The Awakening (or, Reminisces about the Digitech RP100)

It's funny what one Youtube video can achieve. The one I'm referring to was posted by Ryan "Fluff" Bruce a couple of years ago. When I discovered his excellent channel, I did some digging in his back catalog and jumped at the "Remembering the 90s" series. One of the entries was a retrospective look at the Digitech RP100 modeling multi-effects pedal, which I owned many moons ago.

There is a whole spectrum of attitudes one can take towards previously owned gear. I have already written at length about the ones that got away. On the other end of that sliding scale, there's the "good riddance" section, which is where I usually cannot resist blowing raspberries at Peavey. The grand majority is stuff I take a fairly neutral attitude to; maybe it wasn't for me or I discovered alternatives that suited me better. Then there's that little minority that sparks a fair bit of curiosity: how would I feel about it now that I'm older and hopefully somewhat wiser?

On the whole, I'm pretty neutral about the Digitech RP100. It was a decent piece of kit for its era and for the price. I don't regret selling mine and I have no particular desire to find another one. I'm sure that were I to plug into one now, it'd be obvious within a couple of minutes just how far that technology has advanced since those days.

That didn't, however, stop me from just going on and on, writing at length about an effects pedal I owned 20 years ago. That's because it wasn't about the pedal, not really. Rather, the entire point is what that pedal helped bring about. It wasn't the catalyst for the immense changes to my guitar playing back in 2008, but without it I'm pretty sure the process would have been considerably less smooth.

The inciting incident was something else entirely. In early 2008, I had just come off one of the most eventful musical years in quite a while, and there was every reason to believe that the new year would see just as much stuff going on. I simply had an epiphany. Something made me question where I put the bulk of my money and spent the majority of my time and energy. Maybe that should be my musical aspirations rather than photography. I knew I wasn't happy with my abilities on the guitar. There had to be some way for me to get closer to where I felt my potential lay.

That was the falling of the small stones that set off an avalanche. In a mere twelve weeks, I had reached a whole new level on the guitar, and brought my Stratocaster out of the doghouse. The amazing thing was that I managed to accomplish this without purchasing a single piece of gear. In fact, all I bought during those critical months were picks, strings, and a new fuse for my broken practice amp. In other words: consumables that I would likely have had to get anyway.

The most important change I made was non-musical in nature: a conscious decision to try to stay away from the computer as much as possible. I would pay my bills once a month and try to check my e-mail daily. What little discipline I had at my disposal, I was going to put to use to try to leave it at that: no casual surfing to forums, Youtube et cetera. Sure enough, after a few days, it not only felt natural to exist offline, I was also amazed how much time I suddenly had available to spend on the guitar.

Restructuring everything from the ground up in this way brought with it a much-needed focus, and I found myself richly endowed with something that previously had been sorely lacking, namely patience. Patience unlocked some key things that had hitherto been kind of neglected. I was able to sit down with a five-year-old modeling multi-effect pedal and tweak sounds until it did exactly what I wanted it to do. It finally dawned on me to run it through my practice amp instead of blasting at full volume through my headphones. When I finally started practicing, I refused to do so without a consistent warm-up routine. I even got in the habit of using proper scrub to clean my hands before playing—anything to increase the string life for as long as possible in the pre-Elixir days.

Taken together, those things got the ball rolling. Obviously the Digitech through the little Marshall wasn't the ultimate in tone, but it was just good enough to get me something that worked, a tone that I felt that I didn't need to fight in order to make a sound. I made sure to raise the volume so that it just masked the sound of my pick hitting the strings. After a couple of days, I noticed that I could play at length without any discomfort: no aches, no lactic acid. I tried to pay attention to what was going on as I was doing it, not an easy task, but I was amazed by what I found. My right hand was barely moving, and the pick was just nudging the strings, yet there was no fundamental change in tone from when I had been whacking the instrument for King and country.

This multiplied the effectiveness of my practice sessions, simply because I could sustain them for far longer than previously. It also led to the wild idea that maybe now that I had tamed my picking hand somewhat, I could finally step down in string gauges. I had been using 10–52 strings since time immemorial, first because I tuned down, then because it seemed that only thicker strings could take the punishment from my right hand. As soon as I tried 10–46, lots of things fell in place in one go. It took some getting used to, but after that I could make the same sounds while expending even less energy.

As if all this wasn't enough, I soon discovered the Jazztone picks. It was one of the most dramatic overnight changes I have ever experienced on the guitar. Usually, there's some kind of adjustment period involved. Not so with these picks. It was as if my muscle memory was already expecting them, and when I found them, I hit the ground running. It was like putting an afterburner on the technical ability that I had been building up for weeks.

By now it is perhaps becoming obvious just how much of a positive spiral was getting going. I noticed that what I was doing had an effect, which made it more stimulating to do it, which snowballed into my longest-ever practice session: a full nine hours. I actually heard the improvement more than I felt it. All of a sudden, my RP100 lead patches sounded overly fuzzy and woolly. Evidently, my technique had improved enough that I didn't need the extra gain to compensate.

Much of the stuff I picked up during those frantic weeks has informed the contents of this very website: not just guitar exercises, but also some general tips and tricks. The hard part, as always, is to follow my own advice. It can be hard to get out of a lazy-ass rut, and start playing the guitar instead of wasting my time online. I know for a fact that I need to force myself to start slowly and warm up properly. Most importantly, I have tried my very best to always remember what I was able to achieve in the spring of ‘08, more specifically that I was able to do so without spending any money on gear.