Is simplicity radical?
From comments I've received and private messages, I can feel that people think I'm a bit, for lack of a better term, radical. To strip down to only what I know I need to play a worship service, to sell every piece of guitar gear that doesn't bring me joy. But to me, this isn't radical. To me, spending $5,000+ on a pedalboard and 10+ hours each week sitting and programming MIDI is radical. I think all that work pays off when you have a killer guitarist who's also putting the Strymon and Eventide stuff to work for him but I'm not that guy. My rehearsal time is no longer going to H9 Control and Strymon Nixie and Ableton, it's going to my fretboard.
My board was a Diamond Comp, Pog, Full-drive 2, Bluesbreaker, Boss Chorus, DD-5, Memory Man, and RV-5 for more than 10 years without change. But the Full-Drive, Bluesbreaker, DD-5, and RV-5 got 90% of the use. Then I went on a bender and got all these transparent overdrives, I had 3 Eventide H9's and I had 2 Strymon Timeline's at one point, I had a Pedaltrain Pro AND a PT-3 completely filled. When I got sick of it all and I saw that I was in debt up to my eyeballs and I found that none of it brought me any joy, and that hauling it around week to week was exhausting, that's when I decided to make a change. Originally, about a year ago, I went back to that same old formula (Diamond Comp, FD, BB, DD-5, MM, RV-5).
But this new pursuit of simplicity involved condensing even further, saying, maybe I'm getting enough compression from my drives so I can drop the Diamond Comp. Maybe I can get by without putting octave or chorus on my board and maybe the long modulated analog delay can go too, along with three guitars and two amps.
My sacrifices are pretty simple. I can't do long, immersive, stereo ambient stuff anymore. But I always hated that style anyway. I see it as buying all this expensive gear to do what a keyboardist can do really easily. I can't get the bouncing and galloping ping-pong effect which is cool. But that's really it—everything I've got onboard are the things I was using 90% of the time anyway (a Tubescreamer sound, a Bluesbreaker sound, a DD-5, and an RV-5).
I also have more cash now than I've ever had! When I stopped buying pedals I was able to focus and knock out my credit card debt, buy nice new tires for my car, and now I'm almost to the point where I can afford a really nice guitar. Everything in my signal chain is my favorite thing, my one guitar will be my favorite guitar to play, my one amp is my favorite amp, my one Tubescreamer is my favorite one I've played after doing a bunch of shoot-outs. You get the idea.
This lifestyle frees me to pursue nicer things and things that bring much more joy to play. I've found simplicity isn't necessarily frugality, now that I'm free of that credit card debt I'm free to save my money and spend on truly great things. Actually, it frees me to not really have to worry about things at all. The things I have are the things I want. Among "things," the things I have are the things I value most. And now I don't have any things that are distracting me from what I value most. I get to spend more time with my family, more time rehearsing and playing, less time organizing and cleaning and maintaining things or working to pay them off. I even have a plan now for saving up and quitting my job so that I can pursue my passion to write. And I just feel better. More free. It's wonderful.