Take care of your pedals by giving them the power they deserve.
A heavy-duty, isolated power supply that costs $200 to $250? Nah, I’ll just find a cheap off-brand one on Amazon. But a $450 point-to-point, 2-knob fuzz pedal? Heck yeah!
I’ve been going on rants in the shop lately about pedalboard rigs that feature expensive effects pedals but are powered by inexpensive and less-than-desirable power supplies. Why would this scenario ever show itself? My hypothesis comes down to “allure.” By this, I mean that power supplies, compared to pedals, aren’t exactly exciting. They’re not something that we get to use artistically. We don’t pine for them or get to create with them. It’s not a reverb pedal that you become immersed in for hours on end. It’s not a delay pedal that lets you tap the tempo with your foot and set subdivisions on. I doubt anyone has ever exclaimed, “I got this new power brick and it inspired three new songs in the studio!”
So why aren’t power supplies more intriguing to us, especially with all these new ones that feature switch-mode power, variable voltage outputs, and extensions for linking additional power bricks? I would say that it is due to the fact that they are inherently a utility device. Much like a buffer or tuner, they serve a foundational purpose, as opposed to a creative one. (I would like to point out that those buffer and tuner pedals are at the mercy of the power supply.)
I imagine a lot of us have experienced a noisy pedal in some aspect or another, such as something digital with a high-current draw, or a pedal with a clock (like a delay or chorus). In my tenure, I’ve fielded a good amount of emails from customers about this exact thing, in particular our Triplegraph and Polaris—the former a high-current, DSP device and the latter a BBD chorus. Most email inquiries come in because of noise issues, of which 95 percent are diagnosed as suffering from a bad power supply or wall wart and are then remedied with a superior power unit.
The poor quality power-supply or daisy-chain pedalboard rigs are still running amok in the effects pedal world. The power supply is the lifeblood of the pedalboard, so it’s strange to see high-quality, personally picked, meticulously crafted signal chains being held back by weak power bricks.
“I doubt anyone has ever exclaimed, ‘I got this new power brick and it inspired three new songs in the studio!’”
Let’s play out a scenario to give some perspective and illustrate the point that I’ve been driving at. Let’s say the average pedal is $150. (I think this may be a bit low, but I’m trying to incorporate affordable boost pedals and utility pedals, as well as more expensive digital units.) Now, let’s say the average pedalboard consists of eight pedals. The total cost of the pedals on that board is $1,200. A quick Amazon search for pedal power supplies yields a $40 supply. If you showed up to practice with that, there’s a good chance nothing would be said. Conversely, if you showed up with a $1,200 guitar and a $40 amp, you’re almost guaranteed to catch some glances and draw some questions.
I’m firmly aware that not everyone’s pockets are the same and that a lot of us have to choose our purchasing battles wisely. This kind of goes back to the “alluring” piece of gear winning out over the utility piece.
I’d like to expand on the $1,200 board scenario. I’ve been building pedalboard rigs on the side for about five years now. Pretty much all pedalboards that I build either meet or exceed that $1,200 value. When suggesting a power supply to install in these rigs, I reference bricks from a few manufacturers, usually Truetone, Voodoo Lab, and Strymon—Cioks also makes great options. All of these companies make power supplies that could efficiently power that hypothetical board filled with eight pedals. Let’s take the most expensive supply among the three manufacturers’ products, priced at $279. That power supply for your $1,200 pedalboard would be about 23 percent of the cost of all eight pedals.
Most gear in our music world, including power supplies, falls into that retail razor: “Buy nice, or buy twice.”
In the realm of gain, why not equip more stomps with the option of higher voltage?
Let’s talk a little bit about voltage as it pertains to pedals. We live in a 9-volt world, a place where that rectangular battery has been, and still kind of is, king. You know … the one that you can test the life of by touching the terminals to your tongue? You don’t? Yeah, me neither! That’s weird. So, whenever I’m not testing 9-volts with my tongue, I like to think about voltage and how it relates to powering these musical devices we’ve grown so fond of.
A stompbox is almost synonymous with 9 volts, to the point where you could grab a basic pedal with no graphics or writing near the power jack and probably be fine plugging in a center-negative 9-volt supply. Similarly, you likely would know that the input is on the right-hand side, and the output is on the left-hand side. It’s become convention—something we know instinctively.
We’re living in the golden era of effect pedals, which extends to power supplies.
Pedals that can run at higher voltage—most commonly 18 volts—are becoming more popular. Most often, this feature is found in modern gain pedals, which could be partially due to the fact that dirt pedals are the most manufactured type of pedal. I would reckon it’s also because the components in these circuits are prime candidates to receive this voltage. More so, higher voltage tends to have a strong and desirable effect on these boxes we’ve grown to know and love. When manufacturers and players talk about the effect of higher voltage on gain pedals, they’re talking about headroom. This can mean increased clarity and dynamics in an already sweet saturation device.
We’re living in the golden era of effect pedals, which extends to power supplies. I’m not talking about those wall warts you’d get from RadioShack that are probably now in a box or drawer somewhere in your house. I’m talking about voltage-switchable, power-ready, heavy-duty power supplies with multiple outputs that nest snugly under pedalboards.
With these modern power supplies (colloquially referred to as “bricks”) comes a variety of onboard features, such as a courtesy receptacle, the ability to string multiple units together for more power, and outputs that feature switchable voltage. It’s pretty common to find a power brick with one or more outputs that can be switched from its standard 9 volts to either 12 or 18 volts. Some power bricks will even have outputs that are only 18 volts. (Therein lies the catalyst of this article.)
I’ve been working on pedalboard setups for a while now for both CopperSound and for local musicians. In doing so, I’ve had the honor of working with the new Truetone power supplies—most notably the CS12. This has become one of my go-to bricks on the market. It’s a great size, with a lot of convenient, modern-day appointments. One feature, or downfall depending on how you look at it, is that the last two output jacks are unswitchable 18-volt-only spots. When I was setting up a demo board for CopperSound, this stubborn output jack posed no real issue—every gain pedal in our current lineup features 9- to 18-volt operation. So, when running power to the pedals, I would simply have one of our gain pedals occupy that 18-volt-only slot.
This flexible voltage feature is something that we’ve offered on our gain-based pedals since the beginning. It also keeps me wondering about gain pedals from other companies and why we haven’t seen it adopted more regularly. One factor may be the voltage ratings on some components when you get into SMD (surface mounted devices) territory. I also understand that some circuits simply can’t accept higher voltages, like the Klon Centaur or KTR. But a lot of ICs and transistors that are commonly used in boost pedals can accept voltages over 30 volts. My question to dirt pedal manufacturers is this: Where’s the 18-volt option!?
My own philosophy is to offer the option simply for convenience, even if the increased voltage makes absolutely zero demonstrable difference.
How our noise-crazy new pedal columnists developed a rad take on recycling with their Telepunk Fuzz.
Meet the Telepunk Fuzz. This is one of Sehat Effectors’ best-selling devices. Let that sink in, because it’s unconventional—to put it lightly—and very cool. Here’s how it happened.
Back in 2017, I met my buddy Keket Soldir. We have the same interests in making disturbing pedals and going to flea markets to hunt for cheap treasures. We have very little money, so we’re looking for things that we can use for pedal enclosures. We’ve found lots of medical tools, military tools, old office tools, and one day, I found a wall intercom phone. I told Keket, “Let’s make a pedal with this!” and he laughed at me. “That’s not going to happen,” he said. “The shape is weird and there is limited space inside. I think we’re not going to make it unless we modify the shape.”
I brought it home anyway, opened it up, cleaned the inside, and put a simple 1-knob overdrive circuit within. It worked! But that was just the beginning.
The phone itself is a ’70s/’80s Japanese wall intercom, which was very popular in many offices in Indonesia back then. Discarded variations are cheap and easy to find. There are many different brands: Aiphone, Matsushita (named after the founder of Panasonic), National, etc. But the Aiphone was the most popular and is still easy to find, probably because it was the cheapest brand back then. There are also different models and shapes, depending on the year of production. The ’70s to early ’80s models usually come with a carbon microphone with a simple germanium preamp and amplifier driver, and the newer models usually come with a more modern electret microphone with an improved preamp circuit in it. Actually, almost all Japanese electronics with audio drivers from that era come with the same boards. Perhaps there was one major factory in Japan which produced and distributed that board for various brands, just like Matsumoku in Japan’s 1960s and early ’70s guitar-building history.
“Let’s make an effect pedal from this phone without losing its identity as a telephone.”
The enclosure itself is made of hard plastic (often called “atom plastic” in Indonesia) with sharp edges and a metal cover plate. We also salvage tons of vintage parts from these phones, such as germanium transistors, Matsushita film caps, and sometimes we pull lots of white- and blue-striped diodes (MA150, MA161, and 1S1588), which were also used in early Tube Screamers and other vintage ’70s/’80s Japan-made effects.
The Telepunk Fuzz idea itself is: “Let’s make an effect pedal from this phone without losing its identity as a telephone.” For the first example, we already had an oscillation fuzz called the Moisture Fuzz, and we just put that circuit into the telephone enclosure. But when we decided to keep making more, we added an Atari punk console for weird modulation. Today, there are three circuits in our Telepunk Fuzz: an oscillation fuzz, the Atari punk console (which is a lo-fi synth circuit), and the microphone preamp. Also, if you unplug the guitar, it’ll work as a standalone noise box, thanks to the oscillator’s and punk console’s ability to generate ridiculous amounts of noise on their own.
The device’s mic and instrument inputs—honestly, you can plug anything into either one—are separate from each other. But the mic input has its own preamp and volume control, which then stacks into the fuzz circuit. The instrument input feeds the punk console and can be mixed into the overall output signal to create a harmonic tremolo texture.
So, that’s the story behind our Telepunk Fuzz, although we think there are many possibilities for more telephone-based effects units in the future. Luckily, there are also still a lot of those telephones available for very little! And who knows what other home we might find for a circuit at a flea market or pawnshop? We’re also thinking about a more pedalboard-friendly version, so the device can enter the larger stompbox universe. Who knows where these noisy Fuzzes from a time long ago in a galaxy far away—the pre-digital zone—will end up on their sonic journey?
Busted stompbox? Here are tips from a tech on when to repair and when to despair.
It is a cruel world out there, and no quarter is offered to your pedals, no matter how carefully you proceed from gig to gig. Just like an amp or guitar, your pedalboard can become an instrumental part of what you do as a player. But broken pedals are natural given they’re instruments that you step on, so getting them repaired is something we’ll all need to confront. While we’d love to have nothing wasted and everything working, whether or not something can be fixed reasonably is not always cut and dried.
The value of the pedal is an important factor. Since the cost of labor and expertise is so high, it can be very easy for repair costs to quickly exceed the value of the thing being repaired. For example, there’s a multitude of guitar effect pedals available between $30 and $40. Should one of the footswitches in those pedals fail, a replacement footswitch goes for 25 percent of the pedal’s entire value, and that’s before any work has been done to make an actual repair. At typical labor rates, spending 15 minutes fixing a broken footswitch can bust the bank on a budget pedal. As sad as it is, some stuff just isn’t worth having it be fixed professionally.
Conversely, a great candidate for repair is something like a vintage Nobels ODR-1. The values have skyrocketed, so there’s no question it’s worth fixing. Since minimizing labor is critical, it is triply good that they are simply constructed, made from mostly sourceable components, and contain relatively basic analog circuits with widely available circuit diagrams. But there are high-value pedals that aren’t as tech-friendly. Our benches have seen pedals plagued with complication and no documentation, constructed from unobtanium parts and assembled like a house of cards. In such cases, a technician will need to disassemble the box, study the circuit long enough to understand its operation (despite the fact it is not currently working), deduce what is malfunctioning, and spend time sourcing replacement parts. The tech will then have to decide how little to get paid for all that work, since after developing this plan, the client can simply say no to the repair if the price is too high. Repair work is brutal. Bake your technician some cookies.
Repair work is brutal. Bake your technician some cookies.
A horde of critics will complain that no one should be able to charge the hourly rates that most repair work demands. Most of them have not had the misfortune of actually running businesses. The unvarnished economics is that a busy tech can choose to either work on something at a discount, or pass and move on to something that will put food on the table. The obvious answer means that there’s a great deal of gear out there that, hypothetically, could get fixed, but, practically, can’t get fixed.
If you have a new production pedal that is malfunctioning, I highly recommend first contacting the manufacturer. Most manufacturers, particularly boutique builders, are extraordinarily helpful when it comes to getting their customers’ pedals working again. As the creator of your device, they will have all of the experience and documentation to make quick repairs and a vested interest in giving you an optimum experience. Most builders recognize that a repair can be an opportunity to take a situation from bad to good, since going the extra mile serving a customer may more than make up for any bad feelings associated with a pedal that suddenly stopped working properly.
For pedals made by larger manufacturers, check and see if there are any authorized service centers. Companies like Line 6 often outfit local repair shops with the equipment and resources needed to repair their products. This can save you the hassle of sending your pedal across the country or the world for repair. These types of shops are often limited to major markets, but if you live in or near an urban area, you may have access to local repair.
DIY is another great avenue! There is a ton of information out there, and a person who learns how to replace footswitches, jacks, and potentiometers will be able to fix 50 to 75 percent of all the broken pedals in the world. But if you’ve no interest in self-sufficiency and want to keep your maintenance costs down, buy effects that are simple circuits or buy from companies big enough and benevolent enough to provide easy-to-access long-term support. May the odds be ever in your favor!
In a world of widely shared components, don’t just dare to be different. Insist on it. Aesthetics matter.
Regardless of the number of companies swimming in the pedal pond, I often find myself thinking about aesthetic diversity. We builders tend to all use the same components when designing our devices. It’s how we use them that is the subject here. And I’d like to focus primarily on the external components and how they are presented. Finish and graphics play a big part in a company’s branding and identity. However, I’d like to almost solely talk about knobs, footswitches, toggles, and LEDs. These are the most common things that you’ll see on a pedal.
I often ask people, “If you were to remove the labels and branding, could you tell which pedal it is or which company it was from?” As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, the pedal world is a kind and respectful place. Companies like to carve their name into the industry by having something that looks good and doesn’t step on another company’s toes. Builders achieve this by taking all of those same components that I just mentioned and organizing them in a manner that has a distinctive appearance. This leads to a question: If a company creates a knob and switch layout that’s the same for all of their models, is that intellectual property that other companies should avoid using, or is it simply a design of round pieces of plastic and metal on a square box that’s entirely public domain?
Let’s try something. If a new pedal company hit the streets and had an aesthetic like the one in Figure 1, would anyone have an issue with it? I lean heavily towards no. This triangular 3-knob layout has become practically generic. But if the fictional company were to release a product that looked like the picture in Figure 2, would anyone have an issue with it? I’m inclined to say yes. Three dials on a plane evokes a famed boutique pedal maker, rather than a generic look, even though both examples consist simply of a few knobs and a footswitch. Somehow the components simply being angled a little helps the appearance of originality, but ... as a pedal builder, I wouldn’t go there.
Often when a company releases a product with an interface that strays from the traditional path, it stands out. Non-traditional pieces of hardware can help a pedal’s recognition. However, if there’s already an existing company using these pieces of hardware in their designs, we have a problem.
If you were to remove the labels and branding, could you tell which pedal it is or which company it was from?
Going back to our scenario of a fictional new company releasing a product, if this company were to release a product with a blade switch (Figure 3) or telegraph key (Figure 4), there would be folks that would take issue with it. Now, it would be fair to say that a brand new company may not be fully aware of every existing pedal design—even with the internet at their fingertips. But the community of pedal nerds creates a nice monitoring/filtering system. If a new product hit the market with a telegraph key, for example, as found on our Telegraph V2 Autostutter & Killswitch and our Triplegraph Digital Polyphonic Octave pedals, the nerds would bring our attention to it.
There are only so many ways to locate knobs and switches on a rectangular box. So, what’s a new pedal company to do? Well, when it comes to placement, avoid popular and recognizable layouts like those found in Figure 2 and create your own. If traditional stylings are more your bag, consider alterations to the formula. Look at the Canaglia by Lollygagger FX—a 3-knob, 2-footswitch pedal. What helps it stand out? Metal knobs, a hand-stained wooden enclosure, and debossed labels—characterful changes to formula.
Along with being in the golden era of pedals, we’re also in the golden era of parts. I’ve never seen more knob choices in different finishes and styles than right now. Same with hardware finishes, enclosure shapes, and more. So, if you find yourself with a form factor that feels like it’s infringing on another company, make several small changes. Tweak the knob location slightly and swap out the knob type, move the LED location and change the size, put a washer around the footswitch, or add colored dress washers to the toggles. Small changes add up to a big difference.