Guitar Gear

I got mildly chided the other day by a friend of mine while we were discussing gear. He said it in a fairly facetious way to mess with me because I’ve always been a proponent of “if it sounds good, then it is good” mentality. We happened to be talking about analog delays and I went off on a tangent about bucket-brigade devices and a bit of the history of the circuit.

“Dude…” my friend interrupted, “Does that really matter if you like the sound?” he asked with a smirk.

I laughed and replied, “In the end, maybe not. But you know me. I like to geek out. Besides, it drives my wife crazy!” We both laughed at that!

Mind you, when I’m talking about specs here, it’s not necessarily about the normal features that you see in the marketing literature, but much more about the minute technical details. For instance, the winds of a pickup magnet or the makeup of an amp’s circuitry, or how the bucket-brigade device came into being.

I’m naturally curious to see how stuff works, so I often take some time to research technical things I wonder about. For instance, I was wondering about the microprocessor or DSP used in the BOSS Katana line that gives the amps their voices. The information I came across in forums and articles is pretty fascinating.

One interesting tidbit was the “sneaky amps” models that apparently are in all Katana amps. These apparently are part of some old code in the firmware that’s based on the GT-100 models that BOSS hasn’t cleaned up yet, and with the right SysEx command, you can expose them in the Tone Studio. Pretty neat.

But in the end, none of that matters. I suppose with a deeper understanding of the technical details it may help in eeking out subtleties while I’m playing, but let’s face it. Only I will know. 🙂

Mind you, I’m saying all this tongue in cheek, mainly because I laugh at myself sometimes when I start geeking out. And perhaps it’s my way of reminding myself where my focus should be and that’s on making music.