state of the stomp

A comparison photo of the shapes and sizes of transistors over time, ranging from the 1960s Black Glass (bottom left) to the 21st-century SOT-223 transistor (top right).

When it comes to vintage electronics, those contemporary to their release tend to see them as outdated, while the next generation has a different point of view. Here, our columnist dives deep into the subject.

Let’s begin this article with my memories from when I was a teenager, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. My father was an electronics wizard. He once built a 1000-watt tube pirate radio, and also my first guitar amplifier from a modified boombox. One day, while exploring his garage, I stumbled upon a dusty box labeled “Echo Device for Vocal.” To my surprise, I found two Matsushita MN3005 bucket-brigade delay integrated circuits (ICs) inside. As I’d been delving into the guitar world and its cults at that age, I felt like I had discovered a treasure! Even as early as the ’90s, analog delay was a vintage holy grail.

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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.

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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.

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