How to Collect Pedals
This article is going to break down how I collect pedals. At this point, I've been collecting pedals for almost 25 years. My pedal collection could charitably be called “obsessive,” with 3,000+ stompboxes in the lot. People like to ask me how I got into collecting pedals, because they want to do the same thing. This is my (brief) explanation of how I caught the pedal-collecting bug, and some general guidelines to help you start your own collection.
Cool? Cool.
Collect What Interests You
Collecting pedals is as simple as seeing a pedal you like and buying it. You don’t need to massively overcomplicate things. Collect what most interests you. That's really the only reason it's fun. If you're collecting to show off or be the hero, let me break it to you: that gets really boring really fast.
If you collect what's interesting to you, you'll constantly be fascinated with it. Everyone has their own motivations for buying and collecting specific pedals. For me, my interests change constantly depending on what projects I’m working on, but here are a few different ways I organize my collection.
Brand
You can collect pedals in a specific brand. Some people pick older brands like BOSS, Electro-Harmonix or Ibanez that have been around for thirty plus years, because you’ll probably never run out of pedals to look for/collect. Just ask my friend Daniel Danger, who has an Electro-Harmonix collection that puts mine to utter shame. He’s been hunting down EHX pedals for most of his life, and he still hasn’t finished his collection.
On the other hand, collecting pedals from a smaller/newer brand like JPTR FX, Pogo Pedals or Anasound could be a great way to get started, as it would allow you to get a complete set of pedals in a relatively short amount of time.
Time Period
Obviously, I’m a little biased as a guitar pedal historian, but I find it really interesting to collect pedals from a specific time period. This has the added bonus of connecting you with lots of different brands, and with helping you understand what was going on in the world around that era.
When you get into time periods, you can find connections that lead you to brands you didn't know existed. You might realize, for instance, that Ibanez never actually made their pedals. You might get into this time period and discover that there's a brand called Maxon, and they’re the ones that actually made the pedals. Which prompts more questions: “What else did Maxon make? When did they start?” And then you end up collecting pedals made in Germany in the 1970s.
Style
There are tons of different styles for guitar pedals. Maybe you like crazy, over-the-top designs like Way Huge Pedals or the DOD Lamb Series, and that's all you want to collect. Or you might be really into minimalist pedals like MXR or Arion. Maybe you see pedals more as art, so you want to collect hand-painted enclosures like ZVex and JAM Pedals.
You might even be a person who wants to collect pedals by a specific designer. For instance, maybe you saw a Foxx Tone Machine from 1971, and then you realize, “Oh, a guy named Steve Ridinger designed this pedal. He also worked with Danelectro in the nineties. I wonder what else he did?” And that pulls you down another rabbit hole.
Have a Reason to Collect
Secondly, you need to have a reason to collect. Personally, I collect for research, the history, stories, narratives, the sheer geeky joy of learning about how things started. Obviously, my main motivation here is that I own a pedal company, therefore, I really want to learn from the past and see where JHS might go based on what's been done really well and borrow ideas, concepts, etc. from the companies that came before me.
Now, that's not just circuits (though JHS has done its fair share of throwbacks and tributes). I’m also deeply interested in how people marketed their gear, how they literally built the pedals, the materials they had access to, what worked, what didn’t work. I really am obsessed with that stuff, so that's an important reason for me.
Thus, I urge you to find your reason or reasons to collect. It'll keep you focused and give you an achievable end goal.
Learn How to Research
Know More About What You're Collecting Than the People You're Buying From
The first rule of research is this: you should know more about what you're collecting than the people you're buying from.
Let me say that again, because it’s worth about a million dollars: if you're a serious collector, you need to know much more about what you're collecting than the people you're buying from.
Now, the obvious markets for buying guitar pedals are Reverb, Craigslist, Sweetwater and eBay. You may find stuff locally at pawn shops or independently owned music stores, but it's not consistent. You need to be able to consistently find things and know values, know if they're selling things properly. To that end, I like to get on Reverb and correct people's listings and tell them how they're wrong– you know, in a very nice educational way.
Long story short: I wanna know more about pedals than anyone else, and I hope I do, but I know that there’s always more to learn. I highly recommend that you take the same attitude if you want to succeed as a pedal collector.
Read, Read, Read
If you're gonna get into something, read about it.
With guitar pedals, there’s a surprising amount of literature to choose from. Brands like BOSS and DOD have their own guidebooks, or you could go with a more arty option like Stompbox: 100 Pedals of the World's Greatest Guitarists by Eilon Paz– or even something as general as Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies. The only problem with printed books like these is that they aren’t relevant past their release date, so you’ll want to supplement them with current articles and blogs on guitar pedal history, too.
One great thing you can do if you find a really great book or blog series is contact the author and ask questions. You’d be surprised how easy it can be to get in touch with authors. Most of them have an email address listed on their website. Most of them spent weeks, months, maybe even years researching the book or article you just read. Odds are they’re totally happy to drop some extra knowledge if you reach out with a question.
Find Old Advertisements
Old advertisements can also be a goldmine of information. If you want to track some of these down, then Google Image Search is going to be your best friend. Full disclosure: a Google search will never be completely trustworthy in all of its data, because that’s how the internet works. But that’s okay. Although the sheer volume of information can be a little overwhelming, if you aren’t afraid to dig you can find some great stuff.
Try different word searches. For instance, if I was doing a deep dive on the BOSS Compact series, I might do a Google image search with any of the following keywords: 1978, 1979, 1980, vintage BOSS pedal ads, BOSS pedal ads, Roland BOSS advertisements & catalogs. Catalogs are a great resource, because it gives you a ton of verifiable data all at once, including dates, pricing, advertisement slogans and more.
Download Copies of Websites You Like
When you find a trustworthy website, that’s the holy grail, especially if the creator is actively adding new posts. In such cases, I recommend you go deliberately old school and download actual PDFs or hard files of these webpages onto your computer. I’m a giant nerd, so I literally have folders on a dedicated external hard drive of downloaded websites.
This is also important because the internet, unlike your local library, is constantly deleting old content to make way for the new. Even if you find an amazing website on the history of BOSS, there’s no guarantee that it will still be there the next time you go to research. Your best option is to download a hard copy of the webpage (ideally onto an external hard drive), so that you can access the information whenever you need it.
Find Your People
I’m tremendously lucky to know a ton of people in the pedal industry. If I have a question, there's people out there that I can pull on. In fact, I text people constantly. If you watch an episode of the JHS Show and wonder how on earth we found out that specific date or detail about that guitar pedal, the odds are that we reached out to the designer directly– or as close as we could get. It’s astounding how many doors open for you if you just ask for help: “Hey, I’m researching BOSS pedals as a fun project, and I had a few questions about the Compact Series. Could you help me out?”
It’s kind of a cliché to say “I know a guy,” but the truth is, I know a lot of guys and gals who are super knowledgeable about guitar pedals. I found my people, and so I pull on that constantly. I ask them questions all the freakin’ time because I want to know more about guitar pedals today than I did yesterday. If you can find your own group of people, that's huge. That's gonna save you money, time and sleepless nights.
In addition to reaching out to engineers and pedal builders, you also want to connect with other collectors. Go on Instagram and do a search with #VintageGuitarPedals, #BOSSCollector, stuff like that, until you find someone who’s as wild about pedals as you are. It’s totally doable; you just have to be proactive.
TLDR: if you're gonna collect guitar pedals, you’ve gotta know a lot about what you’re collecting. These are just a few of the ways you can learn.
Go Slow, But Don’t Wait
Number three– learning how to research –helps you out tremendously with this next step. If you’re collecting something, chances are it's not easy to find. If you’re like me, you’re probably nostalgic and you gravitate towards older stuff. It’s vitally important that you know what you’re looking for, what pedals are extra difficult (nearly impossible) to find and which pedals are fairly easy to track down. Then you can make an informed decision when a pedal-purchasing opportunity comes your way.
Basically, “go slow” means that you don't want to panic and buy a bunch of worthless stuff. That’s a waste of time and money. You want to know what you’re looking for. “Don’t wait” basically means that once you know which pedals are worth the splurge, you can confidently purchase that impossible-to-find pedal before someone else does.
A lot of times, vintage pedals look almost identical, but their values are actually totally different. Take the BOSS Super Feedbacker & Distortion DF-2 and the BOSS Distortion & Feedbacker DF-2, for instance. The former is pretty easy to find on Reverb and Sweetwater, but the latter is actually a super rare version, a lawsuit pedal that was only manufactured briefly before BOSS had to take it off the market due to copyright issues. If you saw both pedals on sale in a music store, for sure you’d want to buy the Distortion & Feedbacker DF-2.
Learn How to Date Things
This is fifth on the list, but in my heart it’s number one. You have to learn how to date pedals, or you’ll get totally ripped off. This goes back to #2: know more about what you’re buying than the person who’s selling it. Generally speaking, people have no clue what they're selling, and they might mistakenly list a run-of-the-mill pedal as a rare version– and thus demand a higher price. You need to be able to identify and date guitar pedals from a photograph if need be.
A lot of pedals (especially American-made) use CTS pots. The pots are usually soldered with wires to the circuit board, and you can date the guitar pedal from its pot code. You can do this with ProCo RATs, with MXR pedals, DOD pedals, and tons of others.
You can also utilize the Effects Database, a website that's been around since 2006 and is run by a guy named Bart from Belgium. Bart has dedicated hours of his life, consistently, week after week, to entering in every new pedal ever released. Basically, you can look up your specific pedal by its brand, and you’ll have access to some good links and info about the release date. This is a great resource for any pedal that was manufactured on or after 2007, but if the pedal was released before then there’s not a guarantee that it’ll be listed.
My favorite low-tech way to date guitar pedals is to use Google. I’ll do a Google video search on the guitar pedal’s name, filter the results by date added, and bam– the first videos added were added on the pedal’s release year (sometimes you can narrow this down to a month). It's fairly common sense, but you might not think of it unless you’re a pedal builder.
It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint
This ties back with “go slow, but don't wait,” but basically: don’t hit the gas so hard that you end up burning out. Take your time, buy the right things, make offers. Make sure you know what is super rare versus what is not. Don’t rush. It’ll all work out in the end.
Every Brand Has Features That Make No Sense
In the same vein, you’ve gotta make peace with the fact that no brand is perfect. Even a finely tuned machine like BOSS is going to have at least one feature that makes no sense, whether it’s the serial number, the product name, or something else altogether. You can actually turn this into a game. Try to figure out what the “easter eggs” are for your favorite pedal brand. What sets it apart?
For instance, some of the earliest BOSS serial numbers start with 2, not 1. Why is that? Because there actually was a Series 1 of BOSS pedals in their early days as a company, and they needed to differentiate their newer products from the originals. A company like Electro-Harmonix can also be a goldmine for easter eggs, because they had no problem changing the design of a pedal mid-production if they thought it could be improved. As a result, you have literally hundreds of different versions of the Big Muff on the market, even though the circuit itself is fairly simple. Even DOD had some pretty wild pedals in their lineup depending on the time period, like the Jason Lamb series from the nineties.
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As someone who’s been working on their own pedal collection for more than twenty-five years, I cannot stress how important it is to not take yourself too seriously as a collector. The moment this hobby turns into an obligation– or worse, a job –the good times are over.
At the end of the day, pedal collecting should be fun. If it stresses you out, you aren’t doing it right.