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[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]