I hate(d) digital…. Part 1

Hello there,

Yes, it has been months since I wrote something. I hope this time round I will not stop for whatever reasons.

and yes, I hated anything digital, guitar related-wise. The keyword here is ‘hated’, a word in the past tense.

Those who know me personally in the real world know that I am an advocate of digital emulation of guitar gear since 2010.

So when was I a fervent hater of the anything digital guitar-gear wise ? I guess it would roughly be the mid nineties to the mid 2000s. The culprit(s) was/were the Zoom product(s). In 1994, a school friend wanted my help to assist his visiting relative from Thailand who wanted to buy some guitar gear. This relative, a young teenager at that time, was a rich kid who ended up buying a Gibson Les Paul guitar and a Hughes & Kettner practice amp. He also bought a Zoom 2020 multi-effects processor. Since this rich kid was a total noob, I ended up testing all the gear at the store and at my friend’s house. I played through all the gear bought for hours like a kid in an games aracde.

I spent the most time on the Zoom 2020. While my ears were impressed with the chorus, delay and reverb effects, I found the overdrive and distoirtion sounds very disappointing. They either lacked the gain to enter metal territory or too ‘cold ‘ ( scooped and thinny ) and ‘plastic sounding’ — my term for it sounding artificially digital. My ears liked the distortion of the Hughes & Kettner combo amp way better; warmer, gainier and real.This was the beginning of my ‘sonic prejudice’ against digital products, and I carried this prejudice into the late 90s and into the mid 2000s.

It is an irony that I now embrace digital emulation when I hated digital gear for nearly 10 years. Yes, I know the story here is way too short. There will be a continuation, because without part 2 or part 3, it would seem that the digital-hating me and the digital-loving me of now are two different persons.