I used to make my own effects pedals and sell them under the “electric toad engineering” moniker. It’s a lot of fun, but the market is way too crowded and you’re not going to make much money at it! Still, my pedals are very good.
The last design I came up with I only made one of, and I use it for myself.. but, it is the best overdrive I’ve ever heard, or at least, after years of fiddling with it there’s nothing left I can do to make it any better. I just don’t want to spend my time doing screen printing, advertising, shipping, drilling, soldering, and so on just make 50 bucks on each unit.
There is a lot of hokum that people believe when it comes to overdrive, but it comes down to a really good signal to noise ratio, and a thousand tiny details, and very close attention to pre/post gain eq.
I think the same is true of the “tube sound” mojo- the tube amps that are most sought after are great because they were a labor of love, and people sweated over the tiny details. Solid state amps are designed to be cheap, so they have worse speakers, and so on. You can get just a good a sound out of transistors, you just have to spend some money and time to do it.
I also have designed pedals in the past - I agree with you it is loads of fun but probably hard to make money on. As I see it, there's two issues working against you in this regard.
First, guitar players in general seem to be somewhat driven by crowd mentality and not entirely open to embrace anything that isn't already tried-and-true. That makes it hard to get anyone to try something that isn't a clone or tweak of an existing design.
Second, like you said, the market is very saturated, and even if you do have a unique design, the aforementioned mentality largely works against you I think.
All that being said, there's a whole world of exploration and discovery out there when it comes to analog circuit design and that alone I think makes it an incredibly rewarding hobby.
I know that some guitarists hate them, but I enjoyed playing my stereo Marshall ValveState (a newer one with an ECC83 instead of the classic 12AX7). I think it was the right balance between both worlds. You could barely tell it was mostly transistors inside. Well, it was a Marshall after all. That being said I have played the new MG ones and you can feel there is something missing.
I once had to repair my circa-1990 Crate GX160, so I bought its schematics. Most of the passive components went into multiple stage filters on everyfreaking section. Talk about overkill. I doubt you could even hear the effect of some of those filters, but they definitely played safe and took care of designs back then. Except for a few vendors, now it's all about packing as much they can on the digital side and penny pinching on the hardware.
Hahaha ok, if you really do want one email me at fallingfrog at gmail dot com and I’ll see what I can do.. it would feel nice to have someone besides just me to enjoy all that work. I’ll send you a schematic with the pedal.
There's a somewhat-unique-sounding boost pedal called the Super Hard On that retails for upwards of $300 and contains a single FET transistor and a half dozen passive components totalling less than $10 in bulk quantity.
Get a good analogue pedal, reverse engineer a schematic (these are not copyrightable), create your own PCB, order a BOM, enclosures, some nice knobs, give the pedal some crazy name and paint some whacky stuff on the enclosure. Open an online store, then give it away to some pedal influencers. Wait for those sweet sweet sales.
People are always in need of a new pedal even if it is the same that 100 they already have.
Just give it a good back story, e.g. the transistors you used were with you on a trip into a jungle or were worn as earrings by your 100 year old grandma for one month.
If anyone is interested in pedal history, JHS Pedals creator Josh Scott (I heard his voice a couple of times in the trailer, which isn't surprising) has an absolutely incredible YouTube channel where he gives fantastic oral histories of companies and pedal designs (as well as opinions about various types of pedal and the like).
Semi-unrelated; I’ve been using reverb to sell a bunch of my gear for the past few months or so and the experience has been pretty good. It’s essentially eBay but curated which is a great idea.
For the one actually “large/expensive” piece of equipment I sold Craigslist worked much better, though. I was unwilling to ship or insure it.
When Reverb was bought by Etsy, they dramatically raised their fees with no real justification, and reduced the quality of their customer support. It has rather damaged their previously sterling reputation among musicians.
I like reverb, and I think it’s a pretty great resource, but they raised their rates back in August and it’s left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I end up paying almost 10% to just sell something, and that’s before shipping.
Same here, I like the page and I like their customer service (had very good experiences so far, I needed it only once though), but since the 10% is priced in all gear, everything is a tad too expensive, maybe except if you're a collector. I could live with 5% but 10% is just too much, as a seller and buyer. I still try to sell from time to time, but only the collectible stuff, I stopped buying completely.
It's currently at 7.7% + $0.25. But it's a bit more complicated than that.
If you want something to sell, you usually have to use their "bump" feature to get it to show up at the beginning of any relevant search results. You give an additional percentage of the sale to get it higher in the listings. If you have a more common item, you usually have to give up a higher percentage to get it noticed.
Once you factor in shipping and everything else, I usually sell most of my items at a loss of 10-25% depending on the item. I've never really made a profit from anything I've sold on Reverb.
TBH, it does not sound bad to me at all ( ignoring the bump feature ).
I assume they take care of the transaction/payment? Normal creditcard transaction fees are at 2% + $0.25, and this is without providing a market(place).
AppStore takes 30%, Uber/Deliveroo etc take about 15%.
Prices on Reverb have become a meme. Often people list items asking absurd prices hoping someone desperate will buy. They don't respond to reasonable offers (E.g. for what the item recently actually sold for) and listings are hanging for months if not years.
Funny place.
A not-insignificant amount of those are people who didn't want to sell but have the conversation: "Sell that damn guitar that you haven't touched in 15 years." "See, honey, I tried, but its not selling."
Very true. But Reverb should give those people advice to seek therapy and marriage counselling. In my country - forcing someone to do that is straight domestic abuse and that would warrant involving police if partner was increasingly annoying about my guitar.
The last design I came up with I only made one of, and I use it for myself.. but, it is the best overdrive I’ve ever heard, or at least, after years of fiddling with it there’s nothing left I can do to make it any better. I just don’t want to spend my time doing screen printing, advertising, shipping, drilling, soldering, and so on just make 50 bucks on each unit.
There is a lot of hokum that people believe when it comes to overdrive, but it comes down to a really good signal to noise ratio, and a thousand tiny details, and very close attention to pre/post gain eq.
I think the same is true of the “tube sound” mojo- the tube amps that are most sought after are great because they were a labor of love, and people sweated over the tiny details. Solid state amps are designed to be cheap, so they have worse speakers, and so on. You can get just a good a sound out of transistors, you just have to spend some money and time to do it.