amp builder brought in a cabinet maker who saw the opportunities ahead for himself if he could just hold on to this Goose with the golden eggs too. This Goose was going places. The push was apparently on by these guys to frequent the emerging spam/shill sites to beef up the American side of the market using the internet as the market place. The Goose's pedal was on a spamsite roll.
Move ahead again. (Around '03) Trouble in paradise. The Goose decided his cut wasn't big enough. He cleared out of the store and moved his amp shop to his newly bought home. (It was the house with the new Benz in the driveway, the Goose reminded me later). He'd decided to fill direct orders himself and just feed in a handful of gear to Mr. Middleman. Profits slowed, target sales weren't being met, the Goose proved to be quick to to cash a check yet slow to make a delivery. Mr. Middleman and the cabinet builder became very disgruntled. Very. I had no idea at the time that all this had transpired. It only became known to me later that when I stepped through the doors of that music store again in '03 that I had fallen down the rabbit hole.
As I walked into the store that day I was met with some rather sad faces. Mr. Middleman and the cabinet builder were conferencing at the counter as I had my usual look around. The Goose was no longer there. His bench fee had gone up, way up; his other work was so much more important that amps needing work were starting to pile up in the corner. Orders for the Goose's pedal, the orders which came through the store and which mattered to Mr. Middleman were not being met. The Goose had taken a lot of money and was in pretty heavy arrears. The cabinet builder hadn't been paid for his work. Life was a mess for these guys. The Goose was slipping away. Money was slipping through their fingers. There was something even worse, it seemed, at play for these two miserable men which I only recognized later. The Goose was the "Player". The one with clout. The one who mattered. Without the Goose, clawing to (what was in their minds) "the top" would be difficult if not impossible.
When I strolled up and said "I can take a look at those amps in the corner if you want and see if there's anything I can do with them" I had no idea what was playing itself out behind this scene. I just wanted to look at the amps. One was an Ampeg Revrocket as I recall and it seemed interesting. There may have been a Blues Deville too. The response I got was was a somewhat lukewarm but slightly needy "Sure Gomer. You work on amps?". "Yes, when I want to", I said. This conversation led us into a back room where I was introduced to the Goose's $2000 (at that time) 20 watter. This was one of the Goose's masterpieces I was told. It looked immediately familiar to me. Silkscreened Weber Chassis, chicken head knobs in an easily identifiable config, Fender glow light, sitting in a tweed repro cab built by the cabinet maker. "Can I look in it?", I asked and I was allowed. What I saw sort of sat me down hard. It was a stock, and I mean bone stock 5E3 except that it had been modded to take 6L6s. The tag board and the parts layout were right off that ancient Fender layout sheet. When I looked up at Mr. Middleman and the cab builder I realized they didn't have a clue and that no one, as far as I could tell, even knew or cared just exactly what it was they were selling or buying. It was all steeped in mystery. This stock Tweed Deluxe was the Goose's Masterpiece. It was magic to these men. And they sold it as such. Unfathomable magic.
I looked long and hard at that thing before me and then it dawned on me. I stood up and asked "Do you have one of those OD pedals here? Can I look at it too?". Timing was everything with this. Now I'm sure that if the Goose hadn't taken his marbles home to play his own game with himself leaving these two holding debt none of this would have happened. Ties had been cut and these guys were left hanging. Out comes the glossy, swirly pedal. It took, literally, one minute and I knew what it was. "Shazam Sergeant Carter, are you kidding me? Do you know what this is?", I asked (sort of). And of course they didn't believe it and more to the point, they really didn't care. What was a surprise and somewhat of a shock to me was irrelevant to them. It's a reaction/response I've come to know well in the last four years. Two worlds colliding.
Gomer, the new Goose?
Mr. Middleman lost interest and drifted back into his business worries. Losing the Goose really had an impact on him. He strayed from the path of this story until some time later. The cabinet builder, on the other hand, had a different response. Not so much dealing with what was or what wasn't this or that or the other. He didn't care about that. In the end, he never would. He wanted to know specifically if I could replicate the Goose's $2000 masterpiece amp. Cheaper of course. He wanted one but the Goose wouldn't cut him a deal even though they had been business partners and friends. Business is Business, so the saying goes.
I built the amp. It was a piece of cake. $450 as I recall, slightly modded (how, I don't remember) and it worked great. It was every bit as good as the Goose's. How could it not be? It was a 5E3. This came as a jaw dropping revelation to the cabinet maker. He asked for 4 more at roughly the same price but with different mods, variations on the theme. I thought we had become friends so I considered it and did it. It was fun for me. I enjoyed that build. I felt like I had found a decent friend who shared a gear interest too. We had something in common. I made it clear that I was pretty much just a one-off wonder and that I liked to move around the gear field. There were just too many different areas that I wanted to cover electronics wise not even necessarily guitar related. I was rebuilding a Toyota MR-2 with a friend at the time and needed to spend time on that too. Four more 5E3 amps were built for him, all as good as the Goose's for a third of the price each. Again, he was astonished and again I said something to the effect of "dude, relax... it's just a 5E3". Then he brought me amps to fix. Bassman's, Supers; vintage classics and a bunch of Public Address conversions. Again, he was astonished. How could this be? he wondered. I was just some dude hobbying in my garage. I was a "nobody" in his mind. He had hung around the Goose too long. He had discovered gear shill sites and been sucked into the mythologies. His mind had been poisoned by spammer hype but he didn't see it as spam. He saw it as Truth. These guys being praised and fawned over had something special. He wanted to be considered something special too. He wanted the praise and accolades. He wanted that special place at the table of hype. That is what leads to the cash. The long-term hard cash flow. That coveted place at the table is what's needed first. Everything else will follow in due time. He longed for it. This is when the light bulb came on for the cabinet builder.
Could I possibly build the Goose's pedal? In his mind at that time it was highly unlikely that I could. How, after all, could magic come out of this Gomer's garage? He went ahead and dared to ask anyway. An idea was developing. A big, fat, cash filled idea.
It was here where I opened up the world of DIY hobbying to this unsuspecting, spamsite-addicted-wannabe-a-bigshot-gear-shilling-playa'. From Spamsite Darkness to DIY Dorkness. He came over to my garage and I had dozens and dozens of modded pedals. My path with DIY diverged somewhat from what was typical. As much as I learned from all the input for design/mods etc. I couldn't see why one would have to build the basic effects from scratch or buy a board for a modded this, that or the other when most of what had collected on my effects shelves over the years already had the basic ingredients in them. I had a collection of cheap pedal discards which the buying community deemed not worth having. I was a collector of the "sucky" pedals. The ones which sold on ebay for 10 - 50 bucks plus shipping. All you had to do was reverse them to find out what they were and form a plan of attack on modding them. There was a smalller shelf of one-off designs and a somewhat larger shelf of logic switching configs to run effects options through a debounced foot controlled switch getting rid of the ever increasing toggle options. Hard switch toggles, "quality parts", "fine tuning by ear" etc. etc. had no interest to me.
So we sat down and we played. My objective was simple. I just wanted to get this guy to see that you could do a lot with just a little. These sit-downs, discussions, taste-testings etc. where, in my mind, just two guys sharing gear info. An attempt by me simply to cut through the Mr. Middleman type of businessman shilling bullshit. It was hard going. I could set up 3 different pedal brands (say, for instance, Peavey, DOD and Johnson) with pretty much exactly the same tweeked circuits and when you put them through your cranked 50 watter you couldn't really tell, or "feel" the differences. You could but you couldn't either. I mean there were differences but they were just ever so slight that you'd be hard pressed to quantify them. You could play one on one day, dig it over the other two yet mistake it the next day with one of the others. It was futile anyway in that the mere sight of the cheap brand name led to a flat out dismissal of whatever it was. He wanted the Goose's pedals. All of them. Not these "toys". But he didn't want to pay the going price. They had become too expensive now and he was still pissed over a few of his past transactions with the Goose.
"Alright, alright, alright... you win. Bring me what you've got of the Goose's. I'll see what I can do", I said; and here they came. This was the first time I actually had the "magic" in my hand, at my desk. All provided to me by the cabinet builder. The Goose's "friend".
It took about an hour total on all three.
Boom - Tubescreamer - 3 parts swapped
Boom - Rat - no changes. None.
Boom - SHO - in line gate resistor added.
He really wanted the magic, blessed TS the most. That was the one by which all others were judged. Bear in mind that my pointing out that it was a TS (or a Rat or a SHO) meant absolutely nothing to the cabinet builder. He knew literally nothing, not one thing, about electronics. His ear was king. He had that typical self-serving, rarely-proved-and-so-often-blown-out-of-the-water-with-proper-testing-techniques "I can hear the screws changed out of my speaker cabinet" approach to electronics. His ear would be the decider. OK, this should be fun, I thought. We'll just see about that. Bear in mind too that at this time I wasn't interested in being an "effects builder" any more than I am now. Not one bit. This was just an exchange between friends. It was just a lark for me. An opportunity maybe to help a friend get his mind around the fact that what had become of the world of boutique OD effects was just one big steamy pile of self promoting poo.
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.
OK, then. At least he might be some help to me I thought. I came back about a week later to get some advice about reducing the carrier noise I was getting with an effect I was trying to finish. The guts were sprawled out inside a piece of Tupperware. Not pretty but it was enough to get the effect from point A to point B, plug it in and sample it for troubleshooting purposes. I met the newly emerging guru again that day figuring, in good faith, "Hey, this guy knows something I don't. He's a successful effects builder who might be able to help me with this." The look on his face was classic. He had no idea what I was asking yet his eyebrow arched, his neck stiffened and a smirk came over his face. "You don't need that" he said, "that's a waste of time. Hold on a second…" and he left the room only to come back with a strangely painted pedal. Glossy and swirly it was. He held it up in front of me and informed me that this is what I needed. His OD pedal. I'd better get it now though because he was going to have to raise the price. A Japanese rock guitar hero had picked up on it and they were moving like the proverbial hotcakes. He was big league now and I might not get my chance again for an incredible deal. $265 if I recall correctly. He was now a Goose who's eggs were golden. That was the point where I knew this guy was full of baloney. He knew that I felt that way too; I told him right there. I left the store.
I came to find out that this builder's success reaped a windfall for the music store owner, Mr. Middleman. The pedals were built by the builder and sold through the store. Typical arrangement I suppose. The store owner had a lot riding on the deal, his cut, and the hype was heaped on. The pedal/amp builder brought in a cabinet maker who saw the opportunities ahead for himself if he could just hold on to this Goose with the golden eggs too. This Goose was going places. The push was apparently on by these guys to frequent the emerging spam/shill sites to beef up the American side of the market using the internet as the market place. The Goose's pedal was on a spamsite roll.
Move ahead again. (Around '03) Trouble in paradise. The Goose decided his cut wasn't big enough. He cleared out of the store and moved his amp shop to his newly bought home. (It was the house with the new Benz in the driveway, the Goose reminded me later). He'd decided to fill direct orders himself and just feed in a handful of gear to Mr. Middleman. Profits slowed, target sales weren't being met, the Goose proved to be quick to to cash a check yet slow to make a delivery. Mr. Middleman and the cabinet builder became very disgruntled. Very. I had no idea at the time that all this had transpired. It only became known to me later that when I stepped through the doors of that music store again in '03 that I had fallen down the rabbit hole.
As I walked into the store that day I was met with some rather sad faces. Mr. Middleman and the cabinet builder were conferencing at the counter as I had my usual look around. The Goose was no longer there. His bench fee had gone up, way up; his other work was so much more important that amps needing work were starting to pile up in the corner. Orders for the Goose's pedal, the orders which came through the store and which mattered to Mr. Middleman were not being met. The Goose had taken a lot of money and was in pretty heavy arrears. The cabinet builder hadn't been paid for his work. Life was a mess for these guys. The Goose was slipping away. Money was slipping through their fingers. There was something even worse, it seemed, at play for these two miserable men which I only recognized later. The Goose was the "Player". The one with clout. The one who mattered. Without the Goose, clawing to (what was in their minds) "the top" would be difficult if not impossible.
When I strolled up and said "I can take a look at those amps in the corner if you want and see if there's anything I can do with them" I had no idea what was playing itself out behind this scene. I just wanted to look at the amps. One was an Ampeg Revrocket as I recall and it seemed interesting. There may have been a Blues Deville too. The response I got was was a somewhat lukewarm but slightly needy "Sure Gomer. You work on amps?". "Yes, when I want to", I said. This conversation led us into a back room where I was introduced to the Goose's $2000 (at that time) 20 watter. This was one of the Goose's masterpieces I was told. It looked immediately familiar to me. Silkscreened Weber Chassis, chicken head knobs in an easily identifiable config, Fender glow light, sitting in a tweed repro cab built by the cabinet maker. "Can I look in it?", I asked and I was allowed. What I saw sort of sat me down hard. It was a stock, and I mean bone stock 5E3 except that it had been modded to take 6L6s. The tag board and the parts layout were right off that ancient Fender layout sheet. When I looked up at Mr. Middleman and the cab builder I realized they didn't have a clue and that no one, as far as I could tell, even knew or cared just exactly what it was they were selling or buying. It was all steeped in mystery. This stock Tweed Deluxe was the Goose's Masterpiece. It was magic to these men. And they sold it as such. Unfathomable magic.
I looked long and hard at that thing before me and then it dawned on me. I stood up and asked "Do you have one of those OD pedals here? Can I look at it too?". Timing was everything with this. Now I'm sure that if the Goose hadn't taken his marbles home to play his own game with himself leaving these two holding debt none of this would have happened. Ties had been cut and these guys were left hanging. Out comes the glossy, swirly pedal. It took, literally, one minute and I knew what it was. "Shazam Sergeant Carter, are you kidding me? Do you know what this is?", I asked (sort of). And of course they didn't believe it and more to the point, they really didn't care. What was a surprise and somewhat of a shock to me was irrelevant to them. It's a reaction/response I've come to know well in the last four years. Two worlds colliding.
Gomer, the new Goose?
Mr. Middleman lost interest and drifted back into his business worries. Losing the Goose really had an impact on him. He strayed from the path of this story until some time later. The cabinet builder, on the other hand, had a different response. Not so much dealing with what was or what wasn't this or that or the other. He didn't care about that. In the end, he never would. He wanted to know specifically if I could replicate the Goose's $2000 masterpiece amp. Cheaper of course. He wanted one but the Goose wouldn't cut him a deal even though they had been business partners and friends. Business is Business, so the saying goes.
I built the amp. It was a piece of cake. $450 as I recall, slightly modded (how, I don't remember) and it worked great. It was every bit as good as the Goose's. How could it not be? It was a 5E3. This came as a jaw dropping revelation to the cabinet maker. He asked for 4 more at roughly the same price but with different mods, variations on the theme. I thought we had become friends so I considered it and did it. It was fun for me. I enjoyed that build. I felt like I had found a decent friend who shared a gear interest too. We had something in common. I made it clear that I was pretty much just a one-off wonder and that I liked to move around the gear field. There were just too many different areas that I wanted to cover electronics wise not even necessarily guitar related. I was rebuilding a Toyota MR-2 with a friend at the time and needed to spend time on that too. Four more 5E3 amps were built for him, all as good as the Goose's for a third of the price each. Again, he was astonished and again I said something to the effect of "dude, relax... it's just a 5E3". Then he brought me amps to fix. Bassman's, Supers; vintage classics and a bunch of Public Address conversions. Again, he was astonished. How could this be? he wondered. I was just some dude hobbying in my garage. I was a "nobody" in his mind. He had hung around the Goose too long. He had discovered gear shill sites and been sucked into the mythologies. His mind had been poisoned by spammer hype but he didn't see it as spam. He saw it as Truth. These guys being praised and fawned over had something special. He wanted to be considered something special too. He wanted the praise and accolades. He wanted that special place at the table of hype. That is what leads to the cash. The long-term hard cash flow. That coveted place at the table is what's needed first. Everything else will follow in due time. He longed for it. This is when the light bulb came on for the cabinet builder.
Could I possibly build the Goose's pedal? In his mind at that time it was highly unlikely that I could. How, after all, could magic come out of this Gomer's garage? He went ahead and dared to ask anyway. An idea was developing. A big, fat, cash filled idea.
It was here where I opened up the world of DIY hobbying to this unsuspecting, spamsite-addicted-wannabe-a-bigshot-gear-shilling-playa'. From Spamsite Darkness to DIY Dorkness. He came over to my garage and I had dozens and dozens of modded pedals. My path with DIY diverged somewhat from what was typical. As much as I learned from all the input for design/mods etc. I couldn't see why one would have to build the basic effects from scratch or buy a board for a modded this, that or the other when most of what had collected on my effects shelves over the years already had the basic ingredients in them. I had a collection of cheap pedal discards which the buying community deemed not worth having. I was a collector of the "sucky" pedals. The ones which sold on ebay for 10 - 50 bucks plus shipping. All you had to do was reverse them to find out what they were and form a plan of attack on modding them. There was a smalller shelf of one-off designs and a somewhat larger shelf of logic switching configs to run effects options through a debounced foot controlled switch getting rid of the ever increasing toggle options. Hard switch toggles, "quality parts", "fine tuning by ear" etc. etc. had no interest to me.
So we sat down and we played. My objective was simple. I just wanted to get this guy to see that you could do a lot with just a little. These sit-downs, discussions, taste-testings etc. where, in my mind, just two guys sharing gear info. An attempt by me simply to cut through the Mr. Middleman type of businessman shilling bullshit. It was hard going. I could set up 3 different pedal brands (say, for instance, Peavey, DOD and Johnson) with pretty much exactly the same tweeked circuits and when you put them through your cranked 50 watter you couldn't really tell, or "feel" the differences. You could but you couldn't either. I mean there were differences but they were just ever so slight that you'd be hard pressed to quantify them. You could play one on one day, dig it over the other two yet mistake it the next day with one of the others. It was futile anyway in that the mere sight of the cheap brand name led to a flat out dismissal of whatever it was. He wanted the Goose's pedals. All of them. Not these "toys". But he didn't want to pay the going price. They had become too expensive now and he was still pissed over a few of his past transactions with the Goose.
"Alright, alright, alright... you win. Bring me what you've got of the Goose's. I'll see what I can do", I said; and here they came. This was the first time I actually had the "magic" in my hand, at my desk. All provided to me by the cabinet builder. The Goose's "friend".
It took about an hour total on all three.
Boom - Tubescreamer - 3 parts swapped
Boom - Rat - no changes. None.
Boom - SHO - in line gate resistor added.
He really wanted the magic, blessed TS the most. That was the one by which all others were judged. Bear in mind that my pointing out that it was a TS (or a Rat or a SHO) meant absolutely nothing to the cabinet builder. He knew literally nothing, not one thing, about electronics. His ear was king. He had that typical self-serving, rarely-proved-and-so-often-blown-out-of-the-water-with-proper-testing-techniques "I can hear the screws changed out of my speaker cabinet" approach to electronics. His ear would be the decider. OK, this should be fun, I thought. We'll just see about that. Bear in mind too that at this time I wasn't interested in being an "effects builder" any more than I am now. Not one bit. This was just an exchange between friends. It was just a lark for me. An opportunity maybe to help a friend get his mind around the fact that what had become of the world of boutique OD effects was just one big steamy pile of self promoting poo.
