6.


Your first significant guitar effect pedal will be a MXR Blue Box. Before that you’ll just have basic standards of your time, good no-nonsense stuff that will stay on your pedalboard for ever – a Boss Turbo Overdrive (still Prince’s reference pedal), a DOD Digital Delay, an Aria Flanger, all it will take to create heavily effected layers of guitars in the mid-1980s (you will never turn into a shoegazer though, as noise impro will take over). The Blue Box is a classic double octaver down fuzz – the signal it creates by duplicating a guitar sound two octaves lower just cannot be coped with by the electronics of the guitar or an amplifier, the result being noisy, glitchy and cool, like a vomiting pinball on acid. It’s been around forever, but nobody really uses it, for it is quite uncontrollable. You won’t purchase this pedal at first, someone will spontaneously lend it to you, as something that might fit to what you will seem to be looking for.

She will be an art student that you’ll meet first at the university the second time you’ll try to turn your academic studies into a negotiable art teacher diploma and a lifetime state employee status – fortunately you will fail at that and keep to more adventurous paths (you will strangely rocket in modern art history and theory but be irremediably disqualified in practice even if you’ll be an exposed artist by then and for many years – just unfitting…) She will be younger, belong to other circles, but shine with simple beauty and shyness, where ordinary art students machismo and extravaganza rule – you’ll be a master at that yourself, won’t you? You’ll have a serious crush on her, but you’ll have a crushable personality all your life and keep it to yourself.
Later you’ll start to see her in your inner circles, a new regular in a house at the centre of your social life, shared by beautiful people that will be your best friends for a significant lapse of your life (one day they‘ll be too far away but by then you’ll have admitted that friendship like love have their cycles, they bloom and fade – and you’ll be the one who left first), a bunch of promising architecture students, musicians, art lovers and partygoers. She will be different by then, you will feel that her obvious and attractive fragility already had her into trouble; she will be in an affair with one of the boys, or 2, you won’t know everything and won’t remember the details. It will always be nice to be around her even if it’ll hurt to see her always on the way of being more and more damaged.
She will tell you about this old Blue Box she has (it’s so vintage that it doesn’t even have the name printed on it) – she’ll be into music at some point but nothing steady – and kindly bring it to you one day, telling you to keep it as long as you’ll want and to do something good with it. You’ll do your best and it will become a key effect for your sound for a while (it will be before your digital multi-effects phase). When you’ll be in an improvisation big band and invited to play a solo, the density and radicality of its sound, even confronted to 30 other wild musicians, will amaze you each time. That will be also the only effect used to record the title song of your first narrative short movie, emulating a chaotic video game sound on top of a hectic drumline – one of your favourite recordings ever.

A few years later, when you’ll be so used to it that you’ll have forgotten that it still doesn’t belong to you, she will suddenly ask you if you would buy it right away, or give it back, for she will need the money urgently. You will have lost touch with her at the time, you will have heard that she often sleeps in her car and busks in southern France or something. She will pass by your house with a guy you never met before, she will be puffy, have a broken front tooth, giggle all the time and reek of chemicals – the smell exhaled by a faux tortoise shell Fender pick freshly shaved after strumming with it for a while (that will prevent you from using a Fender pick ever again).
You won’t be able to give her money knowing that it would be spent on drugs right away, so you’ll let her go with her pedal, with a sour feeling in your heart, for your own cowardice and helplessness, the doomed gem she used to be, and a little bit for the crazy magic music of the Blue Box. You’ll buy a new one years later, when you come back to analogic pedals, that will be your first choice. You’ll play it next for that crazy performance in the glass-hall of the Wurtenbergerischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart, your Epiphone Thunderbird Pro plugged in it for the biggest electro-bass sound ever.