A Sunlit Ambience: How Reverb Pedals Influence the Contemporary Worship Music Imagination

With the recent proliferation of scholarship on the musical elements of Contemporary Worship Music (CWM) in addition to ethnographies exploring the tradition’s inner machinations, readers now enjoy unprecedented levels of insight into the actions of human actors and their music. But what of CWM’s non-human actors? Could the instruments and musical equipment used by CWM practitioners, for example, impact evangelical piety? In this article, I entertain this question by arguing that the materiality of reverb pedals—devices used by guitarists to add artificial reverberation to their sound—influences how evangelicals conceptualize elements of their faith by introducing new imagery or enriching pre-existing conceptual tropes. To do so, I first justify my focus on reverb pedals by demonstrating CWM’s reliance on reverberation before showing how guitarists read a pedal’s materiality—namely the iconography printed on its face—for meaning. Next, by combining previous CWM research and findings from personal fieldwork, I construct a model that accounts for the migration of imagery from reverb pedals into Christian parlance. Crucially, this model places discourses around sounded reverberation as the intercessor in the transference of ideas between pedal imagery and evangelical parlance, meaning that this transference involves changes in the idea’s modality. Finally, to show the veracity of this model, I survey imagery on CWM albums and reverb pedals to identify specific instances of this transference. As a result, this paper shows examples of extrabiblical ideas informing the Christian faith, thus further developing Karen Swallow Prior’s concept of the “evangelical imagination."