This revolutionary approach - playing guitar without an amp - was in fact logical if you remember that Tom Scholz was first a design engineer. Though he was now a musician and a producer, he has applied engineering methodologies that have proved for decades their efficiency:

• Top-down approach: never select solutions before defining objectives and requirements and identifying contraints.
• Functional analysis: the requirements that are used during the design are defined in terms of functions, never in terms of possibilities.
• Value analysis: a piece of gear aims at providing strictly the required functions, at the lowest possible cost. Over-design costs money for nothing in return and is prohibited.

You follow a top down approach when you pack your bags for a week-end and say "I can live during two days without a second pair of jeans, so I take only one". You follow a bottom-up approach when you say "I have six dresses and eight pairs of shoes, and I bring them, just in case".

You are making a functional analysis when you say "I need to go to Paris in less than three hours", instead of saying "I will drive to Paris". In the first case, you can choose between train, aircraft and car. In the second case, you are already late.

You are using value analysis when you say "I need to go daily to my office" and buy a bicycle. You are wasting your money and damaging our planet when you say "I need a car, and I will use it to go daily to my office".

Well, if you apply these methodologies to guitar sound, you will rapidly admit that in most of the situations, there's no room in the requirements for a dedicated guitar amp: create the sound in small boxes, plug that in the mixer of the band or of the studio, and you're done!

The chart below is an attempt to position all the gear approaches that one can cross one day or another. One can easily see that they are complementary, which means that we usually call an idiot anyone who is in the opposite corner...

The vertical axis corresponds to the global method used to create sounds. It ranges from bottom-up (the natural approach of someone who experiments new sounds with his gear and selects what he likes) to top-down (the methodology used by technical designers, to create gear that will respond to specific requirements). The horizontal axis corresponds to the focus of the musician: instrumentists aim first at having a good musical sound and let the sound engineers do the rest, while a person trained to the studio approach will aim at providing a sound that merges easily into a global band sound. We have all, one day, been geeks who stack several stompboxes and amps without really giving a dime about the sound of the band. We can become a Pure Player: we have a sound in mind, and spend fortunes in the best amp and the best effects to get the killer sound we are dreaming about. We can also mature a little, and become a Creator, someone who keeps his arsenal of stompboxes and combos, but knows that the sound of the band is the result of a collective effort. The fourth quarter is a place where you will find the Sound Wizards: people who have a sound in mind, know how to achieve it, and have eliminated the eternal quest for weird sounds that may, some day, be useful to play music.

Tom Scholz belongs now to the wizards quarter - after having certainly experimented the pleasure of being a geek in his teen age. He spent several years, before creating the Rockman line, in the Creators area, fighting to get his sound out of the gear that was available.