In the world of gear, there are toys – things that’ll give you that little burst of pleasure instantly – and then there’s machinery, the things you have to work to get what you want with.

A fuzz box?  It’s a toy.

I don’t mean, by the way, to disparage toys.  Toys have their place, and it can be an important one.  They give adults, like kids, something they need; a learning experience, something to enjoy, something that ties learning to fun, or just that little jolt of fun you need.

The Fender Deluxe?  It’s machinery.

I bought my Fender in 1978, for $100 worth of paper route money.  It was 50 watts of power through a 10 inch speaker, the bare-bones two-knob tone controls, a simple spring reverb tank and a tremolo unit.

That’s it.  No overdrive circuit.  No power soaker.  No EQ.

The basic tone, after you got done cranking on the tone controls, was basically…clean.  You had to crank it to get overdrive distortion – and 50 watts cranked was very, very loud.

But this was the fun part; after a while of noodling around with it, you found (or I found, anyway) a combination of things that made it, with all its faults, mine.  My sound. In my case, sometime after I moved to the Cities and after maybe seven years of playing the thing, I cracked the code:  My guitars (a Fender Jazz and an Ibanez SG), into a cheapo preamp stompbox, thence into a DOD rackmount delay line (that I left sitting on my amp, since, sheesh, who’s gonna buy a rack?), and then into a switch pedal (to jump between the Fender and my Peavey Bandit, when I wanted a wash of cheap, overdriven fuzz.  The preamp gave the Fender a little film of crunchy distorition, while the DOD could be tweaked to give just the right amount of slapback to fill things out, making the Fender sound…

…damn good.

It, and the DOD, got stolen probably in 1989.  That thief, unfortunately, I don’t know.  Hope you enjoy it, douchebag, whoever you are.
Anyway – one of these next tax refunds…