Dark Barn wrote:I bought in '94. I now keep it in a Rubbermaid box with some other memories. Also it's never been cleaned, there be some vintage dirt on this thing
SNAP! My first pedal was this, and a Digitech Bass synth wah bought simultaneously as a present from my dad for my GCSE results. Hence my love for distorted filter sweeps Still have them both and still love them both!
Gave it to my neighbor... Want to ask for it back if he still has it to circuit bend... Probably in some old box never used since I gave it to him... Pffft....
My first pedal was a purple boss flanger that my folks bought me with my sam goody guitar. Can't remember the name of the shit guitar but it weighed it ton. hated that flanger with a passion. Never used it and flipped it a few years ago.
My first pedal was an Amdek PHK-100 Phaser and it was given to me as a gift in the 1980s.
Here are the too many details:
When I was 12 I lived in Japan and one night one of my father's colleagues invited us to dinner. My father mentioned that I liked music and playing guitar. The guy spoke very little English and I spoke almost no Japanese, but he asked me what bands I was into and I said Hendrix, Pink Floyd, etc. and he sat me down in front of this large TV. He had a laserdisc of The Wall and the subwoofer bass rumble was actually connected to a seat pad that you sat on so that you felt the bass rumble. It was cool.
He then asked me if I'd heard of Ry Cooder and said that if I liked Pink Floyd, then maybe I'd like The Alan Parsons Project. A few days after this dinner party he gave my father about six cassette tapes with albums by Ry Cooder and The Allan Parsons Project and Billy Squier. Which was very kind.
But back to the dinner itself.... after talking about bands, he wanted to show me his guitar gear.
So he had this area in his small Tokyo apartment with a metric shit-ton of guitars and guitar pedals. He had dozens and dozens of pedals. I was 12 at the time and didn't fully understand how different pedals made different sounds. So unfortunately I was like an alien in a candy store. I didn't know enough to test out "rare" things, but he wanted to "jam" and so we we both got on guitars and he patiently tried to play along to the awkward rudiments of my playing.
One pedal he let me try was some sort of fuzz in a treadle enclosure that had like four stomp switches on it that I couldn't manage to get anything but feedback out of. He had a double-neck 12- & 6-string guitar.
And then at the end of the evening he laid out about 8 Amdek pedals and asked me to choose which one I wanted to have. My father and stepmother protested that this was too generous (they had brought a gift for him hosting us for dinner, but nothing comparable to a guitar pedal) but the guy was adamant. I said that I'd love to have the fuzz in a treadle because I didn't understand what it did or how it worked, but he politely indicated that the fuzz pedal was not on offer. I thanked him profusely for his kindness and chose the phaser.
At that time I didn't even fully understand what the different effect types were or what they did... but I had liked the psychedelic wash of the phaser, and so I chose that. I still have the pedal. It is a bit rough around the edges, but it still works.
Johnson EAD-2 delay. It's still alive, though semi-fried. I jumpered an over-value pot to the dying stock pot, which increases the delay time. I also fiddled with the trim inside. I absent-mindedly put the metal base back on without placing the plastic insulating card in first, and now I can't bypass the effect, so I have to use the mix control to blend between wet and dry signals. It sounds like silty digital mud. It always sounded very dark/muddy, but I think it's even worse since I adjusted the trim, and worse still since I shorted out the circuit by putting the base plate directly against the circuit board.
It's noisy junk, but I can't let go of it. I mentioned the stock delay time pot dying. Basically, I tweaked it too much, and it broke something inside, so it's really wonky and does stuff like this if you set it *just* right: https://freesound.org/people/the_semen_ ... nds/47959/ (The weirdness starts about 30 seconds in).
I remember it sounding really interesting running off a dying 9v battery, though I only tried it once approximately ten years ago.
My first was a gift to me, a standard Crybaby GCB95 from the early 90s. I do still have it but don't use much wah currently, so it's off the board.
First pedal I bought myself was a Boss OS-2. It's a fine pedal but I was running it into a JC-120 and it just sounded thin no matter what i did. Kept that one for a long time as well but did sell it to a friend a few years ago.
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