And I can say these things because I am a worship guitarist, and a lot of these are true about me. That’s the rule; you’re allowed to make fun of things you are. And Nicolas Cage. So…you know you’re a hipster worship guitarist when…

  • when you no longer feel awkward before service at church because you can spend the downtime pretending to mess with your pedals.
  • when you own a Morgan amp.
  • when you own two Morgan amps.
  • when you run a Strymon Blue Sky stereo into your two Morgan’s.
  • when you plug a Duesenberg into your pedalboard. (Or a Tele.)
  • when you politely email Strymon about the shortcomings of the Timeline every time it delays a wrong note you hit, and then post about it on Gear Page. ‘Ya, I’ve already contacted Strymon about that, and Ethan says they’re working on it. Because, to be completely honest, a delay pedal that can’t intuitively sense when I hit a wrong note, is totally unusable live.’
  • when you still talk about John Mark McMillan as if no one has ever heard of him.
  • when you liked Mutemath before they were cool.
  • when you complain about the injustices of mass-produced overseas gear via twitter from your iPhone.
  • when every riff you play sounds like U2, but you still maintain that they’re overplayed and unoriginal.
  • when you hate U2, but dig The Edge’s innovative approach to the guitar.
  • when you know the names of every Hillsong guitarist.
  • when instead of saying, ‘The lead goes like this’, you say, ‘Well Nigel does this.’
  • when you are honestly able to convince yourself to pay rush shipping because you legitimately believe worship won’t happen without that fuzz pedal.
  • when you complain about the snobbishness of The Gear Page, on posts in Facebook guitar gear groups.
  • when you have a pedalboard as big as the sun.
  • when you’ve sold your Fulldrive for a Tim, your Tim for a King of Tone, your King of Tone for a Jetter Gain Stage, your Gain Stage for a Wampler Ecstasy, your Wampler for a Rockett Flex Drive, your Flex Drive for a Pearl, your Pearl for a JHS Double Barrel, and then end up using your stock TS9 most of the time.
  • when you battle for ‘Praise and Worship’ to be recognized as a legitimate message board musical genre.
  • when you consider yourself innovative for lowering the mix level on your dotted eighths.
  • when you wear wristbands and stripe socks, but still maintain that ‘you’re not hipster.’ Right. Because you were so wearing stripe socks in 2004.
  • when you Instagram 7 photos a day of your ‘updated pedalboard’, even though no one can tell the difference due to the vintage ’70′s lighting effect.
  • when you pontificate on pedals you’ve never played…or sometimes even heard of.
  • when you hate Rob Bell, love Francis Chan, and have a dust-covered copy of Blue Like Jazz you’ve never read.
  • when, if the power to the whole building went out, your rig could still run for two hours. (In fact, you rig was probably the reason for the power outage.)
  • when you miss prayer to pull your Pedal Power out form under your Pedaltrain to change the dipswitch and test out your Fulltone OCD on 9 vs. 12 volts in a live situation. (Oh yikes…I’ve so done that.)
  • when you have an ambient album. ;)

It’s really, really refreshing to laugh at yourself every once in a while. We’re such goobers. And I’ll gladly risk sounding cliche here because it’s just so incredibly true and really awesome: God’s grace is amazing.

Splendid.
Karl.