Your Time Will Come (Eventually)

Hey there! I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving. This is the third and final part of a 3-part series on why we should try to suck at what we do a lot more often. Parts 1 and 2 are here and here.

If you’ve read the last two parts of this series, you know by now that things are about to get a little bit wonky.

I’d like to introduce you to the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone pedal.

What the heck is a fuzz pedal?

Remember how in part 1 of this series we talked about how Link Wray hit it big by putting holes in his amplifier for a distorted sound? Well, the soaring success of his song “Rumble” made distortion mainstream.

Three years later, Grady Martin recorded a different song titled “The Fuzz” with a faulty amplifier. Where Wray’s experimentation made the concept of distortion more widely known and pursued, the screwed-up electronics in Martin’s amp created a different type of distortion—fuzz.

And just like Wray (albeit to a lesser extent), Martin scored a hit. Martin’s recording engineer, Glenn Snoddy, noticed that other musicians started seeking out the sound that Martin discovered.

This gave him an idea—if distortion (especially fuzz) was becoming increasingly sought after, what if he could make a sort of pedal to let people achieve that same sound on command? He quickly designed a device and sold it to the Gibson guitar company. The Fuzz Tone became the first guitar pedal as we know it, and also became the first use of fuzz, with Gibson emphasizing its “brass-like” quality and marketing it as a way to simulate trumpets/trombones.

The initial response was… tepid. The pedal just didn’t sound that great as a true replacement of a brass section, and nobody had really figured out how to use it well to recreate the sounds made by Martin and Wray.

Until Keith Richards needed to record a scratch track.

The Stones were planning to release a song with a large orchestral introduction, and Richards had a melody in mind. Richards figured he could track the melody through a Fuzz Tone, the band could finish the rest of the song, and The Stones could record a real orchestra at a later date.

That recording never happened.

You might recognize the song that resulted:

“Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones quickly rose to number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts, and Maestro Fuzz Tone pedals went flying off the shelves.

After years of experimentation, trial and error, and limited use, the Fuzz pedal—and guitar pedals as a whole had arrived.

Success takes time.

However you define success—money, relationships, fame, spiritual growth —it doesn’t come according to our desired timelines.

Sometimes our creations aren’t received the way we intend them. Maybe we missed the mark and need to rework some things. Perhaps we need to start again completely from scratch.

And sometimes all we need to do is keep creating until our creation lands in the hands of someone who truly needs it in that moment.