Vintage Guitar Pedals

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I guess this means old pedals that you bought long time ago and never use anymore. There's one apparently that is quite rare. It's a fuzz box called the Burns Buzzaround and was made somewhere around 67---> 70. Not many made and an unusual design. Robert Fripp (King Crimson) used it (probably 21st Century Schizoid Man) and I think also Jimmy Page on some of his studio work for other artists, back just before Led Zeppelin. I'm thinking maybe Donovan's - Hurdy Gurdy Man. I'm thinking this because I own one of these pedals and I know the sound. Bought it in 69 I think. Supposedly there are only 3 left (well 4 now) and it's valuable - maybe. I haven't played it in 5 years so I guess I'll dig it out of my moving boxes. Here's a screenshot of someone talking about it appearing on E-Bay:

[|iR|Focalor]

Wow, those knobs have got me curious as a mofo. "Balance"? It has mono in and out so I haven't the foggiest idea what the hell a balance would do on a fuzz pedal. I assume it acts as a blending control for the other two knobs, but I can't read what they would be. Usually it would just be something like "fuzz" and "level". Maybe it has no volume/level knob at all, maybe it's something like "fuzz/gain" and "regeneration/harmonics"... curious.

I have a pretty neat vintage Morley Volume/Phaser pedal, I guess it's vintage, I'm thinking it was produced in the 70's. My dad bought it for me for my 16th birthday I think. I sold when I was in college for partying money and hated myself for doing such a stupid and impulsive thing for many years. Years later, I went back to the same store where I sold it and was looking around for rackmount gear. I ended up buying my Digitech GSP2101 effects unit there. I figured since I was in the buying mood, I'd just ask to see if they still had that old pedal I sold them. He looked around behind the counter in some drawers and sure enough he had it. I damn near jumped over the counter and snatched it away from him when I saw it. Talk about luck. If they had kept that thing out in the display case all those years, no doubt someone would've grabbed it up by then. Maybe, who knows.

Anywho, it isn't really practical, it's not as crystal clear sounding as the modern all-digital phaser pedals, and it also uses about a 5 foot undetachable 2-prong AC cord for power, but it has features that newer ones don't. It has the option of controlling the phase with an expression pedal, and you can hit the button to the left of the rocker pedal to switch it to AUTO which will move the phase automatically and you can regulate the speed with the expression pedal. With the harmonics/feedback dial, you can create some really unusual sounds that most other phaser pedals will never be able to reproduce. If you set it just right and use perhaps a stereo delay pedal AFTER this unit with some slightly staggered delay times for each side, you can create some nice roto-vibe leslie speaker effects. I cracked it open one time and looked around inside it. It wasn't what I expected. It wasn't all nothing but circuits and resistors and shit. It had a piece of cardboard boxed around one part of the guts and was taped in place. I removed it and inside of the black paper box was a little light bulb surrounded by these sensors. That's what controls the phase, as the light bulb would get brighter, the phase would shift. I'm almost positive that no other phaser pedals use such a thing.

It's hard to describe the sound of this thing. If you were to use any other kind of phaser pedal, you wouldn't get the same crisp tone, it would be somewhat dampened like a lot of pedal units tend to do to a signal. It sounds a lot like the type of phaser that the guys in Lynyrd Skynyrd used on a few songs. I haven't used it for any of my own recordings to provide an example, maybe I'll fire it up and record some sample clips for you sometime soon. I really don't honestly use a lot of my effects, I tend to just slightly tweak the factory demo presets on my Digitech unit and go, even though it has the ability to do damn near anything under the sun. I use my wah pedal all the time though. Most of the guitar solo tracks from my newer crap were all done with wah. I'm surprised they didn't sound completely noisy and shitty too, this damn thing is impossible to get working silently anymore. I've WD40'd the piss out of the axle but the pot still fuzzes like hell.

I love the sound of VOX wahs, but I'm about ready to look into trading up for something a little more flexible. Once you lube the axle, the pedal won't stay put at any point to use it as a filter like Mark Knopfler does a lot. I haven't heard any other wahs that sound worth a shit though. The Dunlop CryBaby's all sound weak and don't have the same harmonics. Looking for something with that classic White Room british wah sound.

[|iR|Focalor]

Hmmm after looking the pic again, it appears that the knob on the top left is probably the "GAIN", so maybe there isn't a level control, I guess it just uses the balance knob to gate the level of the effect with the original input signal rather than acting as a master output control.

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There's a youtube demo of it. The guy plays with all the rotary knobs to get different timbres and sustains. But you won't hear anything special off of this because you need to hear it "live" with an amp. I just like it for lead sustain notes. Any attempt at playing complex chords with it on, are just garbled harmonics. Power chords are OK though.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZViQ2H-5s4

[{TNP}Dukie]

I have a "Big Muff" I bought new in 1974.  Don't have a picture though

[ReCycled]

I have a "Big Muff" I bought new in 1974.  Don't have a picture though

That's considered vintage as well. Hendrix used that one a lot. Probably worth some bucks....
 

[|iR|Focalor]

Damn, sounds pretty good, even in that crappy video with that guys crappy guitar. Sounds a bit better than your standard issue Big Muff Pi pedal.

I couldn't find any videos of the phaser pedal I have, but I did find a video of a chorus/flanger pedal that just like the phaser pedal I have, and sounds very very similar too. Very deep ethereal tones, very pronounced and crisp, I'd guess because of the weird light bulb circuit it utilizes. For the life of me, I can't recall what you call that kind of circuit either, maybe LFO (low frequency oscillator), I dunno, but it's driving me nuts now.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvOA0K-DIFM

[|iR|Focalor]

I have a "Big Muff" I bought new in 1974.  Don't have a picture though

That's considered vintage as well. Hendrix used that one a lot. Probably worth some bucks....
 

The one he's known the most for was the old Dallas Arbiter Fuzzface, but I think I remember seeing an old video where he was showing off some of his gear and he had several different fuzzes to choose from, the Big Muff included. Pretty much anything containing germanium transistors is considered the better product, I think even the more sought after wahs use them too. I'm not really sure, but I think the old original Ibanez Tubescreamers may have used them.

[|iR|Focalor]

Foe Toes!

Morley model PFV Volume/Phaser. I'm not sure the exact year this pedal was built. They were manufactured by the Tel-Ray corporation from 1971 to 1983. I haven't tried contacting Morley with the serial number to ask them if they could find out when it was manufactured. I originally bought it back in 1996 when I was about 15 or 16 for a mere 65 bucks, which was a total STEAL. The guy originally wanted a little upwards of 100 bucks for it, but I think the guy noticed what a raging hard-on I had for it since I came in a few times to play it before talking my dad into buying it for me for my birthday. It was missing the middle knob, thus why there is an ugly red topped knob there, a replacement knob I got at Radio Shack right after I bought it. The guy said he'd sell it to me for 75, but my dad got him to knock another 10 bucks off because of the missing knob, hehe.

[{TNP}Dukie]

Cool!  I have a Morley power wah I bout in th mid 70's too

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I rented one of those to see if I wanted to buy one. I'd had several Crybaby Wa-Wa's prior to that, but none of them lasted. Shitty electronics. The Morley lasts forever. I just found the tonal range was too huge between the hyped mid-range high and then down to the bass. However when I hooked it up to the fuzz (fuzz on) it was pretty good. I have a cut I did many years ago where I used it. My buddy and I also ran a mike thru them both and got a great "I ...am... Ironman!" sound. But the feedback was tremendous. My ears still hurt.

I gotcha yer big muff...right heeyah...

[{TNP}Dukie]

mine looks just like the gold tinted one on the left.  its still sittin on my bedroom floor plugged into my guitar for the last 22 years

[|iR|Focalor]

and got a great "I ...am... Ironman!" sound.

Last time I tested one out years back, I noticed the same thing. They nail that early Tommy Iommi Sabbath tone right on the head using just about any amp. I'm not sure if they make them the same way, but at that time they were using this big chunky green metal housing for it and it looked like some kinda military-made landmine, hehe. They even packaged it in what kinda looked like an ammo crate.

I would say that I'd like to get some chickenhead knobs like the one on the right for my Morley pedal, but it wouldn't improve the looks at all. As far as vintage pedals go, this thing isn't really worth top dollar, it's not in really good shape. It looks like the rubber grip on the top of the pedal has been reglued back on in the wrong place, it's missing two of the rubber feet on the bottom, it's got some places on the top right edge of the chrome where the chrome has been scratched off, and it also has a few splotches on the top where the chrome has bubbled off and rust has formed on the metal.

[ReCycled]

" its still sittin on my bedroom floor plugged into my guitar for the last 22 years ")

I find that any pedal that is left connected in the chain of all your cords (in the off position) will drain the battery.
 

[|iR|Focalor]

Most of them will because the battery power is connected to the rest of circuitry inside the pedal through the input jack and they still require a small degree of power to move the signal from the input jack to the output jack even in bypass.

That's one reason I'm not a big fan of pedal units. If the battery isn't fresh, it can somewhat decrease the gain of the signal from the guitar to the amp. If you have several (like 8 to 15) all linked together and on bypass, you can DEFINITELY tell a difference in the guitars output. That's why pedal users will typically utilize routing switches somewhere in the chain to remove strands of unused effects from the chain, and sometimes signal booster pedals to compensate for that loss of output. That's also why I'm such a big fan of rackmount gear, especially for multi-effects processing. Rack multi-FX units will usually be of a higher quality, with more flexibility and ways to fine tune the effects that pedals usually don't feature. You can store presets in memory, edit the placement of FX within the chain (algorithm editing), and they have negligible or zero signal loss. The only real problem is that it's a little more expensive and not quite as user friendly and easy to understand as looking at a chain of pedals and seeing all the dials of each one right in front of you.

My pedal collection used to be pretty large, but I ended up selling a lot of them in college for party money. I don't really miss any of them. I missed the Morley phaser, obviously, which is why I was so thrilled to find it and buy it back... for 4 times what I sold it for, but oh well, they gotta eat too. I also miss my old BOSS CH-1 mono chorus pedal. It wasn't a particularly interesting pedal, the same one they've made for years and years. I always prefer chorus to be stereo anyway, but it did have some sentimental value. The only other two that I never sold were my VOX wah and BOSS MT-2 Metal Zone distortion, which I couldn't bear to part with. I got the Metal Zone pedal for a steal too. I got a Guitar Center coupon in the mail for like 25 bucks off anything. I started out with a DOD Death Metal distortion, which I couldn't stand, it had a totally uncontrollable amount of gain, did nothing but feedback and squeal when I turned it on. So I took it back and hoped to find something else. I they didn't have anything else that I liked, so I immediately went over to MARS Music and looked around. I tried out a MT-2 and loved it. I mentioned to the clerk that I had just come from Guitar Center and was hoping to use my coupon there and how sad I was that I wasn't going to be able to use it before it expired. He then told me they had policy of doubling any competitor coupons. So I ended up getting the BOSS Metal Zone for 50 bucks off. Score! ...Hmmm, could be why MARS ain't  'round no mo'.

I've noticed they added some features to the Big Muff pedals as of late. They now have a "wicker" toggle switch, which I think activates some kind of preset active EQ filter to accentuate high frequencies, and it also has a "tone" toggle switch which removes the tone knob... dunno what exactly that might do. Perhaps the tone knob acts like a dual control to roll on presence while rolling off resonance at a certain interval and the tone switch would simply bypass that filter.