What Pedal

[pi]

A friend of mines' son is starting a guitar pedal business and was asking my opinion as to what pedals should he try and create.

I would say don't sell a clone of something. Everybody and their brother is out there making clones. From the big companies to the chinese copycats to the hobbyists on reverb.

If you're making a real business, make something unique or not at all.

 

[StuartJames]

Dirty Boost with Delay

 

[hopdybob]

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+1 Fuzz pedal. The buyers of fuzz pedals are in a doom loop of continually buying the next fuzz pedal until they run out of cash. Adding one more to the spiral will work. Fuzz pedals are the lowest cost pedal to build too.

Otherwise ... there are many $25 import pedals of all the favorite flavors on Amazon.

JHS made a pedal switchable between all the Tube Screamer pedals and another one that switches through all the Big Muff PIs.

Wampler started his pedal business by modding Boss pedals (mostly the MT-2).

Both JHS and Wampler have youtube channels and talk about how they started, their first pedals, and pedal business topics.

From player's perspectives ... players are always trying to get a particular sound like EVH's Brown Sound, AC/DC Back In Black, Nirvana, Surf tone, Country Chickin' Pickin', Bro Country, and on and on. There is an EVH 5150 pedal (or two) but there are less of the others. Players are always asking 'how can I get that famous Tele Twang?' and if there is a pedal that does the whole tone into an amp set clean, that might have a following -- it will be a complicated pedal because it needs Delay, Compressor, and Reverb all in one box with a bunch of knobs but it might be simplified.

Overall, the pedal business has very low barriers to entry so there is a lot of competition, a new entrant needs a niche to stand out, very few niches remain to be explored, majority of guitar players are cheap/have no money (typical starving artists), and often a way in to the 'inner circle' of players (celebrity players in famous bands or youtube 'influencers') is necessary to get traction.



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good thoughts, but there is one big problem.
guitar players are pretty conservative, look at the gibson neck design, built to snap the headstock off.
(strange is that the players do use new designs of strings, jacks and cable etc. and true bypass that almost were never there when the guitar '...' made their name )

 

[Recalcitrant]

There’s never been, afaik, an emulation of the Scholz Rockman. I have had a couple of them, but because their (I guess) output impedence and whatnot are all yesteryear, they don’t work into-the-amp very well. A modern day version would be the bee’s knees.

 

[thunderbyrd]

man, i would hate to try to take off in the pedal building business today, but hey, maybe he can come up with something completely new. it can be done! i think it could be.

but, please let me tell about something i've wished for for years. i would like to have my favorite pedals in one metal box. a multi effects unit that's all analog because it literally has the analog pedals in it. 2 or 3 ODs which can be used separately or driving each other, a uni-vibe, a delay, an mxr phase 90 and also a wah pedal. all in one unit i can plug into the wall socket and go. it wouldn't make any difference to me how big it was or how heavy.

i don't know if anybody else would want something like that but i sure would. it wouldn't be cheap but i would pay for it.

yes i know there are various multi-effects units out there but they are not what i'm talking about here. not digital. not somebody else's choice of tones.

 

[Lowspeid]

This one.

Where’s the Mike Campbell setting?

 

[Peegoo]

Where’s the Mike Campbell setting?

It's an easter-egg feature that is in the manual, but it's encoded in a cryptogram and the user must solve the puzzle to unlock it.

Or something like that

 

[Peegoo]

they don’t work into-the-amp very well.

Set your amp to play clean clean clean and stick the X100 in the loop. It sounds fantastic there because chorus/delay/reverb tend to muddy up the preamp when you stick 'em in front of the amp.

 

[user name]

It's an extremely saturated market right now. If he's going to stand out, he going to have to do something a little different. There are already a million Tube Screamer, Rat, Muff, Klon, Blues Breaker clones out there already. Maybe focus on some lesser known circuits like weird fuzzes and long discontinued modulation. Companies like Pastfx are killing it right now making stuff that went extinct years ago

 

[Wooly Fox]

I was asked this question back in 2021 by a small electronics manufacturer when I was in the UK. My answer was along the lines of below.

For cost purposes, fuzz and OD pedals can get the highest margins due to their simplicity and ability to tweak very slightly to get a USP.

Once you move into modulation and time based effects, you start to see higher costs (more complexity, more specialist knowledge) and therefore you need a decent consumer base to make it work with inevitable higher pedal price a boutique builder has to do.

It's hard to carve out a niche as the sector is oversaturated with clones of popular pedals that the big guys can out compete for price and volume using overseas operations (Caline, Joyo etc.)

To be honest, the only pedals that seem to have any demand base are those not already satisfied (economics 101) so the answer is always, what do you think people want to buy?

The only way I would pay over a mainstream pedal builder for something is I want to support that specific builder or business. Some unique pedals like GraingerFX and Gamechanger build is always going to have a niche so creativity is a must.

Personally I want to see more combo pedals. Idiotbox here in Canada has a variety of interesting pedal combos on their website built to order. It broadens your tonal palate and you would buy on a whim if the price is right. Reverb into treble booster, double stacked tube screamers, blues driver into a metal zone, these are interesting combos.

TLDR: Build what you want, build a customer base, work up from there.

 

[cousinpaul]

I'd advise him to start out at the hobby level. Build some kits, do some mods, etc. Learn the ropes as well as what other builders have already done. If he does come up with something new, seek input from pro players. Sell locally.

 

[northernguitar]

A treble booster into a muff is one of my favourite concoctions for getting some ripping good distortion. I’m not alone, and have wondered if such a pedal would be popular.

 

[HootOwlDude]

I always have on my compressor (EHX ToneCorset) and boost (full-size TCE Spark) pedals. It’d be cool maybe to have a pedal that combines them compactly, similarly to how so many dual overdrives do. Each side would have dedicated controls—definite level knob for each included—and you could switch the order they’re in. Maybe a loop too, so you could insert effects between them too. Then again, maybe that’s no different from what I already have with separate pedals. It is a hard question—what has not been done at this point?