The first issue of
S&VC
that I worked on was the December issue in 2000, our Equalization Special. When Nat Hecht told me that there would be some articles about feedback, I knew I was qualified to work on the issue because I can make feedback with the best of them.
I’m great at feedback. No, I don’t like that awful sound any more than anyone else does; but I do take a certain pride in being able to create it at any time. Ask my band: they won’t let me near the mixing board. That’s fine with me. I just aim the mic into a speaker and watch the fun. (I have to watch because I can no longer hear it.)
They love me at Guitar Center. I went in with my accordion, hoping to patch it through a distortion pedal. Yes, the accordion is now becoming an acceptable medium for the rock-n-roll message. Mine has internal mics to transduce the sound of the reeds, so basically it is one of my best tools for making feedback. And that works out well because many people would rather hear feedback than accordion music anyway.
So, the hapless Guitar Center drone set me up with a Pod effects unit and stuck me into a sound room with bunches of speakers. He trusted that I would know what I was doing. When the glass windows shattered from the force of the thousand-decibel blast, he asked me to leave.
But perhaps the strangest event—the one that convinced me that I have superhuman powers in the area of noise, happened just last week as my band was setting up in our new rehearsal space. I unpacked the distortion-accordion and plugged it in along with all the mics. And I had just hooked in the keyboard when that familiar peal vibrated the sound baffling off the walls. When my band mates regained their hearing, they came over to scold me and to correctly hook up the system.
That’s when we all noticed the mysterious circumstance that puzzles us to this day: the speakers weren’t plugged in!
Thus have I now dubbed myself “Feedback Man.” I have the ability to summon feedback out of thin air. No longer restricted to using transducers alone, I can make an apricot fill a room with feedback. I will, therefore, devote my life to fighting crime using pure blasts of high-frequency noise. This will hopefully stop criminals in their tracks, or, at least, seriously disturb the sales staff at Guitar Center.
