Are Vintage Pedals Better?

In this article, I want to tackle a pretty big question. It’s a question that has haunted all of humankind since roughly 324 BC, a riddle wrapped in a secret wrapped in an enigma: do vintage pedals sound better than modern reissues?

This article, and the JHS Show episode it’s based on, are both incredibly simple. I'm going to take four classic, coveted, full-of-mojo vintage pedals that are really expensive and hard to find, and I'm going to shoot them out against the modern reissue by the same company. We're going to figure out, do vintage older pedals sound better? Could new pedals possibly sound as good as the old ones?

As always, you are going to enjoy this article more if you go back and watch the JHS episode first, since our premise hinges pretty heavily on the outcome of these jam sessions.

But I’m not here to tell you how to live your life. Do what you gotta do.

ProCo White Face Rat VS ProCo Rat Reissue

The first pedal on the list is full of controversy. It's full of argument. Naturally, I’m talking about the White Face Rat. I agree with you that it also makes an awesome band name.

This pedal, released around ‘84, ‘85, gets its name because the iconic Rat logo is black inside of the white box on the enclosure. Legend has it that this is the greatest sounding Rat on the face of the earth, probably because it looks the coolest. Now, I want to believe that, but at heart I’m a skeptic. I need to see some hard evidence first.

In the episode, we shot it out against the newer ProCo Rat reissue that everyone hates on. Yes, they're produced a little bit differently in 2020 than they were in the mid ’80s, but the circuit is supposedly the same. After Nick and I jammed with both pedals, listened to the recordings, did our homework, this was my conclusion: these sound identical in this musical scenario. Seriously, when I'm switching, I don't feel or hear any difference. It is the same exact circuit and the same exact sound.

Let me clarify something here. I know that in a lot of shootout pedal videos, the guitarist will put the knobs on both pedals at noon and judge it that way.

Which is, and I say this with love in my heart, 100% wrong.

No two pedals sound the same if you set them at noon, not even two brand-new Lucky Cats or Super Bolts. In every single case, there's parts tolerance, which means that there is a range to these pots. They're not perfectly designed. It's impossible to make a thousand pots that have the exact same resistance when you use it, so you have to massage the knobs a little bit, pull things in, and get things closer to each other. The circuits are still identical, and they will sound exactly the same if you take the time to find the right tolerance and the range for each.

The second important factor here is the chip. I know that lot of you are saying, “What about the chip? The old White Face Rat uses the OM3, and it’s just better.”

...Yeah, not really. The chip isn’t that important. The important thing is whether or not the reissue sounds and responds like the original, and ProCo nailed it.

Vintage Electro Harmonix Small Stone VS Electro Harmonix Small Stone EH4800

Next up is a huge classic that a lot of people are emotionally attached to, and for good reason. It’s the Electro Harmonix Small Stone phase shifter. There's a lot of vintage options for this, but I used the 1975 OG version, which is more rare, more expensive, the cream of the crop if you're going to collect a Small Stone. In the video, I put it up against the Small Stone EH4800 phase shifter, which is basically a nano Small Stone reissue.

Here’s the question that comes up: how could the nano reissue possibly sound as good as the original? The vintage box is bigger, meaning the circuit’s bigger.

Well, Nick and I jammed with both pedals, and our takeaway was pretty much the same: they’re insanely close in sound. The Small Stone EH4800 is cheaper and the vintage Small Stone is crazy expensive, and this jam session helps shine a light on how ridiculous that is.

You aren’t sacrificing anything by buying the nano instead. If you want the sound of a Small Stone, the EH4800 is fantastic. Electro Harmonix has done a really good job and they take these reissues seriously. I've done things like the Big Muff shootout to show you that. People argue that the vintage pedal looks cooler, the box is bigger, therefore it sounds better, and that’s just not true. All I can say is that both pedals have the exact same circuit, the newer model just uses smaller surface-mounted parts while the vintage pedals use old parts.

If you want to split hairs, the vintage Small Stone actually has an issue with volume loss, so the reissue actually works slightly better. Just sayin’.

1983 Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer VS Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer Reissue

This next pedal is the definition of iconic. Seriously. This is the pedal they’re sending up in the space shuttle if we need to explain rock’n’roll to aliens. This is, hands down, the most popular pedal in guitar history. It’s on hundreds of thousands of pedalboards as we speak.

Say it with me: the TS9 Tube Screamer.

I took a leap of faith here. I chose to shoot out a vintage 1983 Ibanez TS9 Tube Screamer against the cheaper, modern reissue. I commonly hear people on forums refer to this specific reissue as “bottom of the barrel,” but I wanted to find out for myself. We jammed with both pedals, we weighed the evidence, and my conclusion was this: they sound the same.

I know. Go ahead and throw those rotten tomatoes you were holding onto for the right moment. This is definitely that moment. But I stand by it. These two pedals sound identical.

I hear your arguments. I really do. You’re saying, “The chip in the old one is special, pure magic, the thing of dreams and legend. Therefore, the chip in the new one is completely trash.” The truth is that the chip doesn't have a lot to do with the sound. The major differences occur in the components inside the tolerances of resistors, capacitors, potentiometers, things like that. Bearing that in mind, this reissue really holds up. I even put the knobs on both pedals in the exact same place, literally, and it was a perfect copy.

I also think we need to face some hard facts: as the human race, we’ve accomplished a lot of things, but we have not perfected human memory yet. if you're saying that the vintage TS9 sounds better than the reissue because of the memory you have of playing that pedal 40 years ago, I’m worried. Let’s be real. As people, we can't even remember what we ate for lunch last Monday, let alone the sound of a certain Tube Screamer 40 years ago at a bar in Des Moines. It's just not possible.

I’m not going to get on my soapbox here and rant, but I do want to point out that these engineers are geniuses. They want to make this reissue like the original pedal. Why would they try to make it worse? Forty years later, they have better parts, better manufacturing, smarter people than they've ever had before. A quality company like Ibanez is going to make a quality reissue. That’s just how they operate.

1979 BOSS CE-2 VS BOSS CE-2W

Lastly, I want to shoot out the vintage 1979 BOSS CE-2 against the reissue.

The vintage pedal I have is a silver screw, meaning it is the original version, very rare, very coveted. It’s also thirty years old. The paint is scratched. It’s not brand new. That’s going to factor into the sound. But it's beautiful, and it sounds beautiful. I'm going to shoot it out against the BOSS CE-2W, the Waza Craft reissue from 2018. Basically, BOSS being a boss company (see what I did there?), they recognized that these vintage units were crazy popular, but also crazy expensive. So they re-released them in a reissue form, and added some different modes as well.

For the sake of the experiment, I shot out these two pedals against each other in standard mode, and the results were amazing: I literally cannot tell a difference between them. Seriously. As the player behind the amp, I can't hear it in the mix. These are fantastic. Like, take a quick break here and go look at the whole Waza Craft line. I’ll wait.

It was beautiful, right? Made you want to cry tears of joy?

Now, some of you are wondering: what about the chip? Great news: they still make the same chip for the BOSS chorus. Now, some people still get hung up on the fact that these new chips weren’t made in a certain factory with certain dyes by certain people when the weather was a certain way. I get that. I don’t agree, but I get it. That said, I’m not going to stress about it. These pedals sound amazing, and at the end of the day, that’s what matters.

I want to address one other point in defense of BOSS, because I love BOSS. Some people complain that the Waza Craft line has a different buffer, and want to know why BOSS changed it. Here’s the short answer: BOSS changed the buffer to improve on the pedal. People complained about the buffer in the vintage model for about thirty years, BOSS took the hint, and they fixed the problem. So, is it a part-for-part completely identical remake? No. But does it sound the same (arguably, a little better)? Yup. Definitely.

So, pedals aren’t the mystery they once were, and I honestly think that’s a good thing. The specs are there online for people to look up, to build for themselves, to modify their own pedals. Now we know how the sausage gets made, and the takeaway is this: pedals are not that hard to reissue. They’re basic electronics. We also need to bear in mind that these designers are really smart. They were smart when they built these vintage models 40, 50 years ago, and they've only gotten smarter. We've had decades and decades to improve on old methods, so of course we can replicate a BOSS CE-2.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is a guitar pedal, not a Stradivarius. And honestly, that’s the best news you’re going to hear all day. It means that you can enjoy a reissue with zero regret, and you can save a little money at the same time.

Guest UserOctober 9, 2020