Technology is great, but we can easily become trapped in an endless maze of possibilities that it creates. This is bad when it gets in the way of just creating new stuff. That’s exactly my fear when it comes to putting the Strymon Mobius on a pedal board.
And if you carefully sort through the blind digital hate, you do find some critics that feel this way. Some people seem to think the pedal is too complex to just plug in and use. That creates problems for musicians who actually play music, rather than show centerfolds of their pedals online.
Many of us refer to this distraction-enduced creative paralyzation as going down the rabbit hole. I asked Gregg from Strymon if this is a legitimate concern a little while back, and his response was:
I think Pete does a good job of making the rabbit holes shallow and easily avoidable. Each of those pedals can be very simple. Turn the bottom row of knobs on the TimeLine to minimum and the top row is a simple three knob deal with 12 different machines. I think that if the people that feel intimidated by the possibilities, just take it slow, and they will see that you don’t need to get lost unless you want to.
That seems to directly contrast the dissenting views. I expect you can plug this thing in and almost instantly get usable sounds. It turns out, you can. So rather than agonize over the features the way so many have before, let’s just dive straight into a quick demo of that exact exercise – plugging it in and trying to make things sound good, or at least okay.