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    Pedal Culture: Guitar Effects Pedals as Cultural Artifacts
    Pedal Culture: Guitar Effects Pedals as Cultural Artifacts
    Pedal Culture: Guitar Effects Pedals as Cultural Artifacts
    Ebook178 pages57 minutes

    Pedal Culture: Guitar Effects Pedals as Cultural Artifacts

    By Ronald Light and Megan Pai

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    About this ebook

    Pedal Culture is a themed exploration of guitar effects pedals as cultural artifacts, derived from a 2017 design exhibition at San Francisco State University curated by the author. An anthropological quest, understanding how effects stompboxes allow for quasi-supernatural power transference from on high to guitarists is just one of the many themes Ronald Light explores. Exhibits showcase symbolic associations in the branding of sonic effects with cultural touchstones from popular arts and culture: material manifestations of noir literature, retro-futuristic cinema, and Japanese anime; graphic metaphors for female pudenda; explicit reference to murder and mayhem; and all too obvious associations to guacamole and chips.

    The curatorial tone of Pedal Culture employs an irreverent sensibility expressed in a whimsical and ironic attitude toward its subject. In the expansive (and expensive) world of guitar gear, this richly photographed volume fuses form, content, and aesthetics. This is Pedal Culture!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRowmanLittlefield
    Release dateDec 30, 2021
    ISBN9781493060801
    Pedal Culture: Guitar Effects Pedals as Cultural Artifacts

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      Book preview

      Pedal Culture - Ronald Light

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      Preface

      I first picked up a guitar in 2014 at age 65 with three objectives in mind: First, to learn to strum the Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want; second, to enjoy learning to play along with my best childhood friend who’d suggested we both buy guitars (lap guitars, at that); and finally, to attempt to stave off the ill effects of advancing age (death, the illest of them all) by attempting to climb the Mount Everest of feats – learning to play a musical instrument – and thus force my brain to plant and harvest a large new crop of white matter. By way of a status report six years later: I’ve learned that You Can’t Always Get What You Want literally happens to be true – the song is not amenable to strumming, but to fingerpicking. My friend has become an accomplished and sought after blues harmonica player. And as for white matter (the neurotransmitters of the brain), I remain alive, alert and able to practice guitar, so I guess things aren’t going too badly.

      What I didn’t expect – in fact, a world I didn’t know even existed – was that I would become consumed by guitar gear (i.e. a gearhead) obsessively lusting after new guitars, amplifiers and guitar effects pedals. For some reason unbeknown to most people, the affliction known as gear acquisition syndrome (GAS, for short) is most acute with guitar effects pedals, and a large and highly consuming commercial world has grown up because of it. In short, I bought my first effects pedal. And then, another. And so on.

      At some point I guess a degree of self-awareness must have set in, and I became intensely curious about the social meaning and symbolic associations of guitar effects pedals in the cultural and cognitive worlds of obsessive guitar fandom. Besides, thinking about the place of guitar effects in guitar culture fueled my desire and fanned the flames of obsession over the pedals themselves. Encouraging yourself to think about what you can’t stop thinking about is a symbiosis made in heaven, I reasoned. In truth, the first point of fascination for me with stompbox culture was this: With the of the aboriginal Aranta tribe and maybe the most devout of Catholics, no other people on this planet attribute so much mana (supernatural power) to inanimate objects as do rock and roll guitarists. I noticed a pervasive and near-compulsive attraction to certain effects boxes that had been associated historically (and now, expressed in the realm of legend) with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn, David Gilmour – really, all the guitar biggies of certain era. The anthropological and mythological aspects of this were just too juicy to ignore. And so I didn’t.

      Since it was the special power emanating from these material entities that was the source of my fascination, it became immediately obvious that an exhibition of road worn guitar effects pedals was the best way to showcase the devices as power objects and bring the phenomenon to wider, public attention. Once bitten by the bug of an idea, my agenda was twofold: First, to begin to develop the idea into a proposal explaining what the shape – conceptually, and thematically – of an exhibition might look like, and next to begin thinking about an appropriate venue – a gallery – in which to stage the exhibition. When I read about the planned opening of the Design Gallery – later christened DESIGNSPACE – in the School of Design at San Francisco State University I had a strong feeling of this place where it might all come together. All arrows seemed to point in that direction, and the prospect of exhibiting in a gallery of design would strongly inform my curatorial focus. The most exciting thing of all was the prospect of bringing students into the equation: As an outside curator pitching an unsolicited proposal I felt it essential that my plan be an invitation for students to dive into an enriching educational experience of real-world learning. Albeit unsolicited, my proposal could be a win-win for the university, for students and for myself. In short, it might prevail – and so it did!

      At the beginning of 2017, gallery director (and associate professor of design) Joshua Singer signed off on a plan for my developing an exhibition under the auspices of the School’s gallery. I offered to secure funding; to organize and curate the exhibition in all its aspects; to source all necessary objects (guitar pedals) for display; to perform public outreach and publicity – in short, to do everything necessary to ensure an appropriate level of curatorship due a university gallery of applied arts and technology. Thousands of hours of time would be required to do the requisite research and interpretive work in addition to the many logistical tasks necessary for mounting the exhibition. The only problem that so much of the gallery’s schedule already had been booked, so the pedal exhibition would need to open in eight months’ time. Nothing like a tight schedule to get things going!

      In spring, 2017 I was introduced to the then students of

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