I can’t count how many
times this exact situation
has played out in my
travels: Person A has
some oddball pedal they
consider to be his or her
“secret weapon” and
brags about it online.
Person B knows this
exact pedal, only when
they played it, it looked
a little differently. Both
these people played the
exact same pedal with
different labels, but the
big-time plot twist is
that these pedals were
often direct copies of
other company’s circuits.
If you’ve ever played a
one-knob phaser from the
late ‘70s or ‘80s, made by
a company you’ve never
heard of, you can bet
your bottom dollar that
it was a copy of a Phase
90. Most overdrives were
Tube Screamers, most
“distortions” were just
Rats, and most choruses
were CE-2s. So it goes.
In this era, this happened
all the time. There
were quite literally
hundreds of companies
all cranking out clones
of better-selling pedals,
sometimes adopting the
names of beloved brand
names and flooding
the Western market.
Back in those days,
“Made in Japan” wasn’t
exactly the trademark
of manufacturing quality
that it is today, and any
company could throw
down a few bucks and
develop a whole line of
pedals without actually
having to do anything.
“There were
quite literally
hundreds of
companies all
cranking out
clones of better-
selling pedals...”
pseudonyms was anything
but; the pedal was also
manufactured under the
brand names Redson,
Studio Series, Gig, Loco
Box, and PowerVoice.
And it wasn’t just this
model—there were tons
of them, sold under many
more names. Korg and
Yamaha shared identical
enclosures; cats and
dogs were certainly living
together in this time
period.
Sadly, some of these
companies had true-
blue engineers on staff,
working hard to provide
you with original, great-
sounding effects, and
too many truly fantastic
pedals drowned with
If you’re wondering why
these pedal lines, many
companies like Pearl and
of which you’ve never
Washburn have old pedals heard. It’s time to put
floating around, now
on the scuba gear and
you know—and many of
rescue these relics from
these companies shared
the shipwrecks their lines
enclosures and other
became, and here are the
telltale components such
eight best.
as knobs and switches.
Take for example, the
Cutec AD-01 Analog
Delay. This pedal was a
standard analog delay,
but its breadth of
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