Have You Heard of Pogo Pedals?

 

Scotty Smith is a legend in the pedal industry, one of the OG boutique pedal builders, and has been making great sounding stompboxes for three decades running. 

He got his start in the industry with Pro Analog Devices, but in this article I want to put the spotlight on his newest venture: Pogo Pedals.

How It Started

Scotty first got bitten by the guitar pedal bug in the late eighties. Around 1991, he connected with Bruce Varr at an Indiana guitar trade show. Bruce had a huge booth of vintage effects gear. This is what first flipped the switch for Scotty, and he began collecting pedals.

When the vintage pedal boom hit in the late nineties, Scotty wanted to take full advantage of it (he couldn’t believe, for example, that people were willing to pay $600 for a vintage TS808 in 1998). Now, you have to understand that Scotty is first and foremost a businessman. Realizing the profit that could be made from investing in vintage effects, he began collecting and flipping vintage gear. He called it “bird dogging,” which is actually a pretty accurate metaphor. He eventually graduated to repairing gear, and began experimenting with DIY pedals soon after. The first pedal he built himself was the three-knob Tone Bender V3. 

He founded Pro-Analog Devices in 1998 (at age 34) and built gear under this company name until 2020. As the name suggests, Pro-Analog Devices made devices that were analog, including the Manticore Overdrive and the MKII Fuzz. Around 2017, Ryan Steinberg started handling media for Pro-Analog Devices, and a friendship was forged. Interestingly, Ryan had already been building DIY pedals as a side hustle, but his real passion was in designing the enclosures with crazy graphics. 

Scotty Smith closed the doors on Pro-Analog Devices in 2020, but Pogo Pedals launched on June 3, 2020, co-founded by Scotty, Whitney Robinson and Ryan Steinberg. Scotty admits that the origin story of Pogo Pedals is a little different from most: “We wanted to be uniquely different from a standpoint of how our brand looks...We don't have one of these overly flowery stories [where] we're selling it emotionally constantly...but we're focused on the quality of the pedals being versatile and then very affordable, and then they capture a boutique sound in a small package...[that] sounds good on just about everything.” 

Basically, Scotty and his team aren’t selling a story, they’re selling a product, and it certainly seems to be working for them.

Also, can we acknowledge that Scotty, Whitney and Ryan launched a pedal company in the midst of a global pandemic and that it not only survived, but thrived? Ten points to Pogo Pedals. 

Pogo Pedals

Before we dive into the pedals currently available through Pogo Pedals, I want to mention a few pedals Scotty made under the Pro-Analog Devices brand that I love: the Boost Royale, the Dual Drive, the Power Driver V2, the Ascension, the MK 4 and the Super Quack. Although some of these pedals are mega rare, they’re a great addition to any pedal collector’s horde.

The first pedal Scotty created under Pogo Pedals was the Zen Ray Overdrive, released on December 18, 2020, and based on the Vemuram Jan Ray, which is itself a take on the Paul Cochrane Timmy Overdrive. The Zen Ray differs from the Vemuram Jan Ray in two major ways: it added two germanium transistors to facilitate a different clipping sound and it features a mid-saturation control. It’s also Dumble-esque, if you’re into that kind of thing.

The heart of the Pogo Pedals product line is the Harmony Series. These are all $149 pedals in small (but not quite “nano”) enclosures. If you want to see these pedals in action, you can go back and watch the jams in this week’s episode, but here are a few of my observations on these mega-affordable, mega-cool pedals:

  1. FZS-1 Modern Fuzz: This is Scotty’s take on the FZ-1S, which was a Tom Oberheim design done for Maestro in 1972. The Pogo Pedals FZS-1 also includes a clean blend and two voicings, so you have plenty of options here. 

  2. VPS-1 Analog Phaser + Vibe: Let me be clear: the “vibe” in question is not univibe, but vibrato, which means that this pedal removes the clean signal and modulates the pitch. Interestingly enough, this pedal does have a really cool univibe sound when it's in phase mode.

  3. SBC-1 Compressor + Boost: Based on the 1980s solid state Ampeg amp, the Compressor + Boost may be the most unique pedal in the series. The controls are super different (case in point: there is no master volume control), which provokes this almost visceral reaction of, “Whoa! This isn’t familiar.” As someone who’s played a crap-ton of guitar pedals, I like that. 

  4. COB-1 Octavia: The Octavia Octave Fuzz was inspired by a mix of legendary octave fuzz pedals from the last 50+ years, including the AMPEG Scrambler, the Foxx Tone Machine and the Univox Super Fuzz. Note that the Octavia is not based on the Roger Mayer circuit of the same name; Octavia is just a really baller name, so Scotty and his team decided to borrow it. 

  5. TRS-1 Vintage Trem: This pedal is based on the 1960’s Schaller Tremolo TR-68, and the knobs give you some great options for exploring different sounds. 

Pogo Pedals Harmony Series

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it until the day I die: companies don’t make pedals, people do. Pogo Pedals is Scotty Smith, Whitney Robinson and Ryan Steinberg. They’re the ones that put these fantastic pedals into the hands of thousands of guitarists, and doing so in the midst of a supply chain shortage and a global freakin’ pandemic is no small feat. 

Check them out on Reverb.com and the official Pogo Pedals website, and order yours today. 

https://pogopedals.com/

 
 
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