WAMPLER. VEX.
BLANCHE. THESE
NAMES ARE THE
PIONEERING ONES
IN THE EVEREXPANDING CANON
OF BOUTIQUE PEDAL
MANUFACTURERS.
Their designs have permeated the
effects world for years, have been
the building blocks of our industry
and countless modern designs have
borrowed elements from their works.
With that said, old-school builders such
as Electro-Harmonix and Ibanez weren’t
exactly champing at the bit to give us
DIY builders a leg up—leaked service
notes and the absence of “gooped
boards” were the only pearls given to
us. Early pseudo-boutiquers released
pedals that were simple tweaks on
these designs, but when real trails
needed to be blazed, and the boutique
pedal industry needed to separate
itself from the mainstream, many of us
turned to one man. That man is named
Tim Escobedo.
Many of the most die-hard pedal
junkies have never even heard of Mr.
Escobedo, but his work permeates
modern pedals to this day. His page,
Circuit Snippets, has been a modern
beacon of DIY effects, and thousands
of people—myself included—have had
it bookmarked across generations of
computers. The site is a bare-bones
collection of circuits designed by Mr.
Escobedo himself, a scratch pad of cool
ideas that everyone’s kept under their
hat as a depository of genius that only
they know about. Though it looks like
copyable text, the site is a series of
pictures—both pictures of schematics
and pictures of text. It’s about as
primitive as the Internet gets, yet the
circuits themselves are timeless.
Every type of effect is represented
within the annals of the Snippets,
from vocalized wah and Magnatonelike vibrato, to boost, ring modulation,
fuzz and more. Astute readers will
note that I’ve slapped an Escobedo
circuit—the Duende—onto the tail
end of the Shin-Ei Companion Fuzz
(Issue 133). One of Escobedo’s
most outside-the-box designs is the
Uglyface, a pedal whose name is
benign enough, owing this innocence
to its similarity to “Fuzz Face.” The
Uglyface is a CMOS-powered whackedout distortion-and-synth hybrid, and
after building it, is the only pedal about
which I’ve ever heard our own Andy
Martin say “I’ve never heard a pedal
like that before.” It’s wild. It’s 100
percent unique. It’s an absolute unsung
classic from one of the Dons of DIY.
And you’re going to build it.
But first, let me hit you with that
disclaimer: Neither I, nor Tone Report
ToneReport.com
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