i hate having a bit of a pedal fixation lately cause i watch a bunch of stuff on youtube and occasionally finding super cool boutique effects pedals that i really adore only to find out the price.
like lately whenever i get a decent paycheck and have my bills paid already for the month i’ll pick up like a cheap $40-80ish budget pedal to mess with on my board with out thinking much of it since in the past that’s what i would have spent on video games or drone parts or etc. like budget pedals are nice but they don’t really have the same kind of niche vibes that some of the boutique stuff brings. they’re often just tried and true circuitry and really good but nothing out of the norm sound wise. like a decent silicon transistor fuzz sounds like a silicon transistor fuzz to me whether it’s made by a moderate sized company in china for $60 or from a small warehouse of nerdy american guys in kansas for $300 despite what people on the internet with too much disposable income or financial ties to the companies might say.
then i hear stuff like this where it’s so unique and my sort of vibe where it’s like damnit i actually really want this one. just hearing this and a couple other demos it actually brings me a lot of inspiration to make music beyond just playing it. like making lofi funk/jazz stuff with this kind of analog glitch prone old tech feel just sounds so enjoyable to me. but it’s really hard to justify the cost when it alone is more than my entire daily pedal board setup and amp. like say i do set aside the money to get it, there’s this nagging sense of “i’m only an intermediate bassist who hasn’t worked much with music theory or other instruments since like high school and most of my gear is relatively inexpensive, is that going to bottleneck the creativity of making something i truly like with this thing?”