A post back, I wrote about my acquisition of the Big Gay Fuzz. This pedal is a one-off clone/mod built specifically for the Pedals For Peace charity auction site launched by Devi Ever. Within a few days of winning the auction, but before the pedal showed up in my mailbox, I received an email from the builder, Tom Dalton (of Fuzzhugger). He had a few ideas for further mods to the circuit and was wondering if I was interested in what essentially would be a meta-customized pedal. How could I say no?
The BGF, with fine pink packaging and custom manual
The pedal (as originally built) came two days later, and I immediately plugged it in—the volume swell mode was wild, and the piercing upper octave harmonics above the twelfth fret added a simmering fuzzed-out shimmer. However, there was a significant volume drop at some settings, and overall the thing didn’t produce a lot of signal. I had the level knob pegged most of the time, and was surprised that my clean signal was often louder than the fuzzed. I emailed Tom and asked if the mods he proposed would add volume. “Yes,” was his enthusiastic answer, and he (over several emails) elucidated the nature of the mods he had dreamed up since the initial build (and after the eBay auction closed): a second circuit board, comprising a clean boost mode and a whole other fuzz circuit; an additional toggle switch; another volume pot—the details were juicy, and amounted to a wholly other pedal put inside the one I already had. Tom’s excitement was infectious, and I mailed the pedal to him the next day.
This brief vignette illustrates what I am interested in exploring through the ethnographic project I’ve pursued on and off over the past two years. I’ve been referring to it as “pedal culture,” and have circled around several aspects of the boutique pedal building industry: distribution, aesthetics (sonic & visual), building and creativity, and (finally) the emergence of communities within the online domain. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the project with a new name: fuzz folk. Maybe a bit corny, but the name adumbrates the directions I’ve begun to see this project going, especially with regard to the complex relationships between concepts of aesthetics, community, and communications. Elements of exchange and “gift economy” in the fuzz folk world serve to extend aesthetics into social relationships (see here for how Henry Jenkins has employed the “gift economy” idea—in fact, read the whole 8-part piece); people buy, trade, argue about, and praise pedals or sounds that they share affinity for or aversion to, in the process forging relationships anchored in discussion threads, PMs, YouTube demo vids (something I’ll certainly address in another post), blogs, and myriad other “new media” components of communication. As such, community and aesthetics intertwine in dynamic (not causal) ways that provide what I’m seeing as a rich opportunity to examine the dialectic between analog & digital domains.
The BGF after Tom's mods. The only visible change is the extra toggle on the right hand side…
But back to the Big Gay Fuzz. This singular example of material culture embodies the whole of what I have briefly described above, serving as a metonymic vehicle for the fuzz folk community. In a way, it is also a super-distilled example since it is the only one of its kind—illustrating yet another social-aesthetic element of fuzz folk/pedal culture: individuality or uniqueness. And as I noted in a previous post, this pedal also represents the ways that pedal building and the fuzz folk community is more than just a bunch of people rattling on about crazy sounds or obsessing over gear; there is political intent behind this pedal and the Pedals for Peace project launched by Devi Ever. Yet another aspect of the fuzz folk I’ll be tracking through this project…