Downloaded from YTS.MX
[man I actually had this conversation once with my grandma, heh.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
she's 89 years old, and I had to explain to her, what's a pedal board.
I tried to explain to her that basically electric guitar
was never engineered to sound different from acoustic guitars.
It was only engineered to sound louder.
All the different flavors that we get from guitars
has historically evolved through these things called effect pedals.
This external device is like the go between the guitar and the amp.
And it's normal to have six to ten little boxes like, all neatly packed into a system.
It's just more colors for the guitar,
and sometimes that changes the type of music you play,
and sometimes that's just gets in the way of playing music.
[dramatic music playing]
[music fades]
[mellow music playing]
I think ever since musical instruments were first used,
they have been an extension of people's power of expression.
And they have always used the technology available in the times,
whether it was a... a piece of bone or a log, or something,
or electronic or complicated string instruments.
[Andrew] You have to go back all the way to the beginning,
even in classical music where there was no electronics,
but they wanted to modify the sound of the instrument.
So to me, the first pedal was the pedal on the piano
that you made it to sustain so you could hit like a chord, you hold the pedal down.
So, it's like a mechanical device,
that is, modifies the sound and give you more expression.
Well, the history of effects, I mean, people have always wanted to alter their sound.
I mean, if you look at the way keyboard instruments evolved,
I mean, people looked upon the... the piano forte
as this incredibly weird thing the same way, people look at samplers
when they first came out or something, you know, you had clavichords,
and you had some Balos, and... and all these different instruments.
And then people started making modifications to those.
[Andrew] And even on trumpets, they have that mute that is like a little cap.
So, when you did this, wa, wa, wa,
you can hear that like an old jazz recordings,
but they wanted to modify the sound,
give another expression today [inaudible].
So finally, when the electronics arrived
then you could plug in your guitar
then immediately people start to think about, yeah,
how can I take it to the next level?
[Mike] With electronics, there was a period of...
growth and diversification of using effects.
And then there was the increasing notion that effects are instruments.
[reel whirring]
[clicks]
The history of pedals starts in 1931 with the electric guitar.
Without an electric guitar you don't need pedals.
They started making modifications to the guitar itself.
They added pickups. They had amps.
[Albini] Things like, tone controls, and equalizers,
compressors and limiters, those were also developed fairly early in the electronic era.
You could consider those special effects, but I consider those more corrective devices.
I suppose, perhaps, the first special effect would be reverb or echo
because when you play in a room, you hear the ambient effect.
I suppose that would qualify as a special effect, but that's an acoustic phenomenon.
["Peg O' My Heart" by Jerry Murad's Harmonicats playing]
There were a lot of accidental effects as well.
A piece of equipment would be working incorrectly.
There'd be like a... a bad junction, uh, on the vacuum tubes.
The vacuum tube would instead of behaving like an amplifier
would behave like a diode and you'd get a... a fuzzing effect.
It's somebody using something where they stumble across some sound
and find sort of a musical use for it, you know,
where it's sort of a broken speaker or sort of turning the tone knob,
you know, to create sort of a moving filter.
[upbeat music playing]
And then ultimately coming up with some mechanical device
that would turn that tone knob for you.
The earliest guitar effect is the DeArmond Tremolo.
It has a motor in it, really safe contraption
when you combine electricity with fluid moving around inside of it.
We used a little cylinder of an electrolyte fluid
and shook it back and forth to make and break a connection, to make a tremolo sound.
["You Can't Do That To Me" by Roosevelt Sykes playing]
♪ You can't do that to me ♪
I think there's a lot of the history of effects that won't be known
because so much of it was people throwing things together, uh, for their own rig.
[Josh] You get people inventing practical use of echo like Les Paul.
People shredding guitar speakers like the old blues guys,
or people just playing through broken old gear and getting some gnarly overdrive sounds.
Especially the Delta blues, the black musical culture,
they were the first like Chicago blues.
These people turn their amps up.
["Rock Awhile" by Goree Carter playing]
[Adrian] In the 1950s, music tastes started to shift.
There was a new type of music on the block called rock 'n' roll.
It was given birth to from blues and jazz that had gone before it.
Artists such as Link Wray were doing things like cranking their amplifiers to induce distortion,
slashing their speaker cones, putting holes in them
to create a really ratty, nasty type of distortion.
["Rumble" by Link Wray & His Ray Men playing]
[Josh] Link Wray "Rumble",
they banned it from a radio station because it might ensue riots.
I always say no one had ever heard Slipknot then.
You know, it's like, such a weird thing to get our head into.
[Adrian] It was events in the 1950s that started to move us towards different sounds
and experimentation in music that created the necessity for effects pedals.
And when you reach 1960,
you have this epitome of the broken guitar with the Marty Robbins record.
♪ Don't worry about me ♪
[Josh] Marty Robbins is tracking a song in Nashville called "Don't Worry".
The bass player has a 6-string Dan electro bass
plugged directly into a brand new mixing desk that the studio got.
And unknowing to them, there are faulty transformers in that desk,
and it kind of explodes on them.
There's a little bit of a discussion/argument over keep it or don't keep it.
Ultimately, though, Marty Robbins likes it.
The engineer at the time is a guy named Glenn Snoddy. He likes it.
And it caused the sound of fuzz, tone and sound.
["Don't Worry" by Marty Robbins playing]
People were calling in to find out what it was.
They couldn't understand, what the sound was.
[Josh] If you have a sound that your friend doesn't have, he wants that sound.
That begins to happen in Nashville.
People hear that song. "What's the sound?"
Well, we had a artist, Nancy Sinatra,
that called and wanted to come in and make a record.
When she got there, we had to tell her
that the console that was causing the sound,
the amplifier quit, and we couldn't do it anymore.
And they didn't like that at all.
[laughs]
I told Harold Bradley that I'd have to see
if I could make one and get it going.
[Robert] He called my dad and they said,
"Now, Revis, I think, if we could come up with that sound
then maybe we could make some money with it."
Daddy was really, really interested in transistors.
And he had ordered books on transistors, and learned about the transistors and...
Transistors are small electronic devices...
and they were designed to supersede valves and tubes.
But, in the early days in the 1960s,
transistors were predominantly used for amplification purposes.
A small signal, such as you get from a guitar, would be played,
pushed through to the effects pedal,
and amplified by the first transistor.
It would then roll from that transistor,
and then roll through to another transistor, and then that signal again would be amplified.
You would end up with, in these designs, a fuzz circuit, uh,
that would be extremely pleasurable
to those that are after that sort of distorted sound.
[Glenn] I went to Chicago then and got hold of the Gibson people.
The owner of Gibson said, "Well, that's it.
We'll... we'll take it."
Sometimes you have to turn disasters into something that's positive,
and that's what we did.
So that's how the fuzz tone got started.
[distorted music playing]
[Adrian] They market it to people as a guitar effect
to make your guitar sound like, a cello or a banjo or a sitar,
really strange marketing.
It did not sell well. They initially sold 2,000 units and nobody wanted them.
They sat on store shelves.
But, then in 1965, The Rolling Stones released "Satisfaction".
["Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones playing]
[Adrian] Keith Richards, he used that effect to do a horn part
'cause they didn't have horn players.
It's very easy to say, that it would not have been that successful
if it wasn't for The Rolling Stones.
Indeed, history tells us that basically,
they sold out all of those pedals worldwide
as a direct consequence of that song hitting the airwaves.
It pushed other designers to make fuzz.
Essentially, the Maestro laid the foundations for what was to come.
[upbeat music playing]
[man 2] In 1965, later in that year, you have Denmark Street in London.
That Maestro pedal makes its way over.
Only a few guys have them in London, the Beatles, people like that.
The guy walks in to Macari's instrument exchange on Denmark Street.
[Adrian] Who are Macari's?
They're a legendary shop run by legendary people, making legendary things,
and have had a massive and profound effect on our industry,
so, overall legends.
[Gary] This was all down to Vic Flick, who was the James Bond guitar man.
And he came in one day with a Maestro Fuzz-Tone.
can you check this out and do some... something a little bit better with it?
It's not giving me a good enough sound.
It's just this little short burping sound and I want a long sustain.
So I tried it out for him, and I couldn't really do anything with it.
And I said, leave it with me and I'll work on it, and I'll do you something.
Um, you know, develop, run, which I did, and I built him a Tone Bender.
[heavy distortion playing]
[Gary] Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck, and Spencer Davis, Manfred Mann,
all the names, you name it, they had it, you know, at that time.
[AnthonIt's the one that Pete Townshend got hold of.
I don't think, he liked it very much
because he gave it to Mick Ronson.
And of course, it became the signature
Bowie sound on virtually every bit of distortion on Bowie records.
It's one of these, so... It is really like the holy grail of fuzz boxes
along with this, which is the MK II,
and this... this came along six months later.
This has been used all over the place,
but most famously is, the Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page pedal.
So, the product is kind of important,
but what's most important are these guys getting hold of it and going, boof,
this is what's going on.
And basically, at that time, '65, there was nothing so, everybody had a Tone Bender.
[AnthonIt was a catalyst for everyone to suddenly want this fuzz sound.
And right then there was only one place they could get it.
I mean, it must have been... must've been incredible.
And I built another version for Marshall, which was the super-fast.
And all the other companies in England actually had Tone Bender-based fuzz boxes,
like, Rotosound, Barnes & Mullins, Hornby Skewes,
all the old manufacturers or importers
as they were had these pedals modified in some way or another.
Labels and music instrument companies,
people like that, didn't know,
what the hell a fuzz was even supposed to sound like,
you know, they're literally inventing like, what rock 'n' roll became
because no one even knew, what the hell were...
that they were trying to accomplish other than, well,
it needs to be louder and it needs to be more aggressive.
[rock music playing]
[Craig] That gave birth to the guitar solo in a lot of ways.
If you listen back to the early days
of The British Invasion or Buddy Holly, or people like that.
The solos tended to be fairly economical, you know,
quite short, and so, there weren't really tambour.
They were all treated from a melodic standpoint.
Effects made the solos possible from a tambour standpoint.
So, you have this significant kind of ironic moment
where an American accident in a country music studio creates an effect pedal,
which then is used by a British man, ends up on Denmark Street in London,
and is turned into the Tone Bender,
which then gives us everything from The Yardbirds to Led Zeppelin.
That's probably the most important moment in effects pedal history.
Because in 1966,
Arbiter takes the Tone Bender 1.5 and made the Fuzz Face.
[distorted music playing]
[Morgan] The Fuzz Face...
the one pedal that's made, like, a million different variations of it.
It's literally like, a little blurb out of an RCA transistor manual,
and some dude decided to make it.
[Jeorge] I'm a Fuzz Face fanatic. I love Fuzz Faces.
A Fuzz Face is an instrument,
so, you play to it and that's what's really fun.
It's very dynamic and interactive,
and... and you can get all sorts of crazy stuff from it.
And that's how Hendrix used it.
[rock music playing]
In the '60s, guitar was hugely popular,
but it had reached kind of a, um... kind of a plateau,
I think, with a lot of pop bands doing kind of the same thing.
And then, of course, Jimi Hendrix came along.
The Fuzz Face is a big one.
You know, Jimi Hendrix has used that and changed everything.
Jimi Hendrix, started it all, right?
It all started with Jimi.
He set a standard in guitar playing
that was heavily dependent on effects.
And even in the studio where he did the flanging things
with... with Eddie Kramer and all that.
That was... that was a big deal.
Well, certainly Jimi's pedals were tweaked.
There's no question.
Um, Roger Mayer would get in there with a screwdriver,
take it all apart and mess with the resistors,
and put different little transistors in,
and then it would be super-hot.
[man 3] So, Roger Mayer is,
I would class him probably as one of those legends of the effects pedal industry.
During the 1960s, he was working for the British Navy,
the Admiralty, as it was, uh, conducting underwater research.
It was during this time that he was going to a fair few gigs.
And it was at one gig, that he actually met Jimmy Page.
Jimmy Page, asked him, to solve a problem
which was to allow him to have more distortion, but with more sustain.
Roger went away, produced the device,
which as legend goes, Jimmy loved and used prolifically.
Roger also created another device.
We now know it as the Octavia.
He went to another gig and spoke to another legendary guitarist called, Jimi Hendrix.
[rock music playing]
[Vai] Hendrix reportedly, you know, gets this prototype,
runs and tracks some of the solos on this debut record.
You know, even like Purple Haze, for instance, uh,
where I think, that's an Octavia where you're listening, oh, what is that?
It's a type of fuzz that takes the... the wave form and folds it over,
and creates an octave up effect.
You know, when they talk about time travel and poking holes in the paper,
it's kind of a fuzz that does that.
Roger, I think, quit his job at the Admiralty,
and went on tour with Jimi Hendrix.
But he was described as Jimi Hendrix's secret weapon
because he essentially modified and serviced all of Jimi's amps and effects
which obviously got abused on a daily basis.
It's like everything that is Hendrix was handed to him at the moment it was invented.
We tend to just think, like, Jimi Hendrix was a killer guitar player
and he just went to the store and found all this stuff,
but it's more like these pedals found him.
So, you have this really wild chain of events,
three fuzz pedals creating genres in music within just a span of a few years.
These early fuzzes, part of why they sound so unique
is that the part itself that is fueling the circuit is so bad.
The germanium transistor is inconsistent. It's unpredictable.
It's your worst nightmare, if you're a circuit designer.
So, as quickly as that part could be done away with it was,
rightly so, and you see the first silicon fuzzes come into play.
The Arbiter Fuzz Faces start using BC108 transistors, BC109s.
This is what Hendrix really used more than anything,
and Roger Mayer's designs incorporated these.
You see the Tone Benders go to silicon.
In 1969 though, you see the Big Muff.
[distorted music playing]
[Johnny] My favorite pedal maker? Yeah, Mike Matthews by far.
Absolutely.
How do you not love that guy?
He's a crazy man.
If you want to talk about the mad professor, that's Mike Matthews.
Mike is quite a force to be reckoned with.
And he doesn't even play guitar, like, he plays piano.
And still he's responsible for so much of what we're doing in the industry to-date.
[soft music playing]
[ZacharThere's only one. He's a god.
To his company he said was born in a cloud of pot smoke.
He was having a conversation with his wife
and decided he was gonna just start a pedal company.
[Mike Matthews] Well, uh, while I was in college,
after my sophomore year with a friend,
I started promoting big name rock 'n' roll acts in the summer.
Coasters, The Drifters, Shirelles, The Rascals, The Byrds, Chuck Berry.
With Chuck Berry, he traveled alone, so, the promoter had to get the band.
My band was more straight, hard-hitting R&B.
So, I got them to back up Chuck Berry,
and I played keyboards on the... on the concert with Chuck Berry. It was two dates.
And then the promoter who sold me Chuck Berry...
he called me up a week before the date.
He says, "Mike, I need you to do me a favor.
I need... I got this band.
They're... they're... they're great.
They're... you need to take them for three nights."
That other band was Curtis Knight and the Squires.
And the guitar player that he said was amazing was Jimmy James.
But Jimmy James eventually became Jimi Hendrix,
and me and Jimi became real good, real best friends for... for a couple of years.
The hottest thing in pedals was, uh, Fuzz Tones.
Uh, Al Dronge, who is the founder of Guild Guitars wanted to sell fuzz tones.
So I'd go... I build them up, and this was while I was still working for IBM.
But then, that's just, when Jimi Hendrix became hot,
and everybody then wanted to play like Jimi Hendrix,
and Jimi was just vibrating his finger and the guitar would sing forever.
So, everybody wanted what they thought was, like, this distortion free sustaining.
And that would go up to 10 but, I mean,
if you could turn it up to 30, that's when it would, might start to overdrive and distort.
But with the LPB-1, all of a sudden, all amps were much louder.
[rock music playing]
[Mike] So, the LPB-1 was my first product under the Electro-Harmonix name.
So, in that same box, I just changed two of the capacitor values,
and we had a treble booster which was called the Screaming Bird.
And then we also had a bass booster, also changing some capacitors called the Mole.
And then we had, I made a little older drive distortion unit
and had a muffled sound called, so, I called that the Muff Fuzz.
And then later on, we developed a more complex distortion unit,
and I really fiddled around with that.
It had these multiple stages,
and I carefully rolled off the tones and that became the Big Muff.
[rock music playing]
[Billy] There the sound of, like, the greatest amp ever,
and the greatest guitar ever cranked to 147
and you're playing on the moon, right?
But you got to find this exact right fit tonally, where you get enough low-high combination.
You get the attack, you get the subs,
and that's what I always love about this Big Muff sound.
It's like... it kind of gives me everything
I want as a guitar player in sort of one mashed-up sound.
And I love it 'cause it says it's a distortion pedal.
It's like a different word.
You could play the same riff through them and your attitude will change playing to that box.
It's a more complex circuit, probably has 20 times the parts in it.
[Mike Matthews] And had this wonderful distortion, wonderful sustain,
it almost was distortion free, sweet, so it did sound like, Jimi Hendrix.
[JosIf it weren't for Mike Matthews, there would be fewer great pedals.
You know, I had no idea, how far back this company went
until I saw the vintage stash in the basement,
or met employees that have worked there like 30 years plus.
[Josh] I think you have to look at everything he pulled off.
I mean, bankruptcy twice?
Starts selling tubes, and then decides I'm gonna make my pedals here in Russia.
Like, who does that? It's crazy.
Comes back from the dust, you know, again.
It's an ultimate story of just a guy that is successful
because he's a great businessman and he's a great creator.
[Ben Fong] The '60s were a time of... of amazing change,
and it wasn't just changes in recording studios.
It was changes in the attitudes and the power of the artist.
Now, in the mid to late '60s with artists like Jimi Hendrix
and then especially The Beatles, some of the San Francisco bands,
they pretty much took control, and they came to the music with an entirely different mindset.
And I think that that helped set the tone for what, uh, the wah-wah entered into.
[mellow music playing]
I went to work for a company called Thomas Organ Company, when I was 18 years old.
One day, uh, I was sort of between jobs, and I was talking to my boss,
and he said he was wrestling with a problem on one of the VOX amplifiers
in that it had a switch on it called mid-range boost,
and the switch was very expensive, about $4.
And he was wondering, if I could devise a circuit
that would allow the mid-range boosts to be tuned with the potentiometer
which only cost about 30 cents.
So, you click, click, click, and you can get mid-range, more mid-range, more mid-range.
In order to give an expression to the voice of the guitar,
I asked the engineering department to take that MRB switch
that they had put in that amplifier,
put in this pedal here, so, that I can play the guitar,
and play... and pick at the same time.
Uh, so I went next door and asked a friend of mine, John Glennon,
if he would come into the office and plug his guitar into the pile of wires, and resistors,
and capacitors I had on the bench.
I turned the potentiometer, while he strummed some chords.
Then we looked at each other, he said, wow, that's a really great sound.
Then I looked over his shoulder and through a doorway into another room,
and, um, there was a VOX Jaguar organ.
So, I said, hey, John,
go steal that volume pedal from Frank's organ and let's put the pod in there.
The president of the company sent down word that he wanted to hear this thing.
And he said, "That sounds like,
a Clyde McCoy wah-wah trumpet thing."
And I thought to myself, what's a Clyde McCoy wah-wah trumpet thing?
[upbeat music playing]
[Del] Joe Benaron, who was CEO of Warwick called Clyde McCoy.
And he said, you... can... can we give you some money and we'll use your name.
And Clyde McCoy was living in Louisiana somewhere.
And he said, "Hey, fine with me." That was it.
That was the beginning of Clyde McCoy and the end of Clyde McCoy.
Ended in the fact,
that Clyde McCoy's name went on the bottom plate of the Wah-Wah Pedal
that was commercially released.
And I said, no, no, no, Joe, you don't get it.
I said, this is really a guitar thing.
So, would you let me make a record of original tunes, like I'm doing on record dates,
but I wanna describe what the growl of a wah would sound like,
what blues would sound like.
[man The fabulous new Crybaby Pedal opens the door to a variety of great new sounds.
Now, let's listen to the Crybaby Pedal in action.
[distorted music playing]
And, as, I was writing the music for it, composing it,
I was thinking somebody's got to really make this sound really great.
I told Frank Zappa about it and I said, Frank, you got to... you got to buy one of these.
And so he did buy one at Manny's in New York.
And I think, um, that's where, uh,
about the middle of 1967 is when Jimi Hendrix walked in
and saw Frank Zappa and he said, "What is that you're playing?"
And he said, "I bought this at Manny's, you know, Del told me about it."
So, Jimi went over and bought it.
[rock music playing]
[Skip] The wah-wah was a quiet, kept secret at the time.
A lot of people didn't know, what was making that sound.
They just heard the sound. It was like, damn, he's playing his ass off.
But see, if you can play at your feet,
you can play some of the wah-wah.
[man 5] And I think, the wah-wah was the first effect
that really spoke to the rock listener or pop music listener
because it virtually spoke.
[rock music playing]
[Eddie] The way Jimmy Page used it Dazed and Confused,
I remember sitting in the truck and watching it on the monitor,
and just being blown away, A, by the performance that's coming at me on the speakers,
and B, what is he doing with it?
In the areas of, uh, R&B and soul music,
I think Sly Stone has to be credited with being open to those sounds.
Soon enough, Norman Whitfield of Motown began hearing
what Sly was doing out of the Bay Area and said, "Man, that is a great sound."
And he began to apply it to his work at Motown.
[Dennis] Norman Whitfield, was there with one of the arrangers
and they counted off the song, and I come up with this wah-wah thing, and I was doing it,
and I could see some of the guys in The Funk Brothers, were looking at me
because they never heard that before.
I'd never forget the... the horn players,
they were older guys because we were young and they said,
"I wish he turned that chicka chicka whitewash shit down."
["Papa Was A Rollin' Stone" by The Temptations playing]
Cause it's like, it was the 3rd of September, wah, wah, wah, wah.
So, that's what it... You know, it's a Wah-wah pedal so that's what it does.
I would like to make it sound like something else other than wah-wah
so, it became more of a percussive tool for me.
You see, like a police car chase, you know,
The Six Million Dollar Man, and all the... all the '70s TV themes had... had wah-wah.
[Ben FonYou know, it's not just, uh, the old Jimi Hendrix, and Cream,
and Derek and the Dominos, but also more contemporary rockers use it.
Rage Against the Machine or Dave Matthews Band or U2.
And different instruments,
Miles Davis had his side players do the wah-wah
through their... their keyboards, for example,
and of course, he did it through his trumpet.
And King Curtis did it through his sax.
And so you find this sound throughout music,
and throughout all kinds of music.
I think stomp box has completely unlocked the door
to a... to an awful lot of creativity as far as what people did with guitars.
[Craig] Back in those days, a lot of the pedal was driven by popular sounds.
And there was also a period of time when innovation was valued highly in the music industry.
Ironically, with fewer choices,
there often tended to be more experimentation back in those days.
Things changed. Music changed.
People's attitudes about guitar and then the things they could do with guitar
certainly changed.
Man, you know, what a world they created.
[low beat music playing]
[Fran] In the early '70s, there was this huge explosion
of pedals because there was a huge explosion in application of technologies for solid state.
And then around '70, '71, '72, all these analog effects started to come out.
New chips every week for, um, doing just about everything in the analog realm.
It's a sordid tale, but at its core, it's people trying new things.
and then try new things with new components when they came out.
[Joel] I'm way into the Mu-Tron stuff.
It's all just super interesting to me like how... how that stuff was coming out and then,
you know, the music of the time was influenced by it,
and then they influenced each other,
and how that... I think, that continues of course.
I went to MIT to study electrical engineering in 1964,
and I was interested in synthesizers.
My friend Izzy was making electronic locks which used electro-optical codes.
Izzy, who wasn't quite as crazy about electronic music as I was
said, "Well, can you make something that actually makes regular music?"
At which point we collaborated and made a synthesizer.
What we ended up doing was to shop around until we actually found somebody
who could buy and finance the synthesizer.
That was Al Dronge who was, at that time,
the President of Guild Musical Instruments.
After a few months of flailing around, we got a contract with Guild
and proceeded to build the synthesizer,
and what we call the Timbre Generator to go with it.
One beautiful spring day, I came into the office
and phone rings, it's Aaron on the phone.
Al Dronge has been killed in an airplane crash.
That was the end of Al Dronge. And that was also
the beginning of the end of the synthesizer project.
We started to talk about taking some parts of the synthesizer
and seeing if we could squeeze them into a pedal that was affordable.
The decision was to use the envelope follower,
voltage controlled filter, and a pre-amp
to make a new kind of musical effect.
That's what we eventually packaged as the Mu-Tron III.
[distorted music playing]
[Beigel] I think from the very beginning,
both Aaron and I wanted to put studio quality sound
into affordable pedals.
That shaped our outlook to design from the beginning all the way to the end.
The thing that put us so-called on the map
was Stevie Wonder's recording of "Higher Ground",
which was an exquisite use of a Mu-Tron in a song
that I felt was very appropriate to the times.
In the '70s, the big stuff was filters.
Frank Zappa, Grateful Dead.
For Jerry Garcia of all the different people that used it
and made good sounds of it,
I think that almost the signature use of the product.
[quirky music playing]
The photomod combination was something
that was very great at low noise and handling high signals.
First was a two-cell photomod for the Mu-Tron III, and later a six-cell photomod,
which were used in the Phasor and Bi-Phase.
[heavy distortion playing]
[Vai] Still, the Mu-Tron Bi-Phase
is a fantastic piece of gear as a pedal.
Uh, it just has these generators sweeps
that can, uh, manipulate various frequencies
and move the tonality around.
Well, the Bi-Phase and all of this Mu-Tron stuff I heard about
when I was very young, and I was reading Frank Zappa interviews
'cause he was one of the first ones to use this device
in a very musical way, I believe, you know?
And, uh, so I always, they always held a mystique,
and when I could afford it later on,
I just started trying to collect them.
My dad was one of the people that was always at the forefront
of trying out different things and using them in ways
that a lot of people wouldn't use them.
So Frank would take an existing piece of gear
or an existing piece of anything and just get into it, pull it,
and tweeze it until it did something he was hearing.
And there was Utility Muffin Research Kitchen
which is his studio in his home.
And right underneath the control room was kind of like a little, uh...
a little office of sorts.
It was a work room that, uh, his engineers,
one of them in particular Midget, this guy Midget Sloatman,
who was, uh, Frank's wife's brother was brilliant.
And he would go down there and he would tweak all this gear,
Frank's gear and guitars, and put effects in the guitars,
and take existing effects and just tweak them to get more and more.
It didn't hold any rules or boundaries.
I had this one pedal that I used all through high school. It was my favorite pedal.
It was an odd pedal because it had a wah-wah and the distortion built into it.
And I carried it around, and I used it everywhere, and I brought it out to California,
and I had it in my first Frank Zappa rehearsal. [chuckles]
And he said, "What is that thing?"
I remember thinking, Frank, take anything, don't take that pedal.
And he's playing it and playing it, and I'm like...
Oh, you know, you can have that if you like,
and he looks at me, he goes, "Thank you."
[laughs]
So it's buried in the Zappa vault somewhere.
[Dweezil] That's... that's the thing that you just keep searching for
as a guitarist is the thing that will put you
in the creative state of mind to play your best
and, you know, ultimately, be able to capture that,
and deliver it to people 'cause the sound that you make
is the sonic fingerprint of what you do.
And that's what you deliver to people so that they remember
what it is that you have to offer, you know?
So if you have all these pedals and they create the sonic fingerprint that you make,
that is a big part of the process of making music.
If they came out with the Phasor then you'd hear it on albums,
people would wanna buy it and they would...
they just couldn't make them fast enough.
And these were just,
uh, kind of based on maybe studio effect ideas
back in the... like the flanger.
They wanted to get the sound of tape flanging.
[Josh] Modulation is the effect of modulating the pitch
or the movement of the signal.
And the earliest forms of that are things like
simply plugging into a Leslie cabinet.
You see this on Beatles records,
and there's tons of artists who did this.
You also get into the use of tape machines.
The term flange is a Beatles [inaudible].
I believe the story goes,
John Lennon puts his thumb on the flange of the tape machine
and... and it smears the note, drags it next to the pure tape recording.
So you have these early instances of mechanical effect,
and the Phasors kind of start in '68 with the Uni-Vibe.
[distorted music playing]
People who hear Hendrix, they hear the "Star-Spangled Banner".
They hear "Machine Gun".
The idea has always been, well, the Uni-Vibe it's a rotary effect.
You put your foot down, and you speed the cabinet up or slow it down.
The inventor of that says that wasn't the case.
He grew up as a kid listening to radio frequencies coming from Russia.
They'd bounce off the atmosphere and they come down, and he said,
he listened to these as a kid and when they bounced off
the atmosphere, they would whoosh, whoosh, they would phase,
which is so bizarre, but Hendrix gets it.
And it's forever known as like this rotary speaker effect.
[Art] People started seeing the possibilities of what'd happen,
you know, if you started screwing around
with different kinds of circuits that would do things
that hadn't been done before, but to take it beyond that point,
it... it... it definitely took some innovators.
I think MXR was really on the forefront of a lot of that innovation.
You've got Keith Barr and you've got Terry Sherwood.
And they started out as guys that really just wanted to be repairing stuff.
Keith was the designer, the engineer designing products,
and Terry was running the business,
handling the financial end of it. And Michael was a salesman.
[Richard] Keith and I drove down to New York
to the Audio Engineering Society Show in 1972.
We walked the show,
and I think that's when Keith kind of got the bug on,
maybe we can make some products for the audio industry.
Now besides just repairing stuff, that's when the pedal started firming,
and one of the guys stopped by for his repairs and brought by a pedal.
Keith looked at that and we got the idea for the first one pedal, the Phase 90.
[rock music playing]
[Joe] You can hear MXR Phase 90 or Phase 45 blindfolded,
you know, it... it really is a very, um, distinguishable phase sound.
You plug into that thing and it's one knob,
and it's like you put it at like eight o'clock
and you're, you have Eruption.
You put it at 12 o'clock and you've got Rush 2112.
You put it up at, you know, three o'clock
and you've got Zakk Wylde today. It looks cool 'cause it's orange.
The term genius is thrown around, uh, by a lot of people too easily.
Keith Barr is the only person I've met in my life that I would say is a genius.
Keith dropped out of high school when he was 16.
He took all of the advanced chemistry courses,
all the advanced science, all the advanced math classes he could, quit school,
walked out when he was in his sophomore year,
never got a high school degree, never went to college for a day,
taught himself electronics.
Designing phase shifter, designing distortion,
plus products that are going to be the industry standard for 40 years.
An absolutely, utterly, brilliant, fearless guy
who I just had endless admiration for.
[Richard] Uh, Keith and Terry were renting the lower half of the house here,
and, uh, they have use of the basement
so we set up a little production facility in the basement of the house,
and we're making a dozen at a time or so.
The board, it was raw material we bought
and we actually etched the boards here
with a drill press drilling the holes in the boxes and everything.
We painted and still screwed the outside boxes and everything here also.
If you look at some of the early pedals,
Electro-Harmonix, they were big. Everything was big.
Where MXR for me was the first company
that made a phase tone that could fit in the palm of your hand and in your backpack.
You know, you're not carrying around this behemoth of a pedal.
[Ron] The box that we use, the Bud box was one of the things
that made the product so different,
because up until this time effects pedals have been
these little bent metal things that, you know, just didn't stand up,
and that's what really set the company apart.
I know one of the things that Michael used to do when he'd go,
first time he went to Manny's in New York,
he basically pulled the sales guys out from behind the counter.
He said, "Come out here and I'll show you something."
Took them out on the street, and took the Phase 90 and whipped it
like 50 feet up in the air, and watched it land on the sidewalk
or on the street, and then picked it up,
took it back in the store and plugged it in, and said,
"How about that?" You know, it worked?
You know, MXR started coming out with all these different colors, right?
And subconsciously, especially the young people,
you started identifying the sound with the colors, you know,
like, even today, if I hear a certain chorus sound,
it sounds yellow to me because the MXR stereo chorus was yellow. [chuckles]
And flangers, that sounds, sounds black to me
because that was the color of the MXR flange.
You know what I mean? So they were really smart, man,
to kind of connect, all these primary instincts of ours, you know?
The distortion pedals certainly would be part of someone's sound
so we wanted to come up with some distortion pedal.
The Distortion + is one of the first ones.
And Terry, Keith's partner, had worked at a radio station
and was used to using compression on vocal mics and everything.
So we, you know, a compressor, i.e., our Dyna Comp
became one of our first staples
and so that's what kinda started the first three or four products.
[Ron] It translated over to all of a sudden all of the major acts
were using MXR pedals and talking about them.
[Art] You wouldn't have a lot of the sounds that Eddie Van Halen got
had it not been for MXR, for example.
You know, great talents like he were able to do with effects like that
really did change the world.
[rock music playing]
[Ron] We moved to this factory building
and took over more and more of the factory as it grew.
By the time I left in '79, it was doing $8, $9 million a year.
It was a hugely successful company
from nothing to this company where we're writing the rules,
we're writing the rules for, uh, the music industry,
and we're writing the rules for business in a lot of respects.
And, uh, an exciting time.
[Albini] In the '70s and '80s,
you would only know about a special effect of some kind through its recorded evidence.
Like, you would hear a sound and say,
oh, I wonder how they did that sound.
And then you'd have to do reading in magazines
and hope that he was asked a question
about how he made that sound and then he would spill the beans.
It was kind of like the Wild West for a little bit.
You, if you didn't have something that did what you wanted,
you... you find somebody that knew how to tinker with stuff
and they would just build something crazy.
[Dweezil] You know, like when Peter Frampton would use the talk box
on Frampton Comes Alive!
that sort of sparked an awareness of that sound.
It made people realize that was possible,
and then you started to hear that more and more.
[Peter] I had become friends with, uh, George.
He calls me up. He said, "I'm doing a solo album.
I'd like you to come and play some acoustic with me."
So one day George says, "Well, this pedal is still late
coming in from Nashville, you know?"
I said, "Oh, wow, that's great."
Then I realized he was on Nashville Skyline.
And every other country record you can think of
is Pete Drake just about.
And he set up his pedal steel and then we did a few tracks.
And then in a slow moment between tracks or something,
he started to get this... this little box out
and put it on the edge of the pedal steel,
and is plugging something in here and another wire in there.
And then he got this tube out
and put the tube in his mouth and he said, "Check this out."
And he just goes, I am a guitar.
["I'm just a guitar" playing]
I just went that sound I've been hearing up here
ever since I heard the station Radio Luxembourg in Europe
that would broadcast to, to England.
♪ Radio Luxembourg, 208 ♪
So when Pete Drake does this, I go, it's full circle.
There it is. There's that sound.
And I said, where... where do I get one of these?
And he said, "Well, I made this one myself,"
and Joe Walsh was lent that talk box that I saw
by Pete Drake to do "Rocky Mountain Way". It's that one.
And then I guess Bob Heil saw it, and it's very quiet.
So Joe, obviously said,
"Why don't you make another one? You know. And I'm sure that's what happened.
And Bob Heil made him one, you know,
and then that became the Heil talk box
that I then got given by Bob Heil for Christmas one year.
And that's when I started using it.
["Show Me The Way" by Peter Frampton playing]
It was if, you know, somebody lit a firecracker on everybody's ass.
They all just jumped up out of their out of their seats
and the girls were all screaming.
It's just a fantastic moment that a sound like that
would just excite the audience so much.
[Art] The development of stomp box
has kind of mirrored the development of rock.
Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, and The Beatles
and The Rolling Stones didn't really have a playbook.
You can't just sit down and say that you're gonna invent something.
It's probably not gonna happen.
It has to come in a, in an organic manner.
[Josh] An Asian company invents the Bucket-Brigade chip set.
They see Roland, who's making all these synthesizers
and guitar pedals, they said, "Hey, we have a new technology.
We want you to be the first to use it."
And Roland puts it in a new guitar amp
and they call it the Jazz Chorus.
And that guitar amp has two speakers,
and they made it move like a rotary cabinet.
So the Bucket-Brigade chip is put in that amp.
They just pull it out of the amp and put it in a pedal.
[distorted music playing]
[Josh] You take the chorus, which is a short delay,
so if you blend the clean signal and its chorus,
if you take all clean signal out of a Bucket-Brigade, it's vibrato.
And then another Bucket-Brigade comes along, and another,
and you can do longer times, and you end up with...
[grunts]
And you use a Bucket-Brigade to replicate tape echo.
Some of the earliest effects in the studio were just
repurposing conventional studio stuff,
and that's how the earliest slap echos were made.
Like the Sun Studio's famous slap echo effect
was just a regeneration on a monotape machine.
[Andy] So we owe a lot to the Bucket-Brigade device
because that meant you didn't have to worry
about cleaning your tape heads anymore,
or getting your Echoplex serviced.
The Bucket-Brigade changes everything
because it led to the Memory Man.
[mellow music playing]
Well, what's funny about it is it's really horrible.
It's like... [imitating Memory Man sound]
You know, just... it's degrading,
but it's magical 'cause there's a little bit of unpredictability
just like the germanium transistor.
We love the... we love the unnatural unpredictability.
We like things to be a little off so the Bucket-Brigade is a little off.
[David] You think about someone like The Edge, you know,
you hear a U2 song and if you turn off all the effects,
it's like he's, you're just playing like a couple of notes
and it's probably not a great riff.
You put all those effects on,
and all of a sudden, you're filling up an arena.
You're filling up a stadium with a wall of sound,
you know, effects, and the dynamics, and the intensity,
and sometimes make the song.
In the '70s, you started seeing like mass-produced pedals.
You started seeing bifurcation of musical forms.
You had Kraftwerk on one side, you had disco on another,
and you had classic rock, things happening.
So there was a lot of... of movement going on
and music was really exploding at that point
because the baby boomers now had disposable income.
So that's when you started seeing companies
manufacturing pedals in... in quantities.
We also... we were the first in the... in the world
with the low cost flanger, the Electric Mistress,
the first with a low cost echo unit, the very early Memory Man,
the first with a cheap digital delay,
which was a two second digital delay.
We were the first with low cost samplers, uh, Instant Replay.
[Beigel] And that was about the time
that I had Mike Matthew's picture on the center of a dartboard.
[laughs] How could he do it?
You know, he was making these boxes
which would often fall apart as soon as they were made,
beating us through the market with our own designs, we thought,
and just generally outpacing us.
There were a lot of effects that were coming out like crazy.
When I was doing sessions in LA,
these guys were coming in with pedal boards and he had tons of stuff.
[Andy] Early on, you saw the old pedal boards built by Cornish,
you know, for Andy Summers, and David Gilmour, and Jimmy Page, and it was just very bare bones.
Basically, take the pedal out of its enclosure, put it in there,
make it reliable, make it lasts for the tour.
[Adrian] Pete Cornish had very similar beginnings to Roger Mayer
in that his electronics career started with the British military.
He moved to Sound City in London fixing the biggest stars'
equipment, modifying it, improving it.
It was in Covent Garden in London
where he started to branch out and make custom pedal boards for artists.
And essentially, Pete Cornish became the go-to guy
for ensuring massive touring artists' gear
no matter whereabouts in the world the artist was.
They got repeatability and consistency from Pete Cornish rig.
[Anthony] With the advent of prog rock on, you're hearing those long,
sustained, sweets, melodic sounds
as opposed to the... the rock sounds we had in the late '60s,
and the pedal definitely moved with the times.
I was pretty wild by when I started to come through
the history of pedals was David Gilmour.
There's so many effects if you look into them.
It's just like the name that is attached to them first is David Gilmour.
[Andrew] If you listen to Pink Floyd recordings,
you're not gonna be like hearing effects all the time 'cause it's subtle.
You have a song, you wanna enhance what the song is trying to tell you.
And if the effects are not doing that, then you're using it the wrong way.
[Gilbert] Alex Lifeson, Alex, you know, they, they would build effects
into the songs like Anthem where it goes...
[imitating guitar playing]
You know, that was, that was the hook of...
of Anthem was a was an analog delay.
[Vai] Brian May was a master,
and his use of delays was the first time
I heard somebody do something really musical with them.
[NelSteve Howe, uh, and Robert Fripp.
Steve Hackett, too, in Genesis.
These progressive rock guys, so-called,
they're the ones that I think that really started developing,
uh, a wider palette of expression on the guitar,
and were able to introduce the idea of guitar being, uh,
something that didn't always have to sound like a guitar.
It makes you look at your music a little differently.
And next thing you know,
you're writing down the road map with some more creativity.
[rock music playing]
The colors that you can get, man, really changed the music.
There's certain pieces of music
that would not be the same without the effect.
Exhibiting at the NAMM shows in, uh, about 1976 on,
we began to notice Japanese folks coming around to our booth and taking pictures,
and of course, other booths are taking pictures.
And then you have a brand new thing which had not quite happened.
You have large group of Japanese pedal makers and companies
coming... coming out of the woodworks.
The founder of Roland, uh, his name is Ikutaro Kakehashi
and Mr. Kakehashi founded Roland in 1972.
He started a little, a subset of Roland called MEG.
He had assigned them some products to make specifically small, simple,
easy to use products focused mainly on guitars.
Tom Beckmen was the president of Roland US,
and he simultaneously was also interested in making some kind of products
so he made a product called The BOSS.
Mr. Kakehashi said, "Oh, The BOSS. I like that.
Can we use that name?" Of course. Mr. Beckman said, "Please use it."
[Marcus] And that's when they made the switch over to BOSS,
and it was like a radical change because the chassis all look a little bit dissimilar.
They all looked like different products.
And we went to the BOSS pedal,
the compact pedal that we know right now.
It was like a radical change. It was like really cool industrial design.
[Andy] The BOSS pedals, when they came out in the '70s,
that's that, I mean, that's it.
We all use BOSS 9-volt power supply, you know, like they standardized everything.
They made these indestructible units.
[Marcus] You started hearing about the BOSS pedals,
and a lot of guitar players were walking around with this whole BOSS carrying cases.
[man 6] The funny thing about BOSS is,
you look on any pro pedalboard, there's always a BOSS pedal.
[man 7] One company, the same enclosure,
it just says what it is, chorus, distortion, overdraft, and they're colorful.
And you just look at the ad and you feel like that does it all. I'm not looking anywhere else.
[Chris] With this particular pedal, this design,
you just press down and under this little screw in the back
and the battery was available to be put in it in here.
The other thing was, is that this whole surface was part of the pedal.
So, well, typically, when you use the pedal
and you just need to click on a little button,
it goes click, and this is silent switching.
It would actually make no sound within the circuit so that was neat.
This one people die for, OD-1. This is... They call it the magic box.
The 1970s, they introduced the op-amp
which allows for kind of almost more sequential operation
in terms of the current flow, where you have guitar
hits op-amp then gets EQ'ed and then sent out.
[Andy] The great thing about the op-amp was that you can get a sound
that sounded like you're amping cranked up.
And, you know, at that time, in the mid to late '70s,
you still had a lot of non-master volume amplifiers
so you hear the sound man saying, turn it down,
you then look to another thing, like a pedal, to get that overdriven sound.
[Josh] The ProCo Rat, MXR Distortion +, the DOD 250,
the Guyatone ZOOM BOX,
and you basically have this host of brand new distortion pedals
come out within three years in the late '70s, '78,
this new idea of overdrive soft clipping
so the OD-1 turns into the TS-808.
[heavy distortion playing]
BOSS had a patent on the asymmetric clipping so Ibanez,
um, did symmetric clipping, which is actually smoother,
which, um, a lot of people prefer.
And the Tube Screamer was just, I don't know if it was dumb luck or what,
but it was very well tuned and it just works really well
for people using Stratocasters and Fender amps. It just warms them up.
Gives you the sustain, gives you some distortion mixing, well, easier to play.
And it also cuts through the bands really well.
With a lot of amplifiers, when you crank them up,
they start getting tubby in the bottom. It gets flabby.
It gets in the way of the bass player,
and Tube Screamer fixes all that stuff
so it's kind of a magic little pedal.
Almost every genre of music, there's somebody you'll find has used the Tube Screamer, right?
I mean, early Metallica stuff, that's a Tube Screamer.
You know, most people say, well, you have a Stevie Ray Vaughan, Tube Screamer,
but people wouldn't think Metallica.
That is one of those pedals that was around early enough.
It did something that not many other pedals did.
[Matthew] 'Cause people like BOSS, Pearl, uh, Maxon, Ibanez,
because the manufacturing costs were so low,
they were able to out-compete Keith Barr and the guys at MXR,
and out-compete Mike Matthews.
[mellow music playing]
[Anthony] The Japanese BOSS pedal killed the first box.
These things looked like dinosaurs, and everyone turned around and said,
heck, I don't want big, stupid, Fuzz Box anymore.
We want the new BOSS, you know, OD-1 DS-1, and they were great.
I was using it, you know, myself. Even I thought Tone Bender was dated.
[mellow music playing]
[Josh] In the '80s, you have massive technology advancement.
You see this with computers and technology in general.
You see like the first cell phones, and weird stuff like that
so all of that pours into the guitar world.
The technology worldwide ends up being applied to guitar.
So you have these problems where people are trying to do the next step,
but they can't find the building block yet.
[rock music playing]
[Adrian] The 1980s is known as a decade of excess.
Essentially, the music industry was no different
to, uh, glam metal, spandex, massive amplifier stacks, massive hair,
even bigger shoulder boards, um, and huge pointy guitars.
From an effects pedal perspective, things shifted as well.
Despite the influx of all the Japanese manufacturers,
the trend moved towards to these massive refrigerator-sized rack units.
[Scott] In the '60s, you're getting fuzzes,
you're getting an accident turned into a... a thing.
And then in the '70s, all these effect types just erupt.
And then in the '80s things kind of stalled for a moment.
[David] Well, I think in the '80s, everything got a lot more digital.
And so in the studio, I think there were a lot of different processors and harmonizers
that people in all genres of music were using,
whether it was hair metal, or pop, or hip hop, or whatever.
[Phillipe] In the '80s, they got silly. They used big racks.
They go out of control with a lot of the stuff.
They start to wander into total paradox of choice
where people have a million sounds, and none of them sound good.
You know, you'd go into a recording studio
and play straight guitar.
And then an engineer would add chorus after you left.
At that time, it was basically one effect per rack.
When I was touring with like Dave Roth,
this was really before these multi effects units,
I had the equivalent of three giant refrigerators
filled with gear, and that was my rig.
[Lisa] Many of us got bit with the Rockman bug.
I fell in love with the Scholz stuff.
Tom Scholz is kind of the ultimate DIY guy,
super intelligent guy, amazing guitar player,
you know, basically made a lot of his own equipment.
[Art] There was a natural tendency
to kind of ditch pedals for a while.
You wound up filling a rack with all these sound producing effects.
Eventually you wind up with a signal that's coming out the other end
and it's kind of not what you wanted.
It's over-processed, if you will.
[Andy] I mean, we're at a point where we weren't ready
for a lot of those digital effects,
you know, the technology wasn't there
so it's a lot of those sterile sounding delays and reverbs came from that era.
For me, it seemed cumbersome
as an improviser to have to scroll through parameters
to make the simplest change in volume or tone.
I like the immediacy of what's now become known as the stomp box.
[Art] They started to realize that the sounds were more alive
and were more tangible through pedals on the floor
than they were through scads of rack-mounted effects.
[Josh] At the same time BOSS, I think, is the most significant story.
BOSS and Ibanez kind of owned the '80s.
BOSS invents, you know, the first ever compact analog delay,
the DM-2, the first ever compact digital delay, the DD-2.
[Andy] It's a huge milestone with BOSS and their digital delay.
This is the first time that you can have clear repeats that sounded like that tape echo.
It has a huge frequency range, and it's in this tiny box.
I mean, we have BOSS to thank for that.
And they've continued that same DD series to today.
[Gilbert] We had the great honor of playing on The Tonight Show,
you know, back when that meant something.
And we did a Mr. Big Tune called "Just Take My Heart,"
which has like ultimate clean sound at the beginning.
And I remember the guy from Ibanez going, like,
how did you get that sound? Oh, the clean sound was unbelievable.
Like, a couple of BOSS pedals and my blind control.
[Josh] I went to a sound check with The Cure.
I walked up to Robert Smith's guitar rig.
I'm just looking down, and it's like,
the original plastic BOSS boards, one here, one here
follow the lead lines back to the amps.
And it's like, there are like a BOSS chorus pedal gaff taped
to the amp with the knobs on, always on.
And it's just like he needs nothing else.
Anything that I'm listening to,
I immediately kind of want to uncover that mystery
of what makes that sound, sound like that.
Prince was another big one who just always played BOSS pedal
so I was like, well, maybe I just need to play BOSS pedals, maybe that will work.
[Ron] Went to work for Roland and inherited the BOSS line
which became MXR's biggest competitor.
And Roland grew from literally a million dollars a year.
By the time I left Roland, it was a $125 million a year company in the USA.
The guys at MXR didn't like that very much
because they were suffering at the same time that I went and did well at Roland.
BOSS was the pedal champion in the '80s
because, what, in 1983, Electro-Harmonix was run out of business by the unions.
In 1984, MXR collapsed because of whatever reason.
So floodgates opened and the Japanese pedals became dominant
because they were made really well
and the only real American competition was DOD, and... and maybe Ross.
[man 8] You have Ibanez and BOSS,
and distribution is everything then,
and Ibanez decides to stop distribution and go direct to dealers,
and it left this gaping hole.
And a company called Arion steps in, and they're widely distributed.
So you have this first glance of like mass-produced plastic Japanese pedals,
which is some of the coolest pedals.
[Lisa] When I discovered the Arion line
and then some BOSS stuff, you know, in the '80s,
you know, it was affordable to actually be able to add some effects to your signal path.
[Josh] Reverberation developed in the studios,
and this is anything from chamber reverb,
where you have speakers at one end and a mic at the other,
and just picking up the natural acoustics of that room to plate reverb.
Again, a massive piece of machinery.
It did go down in size with spring reverb,
but again, you really didn't have reverb in pedal form for quite some time.
1985, two are released. They're the first ever reverb pedals,
but they're actually really horrible Bucket-Brigade delays.
I think it's the DOD FX45 and the Arion reverb.
I mean, the DOD FX45 when they released it, they were first,
but it was so bad that DOD never made another reverb.
So they like gave up, they're like, this is it, we're out.
[AndSo in the '80s, obviously you had digital reverb at your fingertips,
or at least over in your refrigerator rig.
[Josh] Something starts happening
and it's the technology of effects,
and these new sounds created new forms of music.
All the post-punk stuff, from the UK particularly,
you know, that from The Cure to the Siouxsie and the Banshees, Killing Joke,
there was a lot of really cool guitar stuff happening, you know?
[AndThat actually did spawn all new sounds and music,
especially, you know, reverse reverb and things you couldn't really get before.
["Loveless" by My Bloody Valentine playing]
[Kevin] And from Bill, this was like, you got to use my guitars,
and one of them was a Jazzmaster.
And I picked it up and started to strum it
and go, wow, this is cool, you know,
and I put it through, um, a reverse reverb and then thought that sounds good.
And I thought, oh, turn the tone down.
I said, wow, it sounds totally like some weird tape,
sort of copy of a copy, of a copy, of a copy.
And then it was playing fast
and sort of bending the tremolo already going this way going hmm, hmm, hmm.
[man 9] Kevin Shields was really the first
and only person using a tremolo arm on a guitar
to make a psychedelic wall of sound no one had heard before.
And it's a common misconception
that he used a lot of effects on those records because he actually didn't.
But the influence that that sound had on a generation of new groups
looking for their own sound is massive.
And many of these new groups turn to effects pedals to create their sound.
[Lance] Taking a lot of the same instrumentation
that you find in traditional rock music,
but using them in a non-traditional fashion
to build those atmospheric soundscapes,
I can't make it sound like I'm in a canyon
with just plugging my guitar into an amp.
[man 10] But you see companies like BOSS, you see DigiTech,
you see this digital world become kind of tangible in... in the late '80s,
like the Whammy is a cool example
of just like putting your foot on that and throwing your note, uh, like that's really weird.
I mean, obviously the Whammy pedal is really well-known
because of, uh, Tom Morello and Rage Against the Machine and all that.
[Albini] There are some musicians
who use the Whammy as an expressive part of their playing,
and they literally can't play some of their riffs if the Whammy pedal doesn't work.
[rock music playing]
It's gonna... it's gonna inspire you to do something
that you wouldn't do if you didn't have it.
The evolution of technology gave us new pieces to the puzzle,
and we were able to create sounds that had never been heard.
[Craig] I think what maybe caused the resurgence of the boutique pedals
was the dissatisfaction with a lot of the early digital effects.
Digital had not reached the level of sophistication that it has now.
And so you just could not get that "analog sound."
[Andrew] I was always unhappy with the overdrives
and... and distortions that were available at that time.
I just wanted to have that nice amp sound, but at a lower volume
so you don't have to crank it up and everybody's complaining.
And then I developed this product further and further
until I got to the point that the first SansAmp was born.
I must be like one of the first guys because, like, in '89,
I built the first pieces in my kitchen in Manhattan.
And I took it down to Sam Ash and I showed it to them. It was like $300.
And they laughed first because it was so expensive.
They've never seen a pedal that expensive.
But I said like, "Please, please just take it as a consignment.
If you can't sell it, I'll take it back.
If you sell it, I'll just, you know, bring more."
They sold it the next day to Def Leppard.
[man 11] Maybe there was a disgust
with the big feeling of some of the companies, the marketing, the saturation.
I think it, in a lot of ways, parallels hair metal and grunge.
Hair metal, all that stuff, was just absolutely crushed by grunge and alternative music.
And I think that was a main force in... in people using pedals again,
and you saw bands like Sonic Youth and Nirvana
just going back to these pedals that were just secondhand.
[BlakAnd I feel like the '90s kind of blew the doors after that.
Kurt Cobain stepped on a DS-1.
Everyone's like, "Oh, wait, that's pretty cool."
"What are... what are all those little boxes he's kicking around on stage?"
[man 12] That's a very simple solution
to how do you make the chorus sound bigger
is you just blow it up with a Fuzz Tone.
[Kevin] Sonic Youth actually really mastered that back in those days.
You know, they were doing bits where they go to nothing
and then just go, bang, you know what I mean?
There were people who could craft that more dynamically
and make it more expressive like Dinosaur is probably the... the best example.
Other people of this generation
would think of the effects pedals as kind of an afterthought.
And he thought of those layers of distortion
as fundamental voices for his instrument.
I think it's the end section of "The Lung".
I listened to it over and over again.
The different sort of dynamics at the end,
and the different... there's a variety of pedal coming in,
the fuzz, and the wah-wah,
and it go round, and round, and round, you know the bit I mean?
J Mascis was blowing my flipping mind.
[rock music playing]
[J Mascis] Um, when I was learning to play guitar,
I was learning to play effects at the same time,
like, you know, I wanted the effects as part of playing guitar.
So I was kinda... it was all I was kinda all doing it at once,
and I got this Deluxe Big Muff,
and I had the Electric Mistress, and then I got a Wah-Wah.
I mean, I knew I liked fuzz in for sure, and the noise,
and, um, I didn't ever understood subtle effects
like, oh, this is transparent.
Or it was like, why would you turn it on then?
You know, I don't understand what's that.
That always baffled me.
Back in the '90s, there wasn't this big craze for vintage gear.
It was just, you know, you had Thurston Moore grabbing an old Big Muff.
And Billy Corgan using this Big Muff from a decade before.
It wasn't about the mystique of the gear.
It was just using the tools that were available at the time.
[Billy] There was a band that we were friends with, Catherine.
They were all using Big Muff, all three guitar players had Big Muff.
and there was the sound in the room and it was like, what is that sound?
"Oh, it's this pedal."
There was nothing like I read it in a magazine and I went and got the pedal.
I mean, we literally went somewhere, found the pedal for 75 bucks.
So, yeah, we went out and got them.
We started rehearsing with them
and then that became sort of the "Siamese Dream" sort of sound.
And then even when we did the album,
and I told Butch Vig that this is the sound that I wanted.
He was like, there's no way.
And then don't forget, I was stacking,
like, in some cases, as many as six rhythm tracks so it was a lot to handle.
It killed all the cymbals, but that's the sound of that record.
[rock music playing]
It was kind of like what we liked about My Bloody Valentine,
the sort of the shoegazer thing,
but it was like as if Black Sabbath was melded with a shoegazer band,
and suddenly, we're getting this kind of warping feeling.
There's a now defunct music store that used to be in San Francisco,
and I remember going in there one time looking for Big Muffs.
I asked the guy how much it was and he named some crazy price.
And I kind of did one of these, and he said, "Well, it's your fault."
[Andy] Another great example is Graham Coxon from Blur.
You know, he... that he grabbed that Shin-ei fuzz
and, you know, use that for the solo for Coffee & TV
just because it was probably something that was, uh, cool looking
and it sounded, you know, unruly and it did the job.
It wasn't that, uh, he read about, you know, other artists that used it,
and he used what was available at the time.
[rock music playing]
[Graham] I never really studied up on anything.
There was no YouTube. There was... there was no person saying,
well, how does this distortion pedal clean up if you back up the volume?
There was none of that. I didn't know any of that stuff.
["13" by Blur playing]
That, you know, it was just, you know, and then pressing
and then go and I'll put it there and then pressing some, you know,
and that's how it went all the way through.
And it was just sort of... it was just to earmark that section
as a... as a solo section or an instrumental section.
And I said, that would be fine. Let's go on to the next thing.
And that was one where it was like a hat trick.
There was tons of good goals in that.
And then sometimes, at other times, it's utter rubbish, so...
You couldn't find a good analog pedal really in... in the '90s
other than, you know, Ibanez was still making some good stuff.
I don't really know what changed,
but people started wanting to go for more organic tones again.
I think after, you know, almost a decade of everybody has the BOSS pedals,
that's all they have, you really wanted something different.
And when you saw the Full-Drive ad, you bought it
'cause like your friends didn't have it.
That is the beginning of this whole thing maybe, the guitar pedal craze.
[rock music playing]
[Blake] Mike Fuller runs Fulltone
which is, I mean, I think everyone has OCD at this point or has had an OCD.
This guy starts the company in '91.
And in '96 he found his ticket. This is a Full-Drive 2.
This is, uh, serial number 171,
February of 1996, label maker.
Uh, story goVintage Guitar magazine talks about this, kind of blew his business up.
I think he's sold 80 billion of these.
They're currently in outer space.
[man 13] At the time of pre-internet,
vintage effects were really hard to come by,
and we saw the music scene coming around
where musicians were again interested in those vintage tones.
So Mike really used this as inspiration,
and was really into bringing back some of those collectible items,
but also add an element
that wasn't really there on the first time around, and that's reliability.
[rock music playing]
[Jeorge] I moved to LA in '91
and for whatever reason was not really wanting to go to school,
[laughs]
hanging out on all the guitar stores in Hollywood,
and just started messing with pedals
and broke out a book of the Electronic Projects for Musicians.
The reason I started building pedals
is because I had a Foxx Tone Machine that was a tin can,
and I was afraid it was just gonna crumble.
That's what made me start doing it
because stuff would break, and I hated that.
This would be the first Piercing Moose.
This was pretty early on. It would be '92 as well.
This is the first pedal I did a, uh, a H circuit board.
I did in a bathtub at home in Hollywood.
It's my clone of my Foxx Tone Machine.
[rock music playing]
[man 14] And I was hanging out at Amp Crazy and, uh, Voltage,
and Mike Fuller worked over at Voltage at the time.
And I was bringing pedals in,
and trying to work on this stuff and learn.
And it was just, there was no like, oh, I wanna be a pedal maker.
Like, what I would really consider boutique that was sort of happening
to me, it really starts with Jack Brossart of Prescription Electronics.
And, somewhere, I may still have the cassette tape demo of the Experience pedal.
[rock music playing]
And it actually sort of sounds like the amps are blowing up,
and it has an octave in there so it's a fuzz and octave.
[rock music playing]
[man 15] It was like an instant Hendrix album.
They had the whole line, those vintage effects.
They brought them back. They had a Tone Bender.
They had a Colorsound Overdriver, you know, an octave pedal.
And I think, you know, sadly, he kind of stopped right before that major wave came.
There started to be people
who kind of like... I feel like pushed that stuff like way into the future with like Lovetone,
where it just seemed like I can't afford that,
but that looks like the most insane thing that I've ever heard or seen.
[J Mascis] I got all of their stuff.
That's probably the first real boutique brand that I remember.
[Albini] Lovetone is a British company. They're idiosyncratic,
like, he ignored the convention of using the BOSS connector for power,
and he uses an eighth plug connector for power.
It would have made his life and his users' lives a lot easier if he didn't,
but he stuck to it for some reasons that I don't understand.
[rock music playing]
His pedals are exceedingly comprehensive.
He sold them individually to people who wanted them.
He did not try to market them as products.
Like if you wanted to buy his pedals,
he would come and meet you, and talk to you, and show you the pedals.
And if you like them, you could buy them from him.
You couldn't just go to a shop and have them order them, you know?
What it did for the pedal industry, it gave people permission.
It gave Zachary Vex permission to do crazy stuff.
This is electricity with Mr. Youngreen, A+;
Electronics One with Mr. Youngreen, A+.
I was a technician and doing semiconductor manufacturing.
And when I got laid off from that job in 1984,
I had started a recording studio,
and I continued working as an independent recording engineer and producer until 1995
when I started Z.Vex Effects at my kitchen table.
And I built my first pedal, the Octane,
and I brought it into, uh, Willie's American Guitars.
I said, "How much should I charge you?"
And he goes, "Whatever you want."
So I asked him what his most expensive pedals were,
and he showed me the Fulltone Full-Drive.
And I said, well, I wanna make it more expensive than that.
So I wanted to be the most expensive pedals in the shop.
November came in 1995 and I had sold 16 of those Octanes,
and I brought in a couple of them to, uh, Nate
and I said, "Hey, you need any more of those?"
And he goes, "No, we've sold as many of those we can sell."
Make me a new pedal and he walked away.
So I designed this, I stayed up all night.
This is the original Fuzz Factory.
[rock music playing]
Fuzz Factory.
I got turned on to some pedals by Henry Kaiser,
and I remember plugging it in and saying to him,
"Henry, I cannot use this on your session. This... this thing is insane."
In the back of my mind, I was thinking, but I like it, you know?
I just I don't know what I'm gonna do with it.
[Joel] It's a crazy pedal.
Nobody, I don't think that was part of a larger company,
would release something like that.
It just was such a cool kind of fun, totally, you know, odd ball effect.
And you would get someone to like hand paint them.
[BlakI always forget how early Zachary Vex was to it
'cause in my mind I discovered him, you know, through Muse like a lot of people did.
[man 16] Matt Bellamy started putting Fuzz Factory
into his guitars through Mansons UK,
and people would watch him twisting the knobs.
So now my pedal was up off the floor.
[man 17] There's not a pedal builder out there that hasn't looked at the Fuzz Factory
and men like took a Fuzz Face and did this,
or, you know, the boutique era would not be what it is without Zachary Vex.
What's interesting is back in the '90s there was,
I think, only one I could think of female pedal builder
and that's Fran Blanche, Frantone.
[Fran] We, uh, spent, uh, about six months
and many thousands of dollars building a prototype.
I learned everything that you never are supposed to do
in a pedal business in those first eight months
because we did everything wrong,
and we... we wasted so much money.
The product was exactly what I wanted,
but it was just un-manufacturable.
Everything was done through catalog
so if you wanted parts, you sent out for catalogs from price distributors.
It would take you months or, you know, a year to prototype a product
that today you might do in weeks.
Instead of making everything custom
when, you know, off the shelf with the hand box and got powder-coated
and, you know, just everything kind of made it affordable as a product,
and that became Hep Cat.
So when I did the Williamsburg factory,
I wanted to do everything under one roof.
So I was making my own circuit boards from raw copper clad,
stock, drilling, filling, did my own machining,
did my own coding, did my own silk screening,
everything top-down was done in-house.
I could come up with an idea, develop it,
make a product out of it, and have it out to market.
I can practically in no time at all.
Now, when we started out in the '90s,
I mean, you had print publications which you had to advertise in.
You had to go to the NAMM show to get the dealers,
and then you have brick-and-mortar stores
that did your selling, and that was the structure.
And it's crazy to think that people bought a pedal from an ad in like one paper.
There was nothing.
And I think through the '90s, the internet, you know, you see Mike Fuller
and you see something happening in a website start.
[Zachary] When Fulltone, you know, got set up with his website,
I went on his website and I looked at every single store he was selling at,
and I would call up all of the stores he was selling to
and go, hey, you sell Fulltone?
And they go, yeah.
And I go, you know, historically every single store
that sells Fulltone does really well selling my pedals,
and I just used that as my pitch and it worked.
When we started Frantone, it was right at the cusp of the beginning of the internet.
We were probably like one of a handful of people in Lancaster
that had internet in... in '95.
I set up Frantone.com so it was like one of the very first domains.
[Dave] The barrier to entry to the pedal world, you know, was a radio shack.
And you could buy a box, and few transistors, and some capacitors
and... and... and a soldering iron and start a pedal company,
even going back a little further
to the, you know, the Craig Anderton Electronic Projects for Musicians
is where a lot of guys like us got their start.
[Craig] I've been writing for Popular Electronics,
and they decided they didn't want any music-related articles anymore.
So I looked around the magazines, there was Guitar Player.
So I said, "Well, I'll pitch them on a headphone amp."
And they were scared to death that somebody would like take it into a bathtub
and electrocute themselves or something like that.
And I said, "Well, I'll give you the schematic for it."
And they said, "Well, we have our own art department."
So they did the schematic, there was an error on it.
And that was the best thing that ever happened in my life
because they got 300 letters from people
which ranged from "I've never built anything before
and this doesn't work, what am I doing wrong" to
"Hi, I'm the audio engineer in National Semiconductor,
and are you aware that there's a problem with the schematic?"
And Guitar Player was like,
"Oh, my gosh, people are actually interested in this stuff."
And then they said, "Well, can you write a book?"
I think the real importance of that book
was that it made people aware that they could do it themselves,
that it wasn't some strange esoteric thing.
It was like building a model airplane, get parts,
you put them into a board, and you soldered it and you had a working effect.
That was the biggest contribution.
It was like, well, this guy can do it, so can I.
[BriaI think the guys that I was learning from,
they grew up with that Craig Anderton book.
And there were some other like underground indie publishing type of PDFs that were released.
[man 18] Back in the '90s there was Usenet which was kind of a forum.
There was all kinds of alt dot guitar effects.
[man 19] And there's a guy on there called R.G. Keen.
And R.G. was one of the pioneers of putting trace schematics on the internet.
[Brian] I barely graduated high school.
I didn't go to college, just read a lot of books, really,
so I... I started out on these DIY forums,
listened to guys like R.G. Keen, and Jack Orman, and Mark Hammer,
and just a bunch of people who in the DIY pedal community
are full of knowledge and willing to share that knowledge.
It was a really wild moment.
The internet is just expanding and expanding.
And guys like me can get on there and learn how to etch a circuit board.
I didn't go to school.
We got on the internet and we let R.G. Keen teach us how to do stuff,
and that caused a bazillion pedal companies.
[Piera] When I started this business, I didn't think I'd be here this long.
I thought, you know, guitar pedals,
how long are people gonna want to use these things?
Are they gonna want to use them ten years from now?
And this was in the mid '90s. I really didn't know.
There was like the big names kind of, sort of, dominated again
where you've got like BOSS, and DigiTech,
and all of these pedal companies were coming out
with sort of like the standard that everyone would get into.
Then like jumped onto the scene
some sort of more weirder things, maybe like Danelectro.
[man 20] You see legacy brands reboot in a big way.
Mike Matthews gets Electro-Harmonix back in action.
Uh, Jim Dunlop reboots MXR, and also the Crybaby, Wah-Wah,
and so many different variations,
and DOD really gets younger players excited about their products,
both the reissues and the originals,
all this stuff really just comes back to the forefront once again.
[DaviSo I saw an ad for something called the DOD Thrash Master,
this bright pink pedal. And I thought, what is this thing?
Can I even remotely sound like one of my idols?
I remember one of my friends coming over who was not a musician at all,
and I showed him this pink box and I was like, this thing is so cool,
like one of these metal bands, like a thrash band and I... and I turned it on.
And he said, "That's just doing all the work for you."
[Piera] Factories that make pedals,
the original pedal design is usually really good.
But then when it gets into production,
they'll tend to use cheaper parts,
or the beam counters will change parts over the years.
And the pedals sort of drift away from the original designer's ideas.
2000 and 2001, you have the two biggest pedal modifiers ever.
Analog Man, it's pretty significant
because he was modding the big box stuff.
[man 21] Since we don't have to make a million of these,
we can find the good parts, the original parts,
put the right chip in, change resistor's capacitors
to make them sound like they originally were meant to be.
[rock music playing]
Sustained for years.
I love fuzz pedals.
Two of my favorites here are the Analog Man Sun Face.
One of them is the, uh, NKT 275,
which is like, uh, an original, like, 1967 Fuzz Face.
The Sun Face BC 108 is a blue Fuzz Face
like, uh, David Gilmour had Live at Pompeii.
[rock music playing]
Echo and fuzz, man, I mean, you just can't really go wrong.
[laughs]
When this got going, and you think of guys like Robert Keeley, Analog Man,
those guys were boutique before this was even like a thing.
[Robert] Something I took from car stereo world,
and home stereo, and... and working for other people
is I'd see that, you know, they'd have switches for bass response or whatever.
I didn't really see that on pedals
so that's how I brought the switches and mods to pedals
to change the sound of them up to give people more flexibility.
[Gilbert] The Keeley Tube Screamer,
he put, you know, the standard foot switch in the middle.
Is it... this style foot switch, I was never quite sure like that. I turn it on.
I'm like, this is a better design for human beings
who want to feel something go ka-chunk.
And it sounded great too.
[man 22] Uh, Keeley is interesting
because I saw the way he grew his business model,
uh, from just modding boss pedals
to coming out with his own compressor obviously.
[Robert] My first original one was called the Katana
and that one was a... a couple of fat transistors designed to sound like tubes.
That pedal ended up being picked up by John Mayer.
And that was the first time I kind of caught the inkling
that every part selection in even a simple design
like that was, uh, something that, uh, you can create some magic with.
Dealers started contacting me and saying, "Hey, can you build a couple of those for my shop?"
And on it goes till Guitar Center calls you one day and wants to place an order too.
[mellow music playing]
[Oliver] But I felt like at some point I kinda hit a wall
and like sort of every single sound that you could possibly get
so I wanted to just sort of see what else that nobody else had ever come up with before.
But then I wanted to go on this trip with this girlfriend to Europe
and I didn't have any money.
This was basically my big idea to make money,
to go to Europe and backpack for a month was
for an effect that nobody had ever really come out with before,
which is like this force feedback loop.
And I thought Death By Audio sounded cool, you know,
and so I was like, that sounds cool, Total Sonic Annihilation.
[rock music playing]
I think like a month before we were set to leave,
you know, sold like 30 of them or something.
And so that was enough to go on that trip.
My first experience with Death By Audio was giant pedals,
maybe with only one or two knobs and totally DIY.
That was pretty bold because at that point you had really professional looking, slick,
you know, companies up until that point.
I could recognize like all these art on those,
like that's like '90s punk rock flyers.
I was like, oh, you can, I can put these things together
so that was like a big influence.
Anyone will come up with any crazy idea, or awesome,
or stupid, or whatever idea, send it to me,
and I would just give them a quote of how much I would build it for.
And then, and I even had no idea how to build it,
then we'll just figure it out.
[man 23] So in 2003-'4, the forums started appearing
like Harmony Central and things like that.
I saw that lots of people were building, you know, effects pedals.
People like Wampler, and Jamie at EarthQuaker and stuff like that,
and Catalinbread, they all started up around that time.
[Shadid] Catalinbread comes out of Portland in like '03-'04.
Nic Harris makes these really cool pedals
that are like really fresh, but also nostalgic in certain ways.
And it's this feeling like old is new again.
And then all of a sudden,
Portland becomes this kind of epicenter of like crazy pedal builders
for more experimental players.
[Anthony] Portland is a very proud city,
and it's all about craftsmanship here.
It's... it's a lot broader than just pedals really.
People here are very encouraged,
and there's a lot of community with the entrepreneurs in town, um, to help each other out.
The reason why we make our pedals
is to help artists explore their creative boundaries.
We really want to make something that has a really high level of craftsmanship,
but as soon as you plug in,
it needs to inspire you to go somewhere you haven't been before.
[Josh] Well, there's so many great examples of crazy.
I also really love like Jamie Stillman's approach to crazy.
It's almost a little bit like crazy is not crazy anymore.
[rock music playing]
[screeching]
[Patrick] He was The Black Keys tour manager for about five years
and he used to fix Dan's pedals.
And around 2006, he started building pedals.
I have these early EarthQuaker pedals that he made for me.
This has got a deal roller, fuzz, this one, uh, Fantastic Beast.
This is a B and M, I'm not sure what that is,
but he's like a fuzz expert so... this is FY SL X.
I don't know what that is. Cool shit though.
He gave you a sound that you could put on records,
and it's gonna make people feel weird.
Like it just, I heard that first time I plugged in,
I was like, whoa.
[mellow music playing]
When they came on, they... they were set to just light shit on fire.
When I met him, it was just Jamie in his basement making pedals.
[Albini] EarthQuaker is a remarkable company in a number of different ways.
Like they... they keep all of their production local.
They keep employing musicians from the local scene which I think is fantastic.
And each of those people in some way or another are either a musician, an artist,
or there is someone who has the same sort of empathy
and sort of sympathetic resonance
that's gonna come through to someone that uses them.
[Jamie] And they're not afraid to overwhelm you with options which I think is great.
I'm usually working on a lot of ideas at once,
and it's like nine times out of ten
it's either I woke up with some idea
where I'm like, come on, I wanna know what that's like
and most of the time it sucks. [laughs]
[Julie] Well, it's interesting 'cause it's technical work.
I mean, it's very involved, but it really is creativity.
I can't tell him what to do. Nobody can tell him what to do.
-Fuck you. -[laughing]
Uh, don't tell me what to do.
[upbeat music playing]
[Brian] They mostly all start from the same place
where they just started tinkering with things in some way.
That's like almost universal, I think.
There are these forums. I could ask these people questions
and they would help guide you to the answer.
Along that way, I bought a breadboard,
which is, basically allows you to make circuits quickly without soldering.
And I just kind of locked myself away for about two years,
and just started experimenting with what happens
when you run this type of guitar into this type of gain stage.
And what happens with EQ whenever you boost the bass or increase the mids,
which that ended up leading me to like self-publishing a book
about modifying pedals and... and building pedals.
I wanted something that sounded like an orange,
and I wanted something that sound like a messy boogie.
And I wanted like all of these different flavors.
And it was obviously not very practical
to drag four or five amps to a bar gig.
If you look through our history,
a lot of people kind of considered us
to be like the amp in a box company
that just made a lot of good dirt pedals.
I love that stuff,
but I... I feel like I wanna push the boundaries of,
and kind of just do some other things
that are fun to me, 'cause I like other stuff too.
And you can only make so many marshals.
[laughs] Marshals selling turd boxes.
[Nels] Josh Scott, um, comes out of the Keeley thing,
modding pedals in '07-'08,
um, you know, making the Morning Glory, the Pulp N Peel.
Taking these good circuits and making them great.
[Andy] When I saw JHS pedals come through the door,
the simplicity of them was... was a really interesting thing,
because it was basically saying we care about the circuits.
We don't really care about trying to blow your head off with cool graphics and designs.
We were just making pedals that sound good.
When you're holding a pedal,
that is as important to me is how it sounds,
75% of the time, I think of a name or a look,
or like the emotion of something that would make someone play differently.
So the icon, a name pointing to a sound or a piece of history,
and then the tricky part is to make a circuit
that's exceptional to fit in that.
That's equally as important, let that be said.
I have to go back when I'm designing
and remember the feeling of hearing Pearl Jam, "Alive", on my brother's cassette tape
and how I felt, and recreating those feelings for guitarists,
in my opinion, is... is as important,
if not more important, than the circuit inside.
[man 24] The new age of guitar god kind of begins again with Jack White,
uh, Black Keys,
Arctic Monkeys, and Strokes.
The stuff that Annie Clark from St. Vincent does
with... with fuzz and guitar synths is mind blowing.
And she's using like Death By Audio, nd Z.Vex , and Electro-Harmonix.
So it's this cool blend of like old stuff and new stuff
to create something powerful and original.
Independent music really hit its stride in the '90s and 2000s.
And I think the market finally had to take notice of bands and music like that.
[Steve] Now, it's rare for every musician
not to have like an assortment of pedals in front of them,
and it's not uncommon for songs to be written
around the features of a particular effect.
[Piera] I was invited to see Radiohead at Madison Square Garden
and seeing Thom and Ed
kneeling down in front of their pedalboards playing the pedals,
not even touching their guitars,
heh, that's pretty amazing.
[mellow music playing]
[Sarah] Usually when I'm composing,
I start out by putting a board together,
then plugging in, and then seeing what happens.
You know, I think the magic really happens
when certain effects are combined, you know?
Early 2000, when I started playing in Mars Volta, Omar had...
I probably had 40 or 50 pedals, and he had probably at that point 300 pedals.
[distorted music playing]
There's bands that I grew up listening to that are using this pedal,
and it still... is crazy for me to wrap my head around,
you know, Aerosmith or High on Fire using something that I made
and designed in my basement, right?
So all these new cool music is happening, and you're kind of going,
what are these sounds I'm hearing?
It... there's this kind of mass realization
among these communities of musicians,
that is, boutique pedal companies are, you know, they have arrived.
They're influencing, and they're innovating,
and... and they're popping up all over.
[Johnny] It kind of was this huge beginning of a bubble
around 2005, or '6, or '7.
[man 25] The whole industry of guitar effects pedals,
not just boutique, but mass produced as well,
was consistently steadily climbing upward.
[John] The vintage guitar market, the amp market, collectors,
you have big money items on the table.
Guitar players, you go buy guitars and amps,
but then all of a sudden, the economy tanks.
[soft music playing]
[Holley] We were really worried, uh, in 2008
We're like, "Oh, shit, what are... we're gonna have to get real jobs."
We're virtually unemployable.
And economic conditions around '07-'08,
you saw a lot of people who stopped buying expensive items.
They stopped buying guitars.
They still wanted something that would inspire them to write or... or play.
Guitar players tend to turn over their sound every six months to a year.
So if they can't change their guitars
and they can't change their amps,
really their resources are adding
to their collection of effects pedals to get different sounds.
The recession fueled the growth of pedal cells.
I mean, there's no way out of that discussion.
[Paul] Pretty soon, anybody who could do something crafty
and make a business of their own in anything, you know, alcohol, furniture,
whatever, all of a sudden, there were...
there was a super explosion of handmade goods.
[Julie] Well, we didn't really know we were starting a business.
-[Jamie] Heh, yeah. -Like it was pretty well a business
before we're like, "Oh, my God, we have a business."
-[laughs] -Right.
[Colt] The... the music instruments industry is a... is very unique industry
where it's mostly hobbyists turned into accidental businessmen.
[Holley] And it really snowballed.
There is absolutely no way we could have done what we did today.
I mean, look at us. There's... there's no business sense here.
There's no talent. There's no anything.
We got... It was dumb luck and lack of competitions,
and brute force.
[both laugh]
[Pete] You know, more and more pedal makers are finding that,
if they have a small operation and are, you know, doing something interesting
that they can probably sustain a small business
without having to become a, you know, a big entity.
[Brian] As we got popular, other companies like us who were doing the same thing,
but building in our garage as musicians,
you know, our businesses just kind of happened
without really meaning for it too.
But as you get bigger, you can't continue building in that garage.
All of a sudden, our, you know, back orders would get so high
that we decided to hire more people.
There was one point, it was so crazy
that I was, like, hired eight people on the same day.
And most of them are still here.
[Josh] I remember 18-hour days out in the shed,
you know, building stuff, shipping stuff,
answering e-mails, making a horrible website on my own,
it became way too much.
[Ryan] Eventually it comes to a point
where we're running Fuzzrocious full-time,
and we're both in education full-time.
Every night is spent in front of the TV or in here just populate parts
or spend your time on your lunch breaks doing that as well.
You just never stop working.
[Jack] I was teching out of a music shop,
um, just fixing amps or whatever.
A customer came in and, ah, he saw a breadboard on my bench.
He's like, "Hey, what's that?" And I go, "Oh, it's this echo thing that I'm working on.
So he plays it, and he's like, "This is great. How much is it?"
I'm like, "I think it'll sell for $200."
He's like, "Well, how much if I buy 10 of them?"
"How about a hundred bucks?"
That's a thousand dollars. He's like, "Okay."
Just like knowing how volumes work, drugs, and all that kind of thing,
like you get a discount if you buy a bunch, you know?
[Pavla] The whole process is incredibly challenging
from dealing with customs officials,
you know, at the very end of the supply chain
to the customer to engineering problems in the beginning.
And so just dealing with sizing issues,
how to squeeze something into a small enclosure and make it functional.
And we didn't go to school for this.
Nobody taught us how to do this.
You just kinda dive in head first
and figure it out as you go along.
[Heather] Now, as it's been growing so much more,
it's kind of like, well, now, we need other roles.
We need someone who does graphic design,
or we need, you know, social media person.
So I think it's just trying to accomplish everything, you know,
that you possibly can with such a small team.
[IljNow, they are big names such as JHS, EQD.
All of them proved to the new generation
that you can start from your garage,
and become kind of a household name
in... in the guitarist community.
The world is very small at that point
where we got in was a perfect storm
to really get into, to making pedals.
[mellow music playing]
[Phillipe] I know a lot of people, myself included,
who we really slave over our designs,
where it's like a breadboard gets made,
and I scrutinize every little component in there.
[Johnny] Oh, tons of different transistors,
positive ground, negative ground.
[VictoriResistors, diodes,
you'll have transistors or op amps, sometimes toggle switches.
[Johnny] Just changing a few values here and there
can make it sound really smooth, or splatty, or dark, or bright.
If you put a wrong value in somewhere, it's gonna change the sound.
Sometimes subtly, sometimes pretty drastically.
It's a study in simplicity.
Every single thing does something.
[Josh] Subtleties and it all comes down to subtleties.
How is the attack on that? Each repeat?
Then how's the release?
How is it escalating? Is it degrading? There's so many factors.
[PauAnd then that, also, then lends itself to the idea of,
well, there can be a thousand different manufacturers
have the same effect.
because there can be different circuits for the same effect.
[Jeorge] Working in a company that... that has been founded on analog,
developing analog stuff every single year,
you know, we get the e-mails,
"Hey, we're discontinuing this transistor. We're discontinuing this IC."
That technology is being lost, so it's harder and harder to do,
and more, and more, and more expensive,
so digital is really is the future.
[slow music playing]
[Roger] Towards the end of my years of analog devices,
uh, we were working on a new, uh, audio specific, uh, DSP chip.
It occurred to me that this chip could make the perfect brains
for a smart stompbox.
[Angelo] DSP is a microcontroller
that's specifically designed for audio
that you can then, you know, dream up any algorithm that you want.
[David] It really was at this tipping point
where the power of digital signal processors
got to where they could start to do very exciting things,
and either replicate some sort of traditional functions
that had been done in the analog domain,
but more excitingly, I think,
open up all kinds of new doors of things, um, that hadn't been tried.
[mellow music playing]
[Josh] I think the significant moment
in DSP, digital signal processing,
walking into a music store as a player
and seeing the green Line-6 DL4.
[David] So the Line-6 DL4 is essentially a delay pedal,
I didn't even know that it had a looper function in it
for years and years.
Somehow, I stumbled upon what's this sampler knob down here do.
And from there, my mind just poof.
[quirky music playing]
[Josh] And out of Line-6 came so many other companies,
because Strymon comes out of that group
and several other people come from that brand new thing.
Right after I left Line-6, I... I knew I wanted to start my own company.
In 2008, I joined up with the guys from Damage Control
who now keep going with the Strymon line.
[Gregg] Then when there only was an amp, you know, tape delays,
and... and Bucket-Brigades, and everybody wanted digital.
And then when... when you actually got it,
then you decided, "Oh, well, maybe I do want those flaws."
[laughs] So now, we're taking all those,
you know, high technology to sort of recreate the... the flaws
that everybody thought they didn't want,
um, when that was all that was available.
There was only a few companies that were even...
had sort of evolved to that level of technology.
So our thing really was putting this really high performance processor
and dedicating it to one algorithm.
Ah, it was digital, but the way you interact with the controls,
the way the controls interact with each other, it felt analog.
[Nick] This company Meris popped up a couple of years ago.
They kind of like came from Strymon and Line-6.
[Terry] I wanted to do things,
I think, with a more creative focus and more outside the box.
Every effect that we've made was going to be an instrument in and of itself.
[soft music playing]
[man 26] Affordable DSP has changed the whole pedal game,
and having digital technology almost be indistinguishable from analog
has made a lot of really interesting new effects come out in the last five years.
[soft music playing]
[Grant] There's only so many things you can really do
unless you start making these crazy insane pedals.
By making these pedals, it expands what people are able to do with music.
[EmilOld Blood Noise Endeavors, I think,
just blows my mind continuously with what they release.
I think that we have a good sweet spot,
sort of, in the weird section of effects,
so some would say near sure, like, unusable or unmusical things
that kind of push the boundaries on what you're expected to like out of an effect.
[Angelo] I'm excited when I see other builders'
personal expression show through,
like, if it's something unique idea.
I say, "Oh, man, I can... I can see that person behind it.
[Emily] Chase Bliss, I don't think they make a bad pedal.
And I am just in awe
of what they've been able to accomplish in the past several years.
[Joel] I wasn't a very good student in college.
I didn't learn very much, heh,
about audio electronics in college.
I basically approached Zach Vex,
and was like, "Hey, you know, undergraduate degree in electrical engineering,
I'm like, I'll work for anything, like, I just wanna learn.
I... I... this is what I care about."
What I did was I pulled out schematics
of my favorite... favorite vibrato,
which was made my BOSS, but it was discontinued.
Basically, I gave him a stack of schematics
that would have circles drawn on them, like steal this, steal this,
steal this... this, steal this, and build the whole circuit.
So Joel Korte took all those ideas that I gave him
and put it all together as that... as that circuit.
[JoeHe made things that were interesting for him.
And like, he didn't necessarily worry too much
about how they were gonna be received,
because he knew that if he was really excited about it,
and it's something that he loved and he really cared about, that...
that was gonna resonate with people.
A few months before I was gonna graduate,
my brother was killed by a drunk driver.
For a year after that, I was basically just...
I don't know, it was just everything, you know?
He was really into this guy named Joseph Campbell,
who, uh, is really known for the phrase, "Follow your bliss."
I just really realized that I wasn't doing that at all.
I have no interest in trying to make something that that's already out there.
You know, I wanna be talked about as an innovator,
and... and if I don't, then I won't be.
[upbeat music playing]
[Ben] And 2002, to when I kicked in,
as I say, there was only a handful of people doing boutique stuff,
maybe 20, 25 people,
and fast forward to now at 2020,
and as a site, as thousands and thousands of people. And how can this be?
By 2012, '13, I was like, "Where are these people coming from?"
It was the... the speed of knowledge on the internet.
[rock music playing]
[Blake] Rewinding to the mid-2000s,
ProGuitarShop basically started doing pedal demos.
I mean, there were some others,
but they were the ones that started doing nicely produced,
very good audio, good playing pedal demos.
And the man doing that was Andy Martin.
There's so many demo guys now, but almost everybody can point back to Andy.
[man 27] But first, here's the clean tone.
[Andy] The whole reason I started doing demos in the first place
is 'cause we... we saw this big boom of pedal makers
that you couldn't find in your local store.
We saw there was only a few people doing that
on this new thing called YouTube, you know, this was like 2007.
You know, Aaron Miller from ProGuitarShop realized that I was into film too,
but I was also in the music and this... this new job that he'd kind of just came
created out of thin air was like the perfect marriage of those skills
that, you know, we kind of raised the bar a little bit,
because we weren't using the camera mics,
and, uh, we were recording these pedals professionally,
and we wanted it to be a resource.
My pedal demo hero is... is Andy Martin.
And I'd be like, "well, I wonder what those... this one sounds like."
Type in Andy, and I'll go like, "Oh, that's what it sounded like,"
and then, you know, it was almost like trying it yourself.
[Emily] YouTube demos and video demos
are a great way for people who don't have that accessibility
to go through and physically play 15 different fuzz pedals
before... until they get the sound that's right for them.
[Pete] This gear reviewer or a gear demonstrator
was... was now a profession,
5and it was just something that I stumbled into.
I think YouTube changed the game as YouTube stars now,
like those, what are those two dudes in England who reviewed pedals?
They're just like soccer dads and shit, but like their channel is huge.
Hi, guys, welcome to That Pedal Show .
-Dan here. -Mick here. Hello, and welcome.
[Ryan] If you work with a great demo
or that has, uh, an excellent fan base,
then you know that you're gonna be in front
of 1,000, 10,000, 80,000, 100,000 people.
[man 28] And I think why it's so successful
and why all these channels are popping up
is because this whole pedal community has been around forever,
but they didn't have the platform.
They didn't have the internet.
They didn't have things like YouTube.
[Scott] There's now tons of channels
that are really just about kind of laying things out for you,
and helping you make decisions
about whether this is a good pedal for you or not.
I think it was just gonna be, well, let's just keep doing this
until we run out of pedals, and I... I still haven't.
[rock music playing]
People have a collector's mentality,
and that has helped enormously in the boutique pedal industry.
[Steve] The vintage market really didn't start happening
until, you know, the... the 2000s,
and... and some of this stuff that is now really coveted is... is going up in price.
Well, you know, I mean, we all start collecting stuff that our heroes used,
you know, just the folklore that gets it going.
[rock music playing]
[Josh] The Klon is fun. It might be the greatest pedal,
because it's... it's this mix of hype and why is it hyped?
And does it sound good or not? And...
you take the back off, it's gooped.
You can't know what it is, and Bill's attention to detail,
ah, why he put the LED here, why it's in a big case.
And I've heard now a million people weigh in and say, "Oh, it's jive.
That thing's a piece of crap, and it's all hype."
And I've heard people say, "Oh, it's just, it's so beautiful,
because it's so versatile."
And it has that the... the dreaded word, transparent qualities.
Then I have to definitely agree with the... the latter camp.
[Brian] I've talked to Bill Finnegan who, uh, owns Klon.
I think he never really intended for his pedals to sell
for $3,000, $4,000 on the used market.
Like he was just creating art.
Man, I guess it's worth it,
because it's... it's traded regularly at that price
that, I think, that it's also a brilliant circuit,
but you can find it in a Tumnus and in one of my pedals even.
[Brian] I really don't like doing a lot of stuff that's based on something else
unless there's substantial changes.
So I did the Tumnus because that's what my customers were asking me for.
And at the end of the day, I live to serve my customers.
If I don't serve my customers, I'm not gonna have a business.
[rock music playing]
There's this great doubt that the Klon clone is actually this,
and it's the psychological thing that's really important, uh, for the pedal industry,
you know, it's some mystery. It's something special.
But I do think there is some legit criticism,
and that there's some things that have become confused for public property,
or, uh, categories when really they're trademarks.
[Steve] Meanwhile, I'm guilty of playing telecasters that are not made by Fender.
We're all frequently playing and using instruments and amps
and things that are made by other people
that are variations or derivations of things that came before.
A friend of mine worked at a pawn shop,
and he called me and he said, "This pedal is really fucked up. You should try it."
It's called the Harmonic Percolator, HP-1.
That pedal traveled the world with me.
I made a bunch of records with it.
People ask me about it because it was kind of unusual,
but along the way, this weird sort of cult interest in this one named pedal
created a kind of mini industry of people making their version of this circuit.
Obviously, there's a lot of people
doing clones and stuff, that's derivative,
but there are, you know, there are a decent chunk of people
doing some really, really cool, unique and interesting things.
[Phillipe] My big peeve isn't necessarily about the people who might copy
or make clones of other things.
My big peeve
is when people say, "Well, everybody does it," because not everybody does it.
[Jack] I can sum that up in one sentence.
Those who can do those who can't.
[Brian] I can go on Instagram right now, and there's like...
Well, there's like a hundred thousand hashtags about pedals.
And when I compare that
and think about 1962 Gibson releasing Maestro Fuzz-Tone
to some dealers and nobody buys it.
It's so different. It's radically different.
[Aisha] Having the Instagram profile allowed me to connect
with more people who are into this.
And I realized, oh, my gosh, it's a huge worldwide community.
[Jamie] If you want to do the thing that you like to do and get paid to do it
like you have to put yourself out there.
And right now, the way to put yourself out there
is to make a bunch of "content"
and put it on social media, like, that's it.
That's the new magazine.
[Piera] Some of these places are... are 90% marketing,
and, you know, they have their social media.
They put out great videos on YouTube and on their websites,
so they're really good at promotion and marketing.
And I think it's still growing because these guys are getting everybody excited,
and there's so many new pedals coming out. People are... are still trying.
And so it's... it's a big change in the business I'm seeing.
Starting a company
that becomes successful because of the internet has an equally negative side.
You know, the very thing that lets you be seen,
throws your pedal out in front of all these people
is the very thing that throws your product out
in front of people who are gonna hate you.
There's... there's these people that are like chained to the wall,
eating dog food in their mother's basement.
They're just sitting there typing away
as... as to why the Tube Screamer is still the best pedal ever.
[Josh] There's not a builder that I know
that doesn't cringe when they're tagged on the gear page.
"Oh, Keeley did it again.
He put dipswitches on the inside of his pedal.
Um, I won't be buying any of those Keeley pedals."
I feel like forums used to be extremely helpful.
I thought that they were like,
you know, a lot of like-minded people with a lot of knowledge.
Somewhere, out of nowhere,
it really just devolved into people
arguing over whose opinion is the right one.
And you know, like, what's cool and what's not cool.
And people making, like, decisions on, like, how ethical a company is
without knowing anything about them,
just like what they feel about them.
There's a small section of the population that wanna watch the world burn,
and you provide them with, uh, you know, lifetime supply of matches,
and what are you going to get?
So it's a sports bar with guitars.
It's like... it's... it's like the most hyper-masculine environment
that you could imagine.
Forever, the philosophy
that I had for myself and my work was,
work and tell no one what you do.
When it comes to... to women who are actually building and in companies,
I probably couldn't have named a woman other than Fran or Devi Ever
until about ten years ago.
[Aisha] I started the Instagram profile and got on there
and immediately started looking for other lady builders,
and, you know, non-binary people of color,
and realized, "Oh, boy, there's just like not very many of us.
[Victoria] Men think that this is something that women don't do.
People come into here,
and I'm like window dressing.
And you basically have to be like, "Oh, hey, I'm part of alchemy too."
[Nathalie] People just generally don't want to talk to you
if they come up and they have, like,
a technical question about the pedals.
Even if you're standing there, they'll kind of look beyond you
for someone else who can help them. That's really kind of hard.
I want to talk about pedals and I want to like,
you know, like demo for people,
but, yeah, it's kind of... it's difficult
to feel like you have a role in that sort of situation.
I never wanted to do the marketing,
because I knew what the guitar stores and the distributors were like.
A possible distributor that I spoke to,
he was like, "Yeah, someone had told me just to come by
because you are really pretty, kapow!"
and then just walked away. And I was like, "What? Like, okay.
I mean, the imbalance is there for the same reasons it exists elsewhere.
[laughs]
[Fabi] When I look at between the '30s and even the '70s, you know,
at that time, socially and culturally,
women just weren't allowed to pick up tools,
much less be building and designing instruments, you know?
That means that there were men creating communities,
teaching one another, creating magazines, creating brands,
and it was exclusively men
for no other reason other than that's the only thing
that was socially and culturally accepted.
Of course, as a marketing tool,
you want to market that to the people that have been creating it,
and the society that it is now, the guitar industry,
which is a bunch of young white men at that time, right?
You fast forward then to the 2019,
those people, those men are older.
And now, in the past five years, it's becoming culturally accepted
for women to be picking up tools, to be designing, to be playing.
And now, you start seeing more women.
Right? Now, you start seeing those communities grow.
It is a guitar and a pedal manufacturing industry issue,
but it's societal and a cultural issue more than anything.
If it was the opposite, I wouldn't be in this chair.
It would be you instead, and I would be asking you questions. [laughs]
[Emily] If you want to sell more guitar pedals,
you need to increase who you're advertising to.
[Sarah] I'm so used to music companies not really considering us
when they're developing their products,
or putting out their products, or marketing their products.
God, it's like a breath of fresh air where we are right now,
and just how the culture has... has changed.
[Fabi] I think that people can relate and connect
to that specific issue right away,
but once you start talking about it
and started really digging into it,
you start to realize that it's not just a woman's issue.
It's really a cultural and societal issue.
[Lance] But half that handful of black and brown people
who are interested in making pedals,
who have just been happy to see that they aren't the only ones doing that.
I think part of why there's not a whole lot of people of color building
isn't anything necessarily inherent to building guitar pedals.
I think it's just an issue of it being more difficult for people of color
to be able to get businesses up and running.
[Fran] And the world is slow to change.
People have to really be different.
It's not a matter of just acting different.
You gotta... you gotta evolve, and evolution takes time.
Kids who are in their 20s starting out now,
when they get to my age, it'll be different.
[Lance] You can't spend your life
thinking about what other people are gonna think about you,
and whether your pedal company takes off,
or whether you just end up making pedals
that are pretty much for yourself or for your friends.
If you enjoy doing it, you should do it.
[mellow music playing]
I like to view my pedalboard as like those are my instruments,
and the guitar is the sound source.
It was really a way to come up with sounds
that didn't necessarily sound like a guitar.
It didn't necessarily sound like music that was already out there.
[quirky music playing]
[Nels] Nick Reinhart comes to mind.
We've... I made a record with Nick, and I didn't know Nick at all.
And I realized, Oh, my God, there's a whole generation of players
who are effects pedal players, not just guitar players.
It's literally a whole other thing of just hobbyists,
and people that aren't even musicians
they just wanna make noise and create something,
you know, what do you call some of these effects? I don't even know.
[soft music playing]
[David] The pedals aren't only for guitarists.
I mean, it's amazing to see different people utilize them
in ways that are unique to them,
and... and to see what results people can get.
I think it's just an inspiring community
that will keep morphing and changing,
but that has really helped shape, uh, modern music.
Nowadays, as much as one can dream,
one can make sounds that maybe no one's even ever heard before.
The possibilities are becoming absolutely vast, if not endless.
It was definitely, you know, in like 2014, 2015,
where I really thought, holy crap, like this is a revolution.
[John] This pedal boom, and the mass amount of pedal companies
holds some evidence that people wanna connect with a personality.
JHS is not Walrus. Walrus has a different personality.
You look at EarthQuaker, or you look at Oliver of Death by Audio,
Robert Keeley, Brian Wampler,
you couldn't have more different personas of a pedal company.
[David] Every pedal is like a different food, right?
It's got different flavors and characteristics that you love.
I have three different distortion, overdrive pedals on my board,
and, you know, that's because each one
is suited to a different type of riff or song.
[Julie] You can have a bunch of pedals,
you know, like nobody is gonna have a pedalboard that has just one brand.
You can have a billion pedals.
[Josh] Yeah, I've had conversations, like, is there a pedal bubble?
Is the industry gonna implode?
[Julie] It is a bit of a relief to know
that there was, like, a time that pedals died,
but then they came back.
But I think that there's always going to be enough people that want to stomp on something,
manipulate it with their hands,
get all these different sounds by swapping out different boxes that will be safe.
[Phillipe] A lot of genres related to rock 'n' roll are showing sales declines.
But meanwhile, the pedal industry keeps going up,
and I think it speaks to that they just love playing.
They love making noise with these things
and plugging in and doing stuff.
For I can make something that gives someone space
to create something and be inspired and create art,
then that's very meaningful to me.
[RyaAnd it's crazy, because technically, we are all in direct competition
with one another, especially... some of us more than others.
This pedal community,
for the most part, we all play really nicely together.
E-mails back and forth, texts, where did you get these transistors?
What do you think about this dealer in France? I don't like him.
Are you sourcing this part from here?
Well, I can get you this thing over here.
You don't find that in other industries.
It's not... that's not a common thing.
If you're selling insurance, you aren't calling out other insurance companies
and seeing what they're doing to gain success. [chuckles]
[Craig] If this universe is gonna continue to expand,
it needs to look into doing things that haven't been done before.
Not everybody thought about going to the corner store
and getting a Texas Instrument op-amp,
but they were there if you wanted them.
It would not surprise me if say ten years from now,
there's another Electronic Projects For Musicians type book
based on using software algorithms
and making it as easy for people to use as that book did.
[man 29] Going forward,
all of those elements go into a melting pot, and that's what inspires us,
and that's what keeps us going.
The need and desire to make the best of what's possible,
the need and desire to do our best by our customers,
the need and desire to stand shoulder to shoulder with our peers.
[Brian] I think pedals have been completely integrated
into musical instruments at this stage.
[Sarah] All these real world scenarios
have been captured via circuit boards
and placed in these little metal boxes.
And I can put them on a board, and play my guitar in,
and have access to like a million different sonic scenarios.
[Emily] I think it's a great time for guitarists,
and part of that is because it's a great time for... for guitar pedals.
[David] I mean, I wouldn't be the guitar player I am
without being exposed to these little boxes.
Popular music would just sound,
I think, a little bit stale without all the different flavors
that you can get out of the pedals.
[NelTo me, without imagination
what good are effects pedals,
but if you have it, this is a beautiful time.
This is like a Renaissance.
Uh, the possibilities of creative wonder are off the scale.
The good news is, you have a million options, you know?
So that's either gonna drive you crazy
or it's gonna make you so excited,
and say, this is the best time ever to be a guitar player.
Do you think it will be like this forever?
[laughing]
[rock music playing]