ilovefuzz.com

Doctor X wrote: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

goroth wrote:

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.

K2000 wrote:Instead of adding expression capabilities, just build more stuff directly into a treadle housing. Small footprint if possible.

K2000 wrote:Noiseless stomp switches everywhere. The louder the pedal clicks, the more I hate it. Somebody needs to redesign the stomp switch, I'm pretty sure it's WW2-era technology.

backwardsvoyager wrote:...jacks on the top.

K2000 wrote: Noiseless stomp switches everywhere. The louder the pedal clicks, the more I hate it. Somebody needs to redesign the stomp switch

K2000 wrote:Re-issue of the DOD Meatbox. They're selling for 120-150 bucks now (or more). People still want them.

backwardsvoyager wrote:

K2000 wrote:Instead of adding expression capabilities, just build more stuff directly into a treadle housing. Small footprint if possible.

Yes! Someone needs to build like delay/verb/mod things in AMT-size enclosures with knobs on the side and jacks on the top. That would be AWESOME.

tomlane95 wrote:Honestly I just want more smallsound bigsound pedals to exist