Yamaha's Overlooked Masterpiece?
When the Yamaha MagicStomp came out in 2003, it was kind of a weird time. We had Limp Bizkit, Avril Lavigne, Evanescence, Travis and Beyoncé. We had Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Finding Nemo and X-Men 2. Lizzie McGuire and Raven Baxter ruled the tween demographic. Arnold Schwarzenegger had just been elected governor of California. Apple had launched iTunes and subsequently sold one million songs in its first week.
You get the idea.
It seems appropriate that the Yamaha MagicStomp, one of the most versatile digital pedals of all time, was released this same year. I’ll be honest: when I first bought this pedal, I didn’t like it. It sat around my office for about a year gathering dust, and then I decided to bring it out of retirement for an episode of the JHS Show. If you go back and watch this episode, I am quite literally playing it for the first time on camera.
The point of this episode was simple: I wanted to play around with a pedal that people had already told me sucks. I wanted to make up my own dang mind about it. And I’m pretty pleased with the results. The jams from this episode are gnarly, so I’d encourage you to go back and watch them, but here are my main takeaways from the experience:
The tape echo feature for this is flawless. I honestly love the digital delay tech of this era, because they actually put in the effort to accurately recreate these sounds. These designers really examined what they were emulating, and their efforts paid off.
For a digital pedal with about a million presets, this was surprisingly user-friendly. I didn’t want to read through the manual, but I was still able to get some pretty awesome sounds out of this pedal. That’s pretty baller.
Once I was able to get past the pedal’s terrible aesthetic, I really enjoyed playing it. Sure, it’s a purple monstrosity with a weird font, but it sounds awesome. That’s the point. Pedals sit at our feet, after all. They aren’t meant to be super visible, so if it looks weird but sounds great, isn’t that better than the other way around?
Yamaha is basically the BuyMore of our day. They sell everything– and I do mean everything –so it makes sense that they’d have a branch of their company devoted to weirdo digital pedals. And with the MagicStomp, they hit a freakin’ home run.
I want to close with a friendly reminder: I’m allowed– in fact, we are all allowed –to change our minds. If you don’t like a pedal when you first see it, fine. But don’t be afraid to give it a second shot, especially if you spurned it the first time based on its look rather than its sound. You might actually love it, and you won’t know until you try.