FEATURE
10 Years of POD
BY ADAM MOORE
Ten years ago, Line 6 unleashed the POD on
unsuspecting guitarists around the country and
instigated a revolution of sorts. Perhaps those
are big words, but there’s no denying that
the POD was one of the first devices to truly
harness the potential of digital technology for
tone seekers—suddenly “digital” wasn’t such
a bad word. For a group of people raised on
tubes, it was as if we had finally caught up.
Although the POD has undergone a serious
evolution over its ten years, the very first version began a long-overdue liberation. No longer were guitarists forced to spend large sums
of money on amplifiers, just to have options in
the studio and on tour (we still do as a matter
of principal, of course, but the point is that we
aren’t forced to); no longer did we need to
charter storage space to house our precious
investments or risk blowing up 50-year-old
capacitors in vintage amps, just to get a few
bars to tape. We could ditch the practice amp
and still have a fully-featured pedalboard without the cables and power supplies. We could
suddenly have our cake and eat it, too—and
oh, how sweet freedom tasted.
And while, yes, if you found yourself in an
acoustically brilliant recording space with Bob
Rock at your side and a locker of top-shelf mics
at your disposal, you might be able to get a
better amp sound to tape, but how many of
us have found ourselves in that position? More
likely, you’ve found yourself stuck in your basement studio late at night, trying to pull together a track without firing up that Marshall JCM
800 and waking the kids. Or you’ve somehow
managed to get yourself in a situation where
there’s not even a JCM 800 to be found. For
those of us with real lives and responsibilities,
with budgets and one spare closet, the POD
has become an indispensable tool.
Flip the page for our look back at
ten years of the POD
www.premierguitar.com
