Dave is a man that I’ve never met before in my life. Dave is a Canadian man that I got chatting to on an internet forum that discusses guitar pedals. You put up photos of your guitar pedals, and other people put up photos of their guitar pedals and everybody talks about each others’ guitar pedals and at the end of the night, everyone’s pupils have been replaced by bright red LEDs.

I only went about setting up my own pedalboard within the last couple of months. I owned one guitar pedal that I never used from when a Dublin music shop had a big sale a couple of years ago and the clerk assured me that it was what I wanted… it wasn’t. Think of wanting to get from A-B and expecting a Harley Davidson, and instead getting an 18 wheel truck. I wanted a light overdrive pedal and was instead sold a pretty heavy fuzz pedal. I was assured it was what I wanted so I thought it was my fault I couldn’t get any usable sounds out of it for me. That put my pedal game on hold for awhile.

Then I started frequenting guitar pedal forums and message boards, largely trying to mimic sounds from Noel Gallagher, Johnny Marr, and John Squire, but also to develop my own sound. The Tubescreamer is a pedal that I’ve always wanted, the TS808, the holy grail of light-medium overdrive pedals, but it was way out of my price range. Then Joyo, a Chinese company came out with a much more affordable clone of the TS808’s circuitry. €50 is a lot more realistic than €200.

So one night while browsing and trying to avoid working on my thesis, I was chatting about the sounds I wanted to emulate and create, and some of the more seasoned guitar buffs were advising me on which pedals to go for. The Joyo Vintage Overdrive came up in conversation.

Dave told me that he had a couple of them lying around that he had practiced repainting pedals on, and that I was welcome to have one. I told him that I had no money for gear as I’d just spent the very last of my spare cash on a tuner pedal that I needed for some upcoming gigs. He told me not to worry about it and to give him my address, so I did and he sent it off to me.

It came today after two months, literally the last possible day it could have arrived before my band’s big headline show to launch our new EP. I set it up among the rest of the board and I couldn’t be happier with how it sounds.

I told my new Transatlantic best mate that he was doing absolutely nothing to quash that stereotype that Canadians are the nicest people on the planet and the big man came back with the gem, “I just like to pay forward the many kind things people have done for me.”

So thanks a million Dave. You’ve given me a pedal that I’ve wanted for months, but also the mindset that I will be paying your kind favour forward to a musician, or musicians sooner rather than later. There’s a lot of cynicism surrounding the music industry these days, but even just the simple act of one musician helping out another gives you hope.