# Can someone shed some light on the history of pedals?



## Adcandour (Apr 21, 2013)

I was watching the Digitech Trio video again (PGS came out with one and I really enjoy Andy's versions of everything), and I just can't seem to get my head around the amount and variety of pedals that exist today. It's also saddening that they didn't exist while I was growing up.

Am I missing something? Was boutique always around and I just never noticed it? When I was young I naively took The Arts music store to have everything available that existed (I was young) - which was primarily Boss from what I can remember. They weren't mentioning brands - I recall them selling "the effect" only (ex. do you want delay? here you go...that's our delay pedal).

Was there something pivotal that happened - perhaps a brand that came in a blew everyone away? There was a time where I gave up guitar for school andgirls, so I think something may have happened during that time period.

My personal awareness grew when I was introduced to craigslist maybe 4 years ago. I traded a vintage Rat to some guy in Toronto who told me to join something called TGPa couple of years ago. The rest is history.


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## fraser (Feb 24, 2007)

boutique used to just be homemade stuff.
in the seventies there were schematics for stuff around-
most everything, if not everything is derivative of something that existed before.
when i started playing, about 1980, you just bought what you could afford and could get your hands on.
but even then there were all kinds of things available.
the big name companies dominated of course,
because thats what the stores carried.

i remember a non musician classmate of mine built me a fuzzface clone with a bunch of switching options-
that was like 1983. the guy didnt even know what the circuit was meant to do- but it did it.

the whole current boutique thing is an internet weirdness.
i could take a 50 year old circuit design, tweak it and overbuild it to hell,
make an attractive enclosure for it, then hype it up on the gear page or something.
its strange really- in the real world i dont know any guitar players that can afford to keep buying the same stuff over and over-
but in a lot of cases, thats whats happening.
arm yourself with some internet research and a soldering gun, and you can be a boutique builder.


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## Steadfastly (Nov 14, 2008)

fraser said:


> boutique used to just be homemade stuff.
> in the seventies there were schematics for stuff around-
> most everything, if not everything is derivative of something that existed before.
> when i started playing, about 1980, you just bought what you could afford and could get your hands on.
> ...


I've often wondered about that. How could all those pedals be so different? Good to see someone with a knowledgeable background to confirm those suspicions.


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## toby2 (Dec 2, 2006)

The EH and MXR ads in Guitar Player and Creem magazine drove me to purchase my first pedal - MXR Distortion plus from Steve's music on Queen West . After that I started to try to build pedals from articles in Electronic Today, and Guitar Player's Craig Anderton's column ( his book as well ) . The EH ads were nuts . They had so many products available back in the early 80's . EH had a downtown Toronto warehouse that had a repair shop for their pedals .


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## Steadfastly (Nov 14, 2008)

Yes, pedals started here.










Now they are here.










...........with a whole bunch of stuff in between.:smile-new:


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## Budda (May 29, 2007)

Theres some websites and books dedicated to guitar effects pedals. Swing by your local book store


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

toby2 said:


> The EH and MXR ads in Guitar Player and Creem magazine drove me to purchase my first pedal - MXR Distortion plus from Steve's music on Queen West . After that I started to try to build pedals from articles in Electronic Today, and Guitar Player's Craig Anderton's column ( his book as well ) . The EH ads were nuts . They had so many products available back in the early 80's . EH had a downtown Toronto warehouse that had a repair shop for their pedals .


1) I never get tired of posting this: http://hammer.ampage.org/files/1981_E-H_pricelist.gif

2) What toby indirectly alludes to is the difference that the internet made. Prior to the internet, if you wanted to let the world know that you had a pedal to sell, you HAD to take out an ad in a trade magazine. There was no such thing as throwing up a website, or relying on forums like this for word of mouth, or even relying on distributors (e.g., musictoyz) to let the public know you had a new product coming out. Similarly, in terms of technical information for making pedals, few of us had access to anything beyond the DIY projects from John Simonton, Craig Anderton, and Robert Penfold that would appear in magazines. By 1978 or so, I had traced an MXR distortion from a buddy's pedal, but that was as far as I could get. There was the odd schematic in some of those 1001 electronic circuits books you can still find in public and university libraries.

All of this underscores two major changes that permitted the emergence of the "boutique" world in pedals: the role of the internet in getting the information needed to actually make things, and its role in letting the market know that you had something to sell. I suppose we should add to that the capacity of the internet to facilitate hype and perceived desirability of small-manufacturer/boutique products, as opposed to major manufacturers.

3) In addition to the information resources provided by the internet, was the availability and cost of the actual materials. As recently as 1994 or so, I had to pay about $20Cdn for a DPDT stompswitch...when I could find them. These days, I can walk into any of a variety of places and pay $1.75 for the same thing (well, maybe not the same quality, but the same function). And, say what you will about Mike Fuller, it was his efforts and willingness to get a switch-manufacturer to start making 3PDT stompers for him, that made it feasible for others. The phone jacks were certainly standard, but the enclosures were not always readily available, or even suitable. I recall building a few pedals in the late 70's in some bulky Radio Shack boxes that had little ventilation slots on the side, ostensibly for heat dissipation of tubes or power-transistor applications. I might have been able to get the odd Hammond box from Electrosonic or perhaps Active Surplus in Toronto, but that was it.

These days, the availability of enclosures suitable for stompboxes has increased, and the prices have come down. Heck, companies like Hammond have such a booming business in supplying stompbox-makers, both commercial and boutique, that they have started producing newer boxes aimed specifically at pedal-makers.

Electronic component costs and availability have also improved dramatically, making it feasible for more to enter the boutique pedal racket. Forty years ago, I basically had Radio Shack and the supplier my department dealt with (Electrosonic). Apart from the odd trip down to Queen St. in Toronto (well, up Yonge, as well, if you include Dominion Radio), or Etco, back when I was in Monreal. That was it. Americans had Lafayette and Allied, but the catalogs were not always available, and if you didn't have a catalog, well, you simply couldn't order anything. Nowadays, any doofus can go to any of a surfeit of websites, compare specs, prices, availability, stock, shipping, volume discounts, and expect an order, paid for via Paypal, within a couple of days.

So, the "stuff" needed to make boutique pedals has simply been made far more available than it was 40 or even 20 years ago.

4) Finally, it goes almost without saying that changes in printed-circuit technology - the emergence of toner-transfer, low-cost PCB fabrication houses, and layout software - has facilitated boutique pedal making to an unbelievable degree. In 1978, I would photocopy a PCB layout from a construction article, tape it to a piece of copper-clad board, use my spring-loaded centre-punch to poke dimples into the copper, and "connect the dots" on the board with a Sharpie, occasionally using rolls of layout tape to apply rub-on resist-traces to the board. These days, I print out someone's posted layout to photo paper on my laser printer, iron it onto a piece of copper board, and I can go from "Hmm, that looks like it'd be fun" to an etched and drilled board in under an hour.

Of course, that's DIY. Folks who want to produce a commercial product will use PCB drafting software (that often comes with auto-routing to simplify the process), then send off the graphic file to a PCB fabrication house that will send them back professionally etched, tinned, punched, and legended boards for peanuts. Compare this to the spider-web point-to-point installations of those early EHX boxes like the LPB-1 and Muff Fuzz, or the Dallas Rangemaster.

So, all in all, the boutique market may have existed since the 60's on a very very small scale, for "name" musicians (e.g., Roger Mayer and Pete Cornish pedals), but it has really only turned into somethng that could be viable as a "business" you could run from the desk in your college dorm-room since the mid-90s.


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## Adcandour (Apr 21, 2013)

Budda said:


> Theres some websites and books dedicated to guitar effects pedals. Swing by your local book store


I'd maybe look at the coles notes 

But, I'll see if I can dig up a youtube vid on the history of pedals. I saw a short one on the 59 les paul and now consider myself an expert. I'll keep an eye out.


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## Adcandour (Apr 21, 2013)

Thanks guys. Real helpful. That price list is histarious.

The last thing I'm unclear about is what has happened lately where companies like EHX are able to come out with crazy pedals like the ravish sitar, B9 and C9, etc. Why didn't they see the possibilities before? Why are loopers like the Boss and Digitech relatively new?

Was there no market? That's another major thing that irks me. I would have been a much better player had these been out 2 decades ago.


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## Chito (Feb 17, 2006)

Two Decades ago, the Boss pedals were the top selling pedals which most people used. As already mentioned by Mark, there was no way for these small boutique makers to compete against the big companies like Roland who makes Boss, Ibanez, Dunlop, etc. The internet helped the small companies in different ways. Which if you look at it, the coming out of the internet around that time coincides with your question about these things not happening 2 decades ago.


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## ezcomes (Jul 28, 2008)

adcandour said:


> Thanks guys. Real helpful. That price list is histarious.
> 
> The last thing I'm unclear about is what has happened lately where companies like EHX are able to come out with crazy pedals like the ravish sitar, B9 and C9, etc. Why didn't they see the possibilities before? Why are loopers like the Boss and Digitech relatively new?
> .


its not so much that they didnt see the possibilities before...tech keeps getting smaller and cheaper...to build the same pedal years ago wouldve been the equivilant of placing the tubes on the hood of the delorean to make it work...

case in point...i just got a DD3...the DD2 was aparantky a great pedal but expensive...the chip they used got revamped to work better and cost a fraction of what it did previously...rather than keep making the DD2 they essentially rebranded it, albiet with a couple changes, the DD3 and sold it at the cheaper cost...all while now making a killing on the DD2 since they didnt lower the price due to cheaper parts

tech evolves so much that what was once just a thought can now be built


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

More and more companies have been migrating to the digital domain, or at least the hybrid zone, including boutique ones. The motivations would seem to be multiple:

1) Digital devices allow for certain functions to be easily and inexpensively implemented that would normally require a much larger and complex circuit to implement in the analog domain.
2) Digital devices allow for certain functions to be implemented that simply could not occur in the analog domain.
3) Digital devices allow for furnishing more functions and features for the same price in a small package.
4) Digital devices are difficult to reverse engineer, making the need for silliness like covering circuits in goop, or sanding off chip numbers, irrelevant.

The move has been largely due to the development of chips/modules that made certain things easily possible. 

For instance, EHX used the Cirrus 4811 for the Holy Grail series, the Spin FV-1 for the Holy Stain (and maybe even others), and the Analog Devices BF531 for the POG and HOG. Line 6 snagged a Motorola DSP chip for their Tonecore series and other modellers. Many budget amp makers have used the FV-1 and the Alesis/Wavefront AL3201 chip for on-board digital FX, and some pedal-makers have probably used it too (the "Femtoverb" DIY project uses it).

At a smaller level, easily 60% of the delay units you see out there, with delay times out to 600msec or so, use the Princeton Technologies PT2399 delay chip, which can provide a full digital delay system for under 50 cents. I get mine here: https://www.dipmicro.com/store/PT2399

Molten Voltage have been providing an innovative series of microcontroller modules for adding digital features like tap-tempo to analog products ( http://smallbear-electronics.mybigcommerce.com/molten-voltage-pedalsync-1/ ). Many boutique manufacturers have been incorporating these modules into their products.

Again, what has happened with digital devices for pedals is really not any different than what happened with stompswitches and enclosures: somebody starts making the devices, and once they become cheap and available enough, pedal-makers start incorporating them.

I suppose it bears noting that nobody is going to sink money into fabrication of a 176-pin VLSI chip unless they have some expectations of being able to sell millions, and they can't expect to sell millions if it isn't a general-purpose device and inexpensive enough that it lures customers.

Apart from the Microsynth, pretty much all of EHX's more interesting products of late have been digital. The same is becoming increasingly true of companies like Earthquaker, Strymon, and many others. Companies like Empress and Diamond, meanwhile, have been mining the hybrid terrain nicely.


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## sj250 (Oct 26, 2010)

In regards to the History aspect if I'm not mistaken I believe the fuzz style pedal Keith Richards used on Satisfaction was one of the first recorded effects pedals in popular music. Wah pedals in there original use I believe were around before that also but didn't really get used in a guitar situation until the 60's or so. There is a pretty cool Cry Baby documentary from Dunlop you can watch on YouTube also.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

While _Satisfaction_ is likely the first recorded example that most of us here are familiar with (it certainly was for me), purportedly the first recorded instance of fuzz was a single by country singer Marty Robbins. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distortion_(music)


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## Steadfastly (Nov 14, 2008)

sj250 said:


> In regards to the History aspect if I'm not mistaken I believe the fuzz style pedal Keith Richards used on Satisfaction was one of the first recorded effects pedals in popular music. Wah pedals in there original use I believe were around before that also but didn't really get used in a guitar situation until the 60's or so. There is a pretty cool Cry Baby documentary from Dunlop you can watch on YouTube also.


I read a book a few years ago and he fuzz pedal was "discovered" by a defective amp in one the the studios in Nashville. I forget the details now but one of the musicians heard it and said he wanted that "sound" recorded on his record. Others heard it and they all wanted to borrow the amp for their recording session. Because of the hoopla created over this new sound, someone figured out how to create the sound and we were off the the races.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

That's the Marty Robbins song referred to.


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## Steadfastly (Nov 14, 2008)

mhammer said:


> That's the Marty Robbins song referred to.


You, obviously have a better memory for these things than I do.


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## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Not really. Just happened to read about it more recently.


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## hardasmum (Apr 23, 2008)

adcandour said:


> I would have been a much better player had these been out 2 decades ago.


Pedals do not make one great, it is the Force in your fingers.


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## Adcandour (Apr 21, 2013)

hardasmum said:


> Pedals do not make one great, it is the Force in your fingers.



The Force or Duracell?


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