Analogue Through
For electric guitar players in love with gear and gadgets, there is no greater lure than that of “the pedal”. In the musical world, “pedal” means a small, flashy, and brightly colored box, which receives the electrical signal generated by an electric guitar, and transforms that signal in some way before passing it along to the amplifier, and into waiting ears. And there are THOUSANDS of pedals to choose from, ranging from roaring fuzz to subtle tremolo.
These guitar pedals occupy a sacred position in the feedback loop between a musician’s playing fingers and listening ears — between inspiration and actualization — and for serious musicians, a critical question is whether a pedal is “honest” in its role as relayer of the signal, between what a musician plays and hears.
Until a decade or so ago, most pedals preserved the analog composition of the guitar signal: this means real, physical, particles of electricity pushing down the cable and into the amplifier; advances in digital technology, though, have produced a host of new pedals which convert that analog signal into a series of digital ones and zeros, and use THAT information to create sounds. Which creates debate: on one hand, you have analog purists, who steadfastly refuse to violate the integrity of their signal by sending it through a digital pedal; on the other, the digital crowd, unconcerned and unbothered with this transformation.
As a musician concerned with clarity of tone, I tend to swing towards the analog side of the debate when I’m pushed…as a writing teacher concerned with clarity of composition, I’m still investigating. This is one of the reasons I said yes to the invitation to write for the “Ahead of the Code” blog: if a writer and an audience are analogous to a player and a listener, the choice of what occupies the space between the two becomes crucial. As I investigated various digital platforms to use with my writing students, I couldn’t shake the feeling that what I was noticing in most writing apps and software is the same hard, clipped sterility I hear from purely digital guitar pedals — put another way: you feed it some soul and it spits out something lifeless. I’ve watched budding writers send their hard-earned adjectives into Grammarly and their sweated-over hyphenations into Hemingway Editor and emerge…confused, dismayed, and detached.
But I’m not going to argue for a Luddite return to the compositional landscape of teacher ink on student graphite; rather, I’ll glance again into the land of pedals, where several manufacturers have started making a type of pedal called an “analog through” pedal. These pedals preserve and conduct the analog nature of the incoming and outgoing signal, while ALSO mapping its characteristics into a digital brain, thereby creating a playground for digital manipulation — you really can have it both ways.
My students are all still learning from home; however, last week they turned in final drafts of their writing pieces, and those pieces felt alive. Looking at the signal chain of these pieces, from inception to publication, the integrity of their signal remained untouched and uninterrupted but ALSO was somehow amplified, affected, and modulated into its best possible form. Because our process was “analog through”: they composed digitally, but there was always a human alongside…and that was me, their writing teacher.
I’ve still got my copy of Donald Murray’s “A Writer Teaches Writing”, in which he gently reminds us that “We learn best — at least in the study of composition — when we are not told in the abstract what to do and then commanded to do it, but are encouraged to write and then have the opportunity to examine what we have done with an experienced writer, who can help us discover what worked and what needs work”. My students composed digitally but met with me for individual writing conferences via Google Meet. We looked at each other on the left side of the computer screen, and at their piece on the right; we laughed at their humor and nodded at their pain, and we clicked “yes” or “no” to Grammarly’s suggestions together. And, at the end, the product was a mixture of both, with a strong tendency towards the human side of the spectrum. Analog through.
