A guitar player with no amp? What's next, a graphic designer with no Macintosh? A writer with no latte? Alas, it's true. With the highly focused and forensic nature of the work on the Cracking the Code film project, there's been no need for me to own anything that produces actual amplified sound. For the last several years, my musical activities have targeted the mechanical over the creative, and the visual over the aural. Sure, I've produced lessons, but those have generally been recorded direct-to-Powerbook, using one of my trusty Tech 21 NYC Tri-OD or GT2 pedals, or the amp emulation built into Apple's excellent and underrated GarageBand. Otherwise, there has been no writing of song nor playing of gig. Walking past my house, there would be no evidence to suggest it was anything other than the abode of another sonically unobtrusive yuppie.

While I clearly do not share the guitar industry's sometimes entrenched retrograde attitude toward technology, there is definitely something to be said for the rustic appeal of fifty year-old amp and guitar designs. I started in digital audio with a lowly Mac Quadra, a SCSI-based Yamaha CBX-D3 interface, and a copy of Opcode Systems' Studio Vision, the digital audio sequencing application that broke the synchronized audio and midi barrier. (Can this venerable piece of software be so old and ignominious that it is unworthy of its own Wikipedia entry? Shocking.) Along the way, I formatted drives and installed PCI cards as I waded through a rising tide of 16-bit, 18-bit, and 24-bit S/PDIF, AES/EBU, ADAT, USB, and Firewire interfaces. Suffice it to say, in a musical world where acronyms proliferate like greenhouse gases, keeping it simply stupid is always an attractive option. In fact, it may be that our collective love of the bleeding edge is exactly what keeps guitars themselves technically in the dark ages -- a galacto-musical limit of complexity, which, like the speed of light, cannot be superceded, and which requires the word Fender, Gibson, or Marshall on one side of the equation at all times to keep the universe from imploding.

Nevertheless, I grow weary of rigging cables and adapters to hear what I practice. Much to the chagrin of my Brooklyn neighbors, who are no doubt thankful for this propitious syzygy of quietude, I am about to break the silence.

That's right, it's time buy an amp. And considering I'm starting from a blank slate, I see no reason not to play the field. In fact, I'll have to, because I have only the vaguest of preconceived notions of what tone should be. There is no shortage of irony in the fact that I have primarily used modeling technology like Garageband and the Tri-OD to generate guitar sounds, yet I am also largely ignorant of the sounds they are presumably modeling. I've spent vast amounts of time -- two decades, in fact -- unraveling the mechanical secrets of the guitar, but I wouldn't know what a Fender or Marshall amp sounded like if one landed on my head.

The first, and until recently, only amp I ever owned was a Peavey Backstage 30, a device so devoid of anything resembling gain that it was useful as an amplifier only in the most literal of senses: make the sound louder. Thus, what your guitar sounded like unplugged was exactly what it sounded like through the Peavey, even with the gain pegged -- just, well, louder. No tone and certainly no distortion of any kind. The duty of reproducing something that sounded like rock fell to the Boss HM-2 distortion pedal. The HM-2 was the tonal equivalent of the kind of B horror movie that might give Ozzy Osbourne a starring role, with a Halloween-safe color scheme and a hard-edged distortion that nevertheless enabled the tapping and harmonics that were the currency of the day.

The Backstage 30 currently rates a charitable 6.3 for sound quality on Harmony Central. The HM-2 rates a benificent 7.9. Averaging these two scores, my tonal IQ for the first ten years of my guitar career stands at an impressive 7.1. By the time I graduated college, I had been playing eight years and could reel off Eruption even better than I can now. Yet I was still unaware that distortion really came from amps.

Not all this ignorance was my fault. In fact, one of the things that's always bothered me about the soap opera-like history of the guitar establishment is the implicit requirement for new players to study it before any of the products make any sense. It's a long and impenetrable plotline of manufacturers and tradition that informs almost all aspects of modern guitar culture. Bought a guitar with a double cutaway? Notch one for Fender. Digging on that humbucking pickup, a sensible design that actually makes your guitar playable in a bar with neon lighting? Notch one for Gibson. Every guitar or amp is a reissue or a remake or a clone of some aging dinosaur that we're all supposedly intimately familiar with.

I can see how it was obvious to someone like Eddie Van Halen, growing up in the '60s, that a Gibson Les Paul through a Marshall was the sound of rock. In fact, I recall an interview with Eddie where he explained that his paradigm-shifting installation of a humbucking pickup in the Stratocaster-style body of a home-made axe was an attempt to achieve the sound of a Les Paul in a tremolo-equipped guitar. But what do you tell a kid like me who grew up in the aftermath of Eddie himself, an age of spandex and pointy headstocks, when everyone already played Stratocaster copies with humbuckers, and the only pertinent question seemed to be Jackson or Kramer? I had no idea what a Les Paul even sounded like, much less that the Van Halen sound was its spiritual descendent. But I could certainly tell you based on tone alone when I was listening to Eddie or Warren or George, even if it was a song I'd never heard. With so much historical baggage to carry, a beginner could be excused for not having covered the PhD-level American Studies courses necessary for conversing intelligently with a guitar or amp salesman.