ilovefuzz.com

what

I admit to thinking some boutique guys are kinda outrageous but tbh I wouldn't build pedals for less either. That said, i think the new wave of builders who work from a compete-first success-later mode have it right. It sucks but ~$200 for an innovative design gets everybody salivating and thinking about what to sell. $400 would be a fairer price for small runs, but virtually guarantees that your runs stay small forever. If I were doing it, I would go the $400 route because I hate being rushed and I like being careful. But when it comes to reality, what I typically buy is more in the $200 range. I'm sure those guys only make $40 (more on direct sales but not that much) for 2 or more hours of drilling and soldering, but the price over an MXR is so immediately justifiable, everybody (everybody who uses the internet, which is still not what it should be, but) wants one...or four.

If you visit the ProGuitarShop YouTube channel and pick any video for a 'boutique' pedal, all the kidz will be complaining at the $200 delay pedal. They just don't understand how many corners are able to be cut by companies like Joyo, Boss, Digitech, etc. Even Fulltone and EQD are able to cut corners somewhere along the chain because of how popular they are. I'd say 80% (just a wild guess) of the musician market worldwide would never even dream of paying $325 for a chorus pedal. But the Cosmichorus V3 is worth it. They just can't comprehend that. They don't care to. Whenever I tell my friends in real life how much I've spent on gear, they scoff at me—and I haven't even spent close to what someone like Dennis Kayzer has. They don't understand the concept that good shit costs good money, and shit shit costs shit money. They could walk into a run of the mill guitar shop, pick a $300 guitar off the shelf and be happy as Larry. II'm a pickier bastard than that, as are most of the folks here. I accept this is an expensive hobby. My friends don't. Their hobbies are surfing with a rented boards, fishing with a second-hand $100 fishing rods, or just drinking. And that's the ironic thing, if any of them smoke or drink, they would spend $2000+ per year on consumables such as cigarettes and beer. To me, that's ridiculous. I want to invest my money. I want my money to stretch a long way, and buying an EGC baritone, a Fryette amplifier, and an EQD pedal should, in theory, last me my entire life. I don't just piss and cough it out two hours later.

Well... sure, people will always complain, but the boutique market is bigger than ever, and I do think it's partially because prices are coming down.

There's no rule that good shit has to be expensive, and inexpensive shit has to be bad. That may be the trend sometimes, but there are a billion exceptions.

kaeth wrote:There's no rule that good shit has to be expensive, and inexpensive shit has to be bad. That may be the trend sometimes, but there are a billion exceptions.

I disagree. "Good shit" is better than the "bad shit" because it has better components, a better design, or requires more time/care to assemble. All of those things that make it better (and of higher quality) cost money, so the price must naturally be higher...how much higher is where things start getting iffy. Obviously an EQD fuzz is better than a Joyo one, but is [insert boutique handwired fuzz] really $100 or $200 better than an EQD? That's up to you to decide.

kaeth wrote:There's no rule that good shit has to be expensive, and inexpensive shit has to be bad. That may be the trend sometimes, but there are a billion exceptions.

Yep.

The whole good/bad/cheap/expensive thing is interesting - in my opinion there is no better design than the stuff done by - Boss. You can complain all you like about the tones (which is of course a subjective thing), but the pedal design is fucking ingenious and revolutionised guitar effects. The fact that they haven't needed to change it, ever, is pretty cool. Everyone shits on their bypass, but until stuff like the soft touch relays came out, Boss's stuff was the most reliable out there, and once they started putting more neutral buffers in there there was no reason to complain about the bypass, except for TGP style ignorance (or if you had a fuzz that wanted to see a certain impedance after your Boss). Their switching system is still waaaay better than the 3PDTs used by most of the boutique industry in terms of mechanical failure and reliability. Their PCBs are laid out like artwork. They're not limited by what's available at suppliers like Mouser or whatever (meaning they're not going to release a stale PT2399 delay). They've created a mammoth line of iconic effects. Their gear is ridiculously consistent, in terms of quality and sound. Boss pedals are great in terms of design, consistency, and they offer a palette of sounds that are useful to a lot of people. And they are stupidly cheap.

There are soooo few boutique builders who can come anywhere near that sort of pedigree. And most of those that can can be found on this forum.

There is so much crap produced these days. There are almost 100 overdrives on sale at Satanmaxe. How many of them are ripped from the following circuits:
1) Tubescreamer
2) Electra drive

How many of those dudes charging 200 plus for a pedal with a PCB that they didn't have the skill to lay out themselves, that is built by making random component substitutions into one of the above circuits (disguised as "months of R&D") and shoved into a 1590B with a graphic/knob combination that looks like it was designed by a drunken NASCAR fan? Now I'm not complaining that the production costs of said piece of crap overdrives are incorrect - if you are a hack soldering away in your basement with an inefficient design and insufficient production skills and it takes you x amount of hours to solder and finish your overdrive, fine, I get that you need to charge a couple of hundred to make any sort of money out of it. So your product accurately reflects your production costs. But using a 3 dollars worth of "audio grade" WIMA caps and a couple of cents worth of silver solder doesn't mean that you're offering a premium product, and it definitely doesn't mean that you're offering a product that offers good value. You're just offering derivative crap that's expensive because of your own incompetence (or because the market is stupid enough to pay for it - either way).

Don't get me wrong, this is the golden age for anyone interested in doing something out of the box to their musical sound source of choice. My board consists of a couple of Bosses, a couple of Guyatones, and the rest is small scale manufacturers like Dr Sci, Subdecay, IE, Fuzzhugger etc. I'm eventually going to hit up V for a custom Shoe pedal cos he does great looking stuff that creates sick sounds. I'm happy paying every cent of every dollar I've spent on my ILF stuff, because it is all stupidly awesome. But I think there is way too much "boutique" shit masquerading as God's Gift to Guitarists, and it irritates me no end that people pay for that tripe, while pooing on big players like Boss and MXR just because they are large scale manufacturers.

Holy batman balls what a rant. In case it got lost in there, I'm pretty sure I actually agree with what everyone has said in this thread so far...

I'm going to reiterate a desire for more pedals with filters in them.

prices are what they are, usually they are understandable and acceptable... not always tho... to be honest, i'm usually mainly not happy about 150+ pedals that have stickers instead of printed design on them

sorry Aen

Seems like a no-brainer, but...
I kind of wish someone would put out a production version of a tape delay that uses cassette tapes.
It'd probably be compact enough to go on a board... tapes are in abundance...

WHY. NOT?!

Here's a vid of someone who has a DIY version going

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RKFDHxDTms[/youtube]

I wish I had mad-skills to build a tough, compact and pretty version of that...

Bad cat amps or matchless amps announced a cassette Tape delay in the mid 90ies. I was very curious but somehow it never hit the market.

DADGBD wrote:Seems like a no-brainer, but...
I kind of wish someone would put out a production version of a tape delay that uses cassette tapes.
It'd probably be compact enough to go on a board... tapes are in abundance...
WHY. NOT?!
Here's a vid of someone who has a DIY version going
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RKFDHxDTms[/youtube]
I wish I had mad-skills to build a tough, compact and pretty version of that...

For real! I've seen many mentions of it, yet no one seems to make it happen.

yes back to pedals and not prices for no reason. cassette tape delay would be awesome, presumably

Holy shit the cassette tape delay is so cool! Just for novelty factor I'd try one.

its a bit boring perhaps ... but i'd like a simple always on all-in-one preamp with
- EQ: Hi-pass/mid-range(2 knobs - freq,+/-amount)/low-pass
- light (transparent!) compressor, 1 knob is fine. just to even out the levels
- and maybe with a buffer on/off switch

Seems like a fairly simple thing for a builder to do as a custom job?