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Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
Part of the assets?
How come people don't complain about the Suhr Riot undercutting high gain tube amp manufacturers and putting them out of business?
To me Boss are the Ronseal pedals really, efficient but not exciting. They still innovate though and on the used market their delays and modulations are hard to beat.
I do agree with you about the Klon prices - I can't speak badly about DAM , I love their gear - I have seen one of their Tonebender MKII replicas going for $2000 is the USA though but even David Main's gadgets are difficult to sell at the moment
I think knowledge is helping, too - way back when, I'd trust mag reviews, which are clouded by cost (200 quid clean boosts are always amazing, 50 quid ones are bland when they might have identical parts and circuits). I even remember someone saying my boss ds-1 sounded digital, because they assumed cheap boss must be digital and they preferred 'all analogue' tone. That was quite a few years back... And it didn't sound digital at all!
People are more educated now, and if they want a punt on a booteek pedal, there is probably a clone that gets you there as a taster.
I would love for more boutique folks to use soft switching, like boss, Digitech, visual sound etc- they boast reliable, but many use true bypass and a mechanical switch, which will inevitably fail at some point.
If possible, I'd love for independent manufacturers to use boss style soft switching, just to reduce mechanical failure. I've had pedals (high quality ones, not cheapies) where the switch has gone... Home use only! So for gigging, especially when I first start, I'm going to be soft switching only and as few pedals as possible - wah, od, delay, reverb and chorus. I could probably drop od if I had the right amp. I just can't be bothered with an expensive hand made pedal to fail because it has a mechanical switch, regardless of quality.
Not so bad if I had money for backups, but I won't.
And I think digitech really gets the short end of the stick when it comes to people thinking analogue stuff is digital... )
(b) That's a good point- people act like the cheap pedals only lose the boutique guys money, and while I'm not going to pretend it probably doesn't lose them some sales, it may well gain them some sales, too, at least for the more obscure stuff which is hard to get to try. For example, I'd never even have considered a Timmy as they were so hard to get and I wasn't waiting a couple of years for something I'd never tried and might never use or even like- but now I've tried the cheapo danelectro clone, I'm considering getting the real thing (if I can ever find one in stock ) ). If people try the cheaper version and like it, they might get the dearer one eventually.
Even aside from that, the fact that a cheaper manufacturer thinks it's worth its while to clone a boutique pedal sort of means that pedal has "made it" as a classic- which might turn more players on to trying the "real thing" too.
(c) Agreed. Alongside good-sounding, quiet, unity gain buffers. A fair amount of the time I find myself passing on Boss pedals because of the buffer more than because of how the effect sounds ) Not saying I like all Boss pedals, but there are a fair few that I like and might have bought but the worry about the buffer made me have second thoughts...
As it stands, I'm looking to try a bad monkey and Digitech screaming blues in an a/b. If it sounds the same (I stack on top of gain rather than standalone), I'll be getting the Digitech.
Sorry boss the sd-1 does something to pinch harmonics my tube screamer doesn't though, which is why I want it...
Agreed. I'm not saying competition got the better of plutonium, but the perception of value I think would have had a big hand in it.
(b) I'm guessing you mean the BM versus a TS and a SB versus a BD2? I'd be interested to hear what you think, too. I've tried my bad monkey versus my joyo TS clone, and I think the Joyo sounds very slightly better. Though I have two Joyos- one Joyo and one harley benton- and they both sound sliightly different too, so it may just be component tolerances, unless they changed the circuit or something like that. But to my ears the bad monkey sounds very slightly muffled compared to the Joyo- slightly more compressed/muffled, like there's a very thin blanket over it. Granted, it has the bass control which means it's a lot more versatile than the Joyo, and I'd also trust its reliability a lot more than the Joyo. And, at least to my ears, to be fair you'd only notice it if you tried the two head to head. But yeah... I also suspect the Ibanez TS9 or 808 might sound slightly better than the Joyo, too.
(c) Daphon? )
Another thing that isn't helping is the weaker pound (though admittedly it's not quite as weak as a while back).
It also makes you wonder how useful a lot of the boutique stuff is- I'm not saying that people sometimes don't kid themselves that the cheaper stuff is "just as good", but at the same time some (other) people kid themselves that the dearer stuff is always better, and that's not always true, either. Certainly in the case of something like a glorified tubescreamer...
Incidentally, a wah is actually one of the things which I actually would kind of be willing to pay a bit more for... you seem to have to pay a bit more for decent ones. As opposed to, say, ODs, where you can get 95% of the way there a lot of the time for a fraction of the cost.