Pettyjohn Electronics — The JHS Show

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: companies don't make things, people do. So, before we dive into Pettyjohn Electronics and look at some of the baller pedals they’ve made, I want to share a little more about the company’s history and the man behind it.

Pettyjohn Electronics was founded by a guy named Stephen Pettyjohn, a studio genius who worked as a master engineer, producer, guitar player and a studio manager for years. Around 2014, he decided to take a stab at creating a guitar pedal that brought in some of his favorite features from the professional grade gear that he used in the studio: the crazy parts, the wild power voltages that run through the circuits, everything. The whole thing for him was an experiment: “Can I take this high end pro audio gear and put it in a guitar pedal?” Long story short: he could, and he did.

He released the PreDrive in 2014, and my world was forever changed. Now, some players found it a little difficult to use, just because the thing came with so many knobs and buttons, you pretty much had to turn a knob, test it out, turn another, try it again, until you got the sound that you wanted. This pedal eventually evolved into the PettyDrive, which was even more complex. Look up a photo of this thing real quick, and take some deep breaths, because you might feel a little overwhelmed. There are more knobs and switches on that pedal that you can shake a stick at -- if you’re the kind of person who shakes sticks at things.

Nothing like this had ever come out in the industry before: a true studio grade piece of equipment in a steel enclosure, sitting at your feet. As a result, the company really started to take off.

Then Pettyjohn decided to drop the two-in-one method (meaning two foot switches and two circuits side-by-side in the same enclosure) and strip his pedals down into singular units. He finally put labels on the controls, fans everywhere rejoiced, and things got a little simpler and a little more user-friendly. I’m going to take you through his best pedals, his most popular series, and we’re going to thoroughly enjoy ourselves.

The Foundry Series

Now, the new era of Pettyjohn for 2020 onward starts with the Foundry Series. All of these pedals are $299. They have a really good balance of being incredibly high-end and made with a lot of the same components as the original line, but overall being a little more affordable, accessible and simple.

Here’s a cool easter egg for the whole Foundry Series: they all run at an internal 36 volts rail to rail off of nine volts of power. That’s nerd talk for “this is a really wild pedal because no one else does that.” It's completely unheard of. You heard it here first.

Looking at the Gold MKII, I’m blown away. This is true studio grade components, top shelf stuff. You can even get a discreet off op-amp option, which basically means that if you want this to have the components like a high-end API preamp would have, he can do that as well. It's completely over-the-top, but completely necessary. It’s basically a cranked, plexi-sounding high gain overdrive. The lows go before the drive section, so you can actually use that to distort things by putting pre-emphasis bass into the drive section. It’s got powerful mids control, gain highs, and a fantastic sweep. The ranges that he chooses for the EQ are awesome.

Next up is the Chime MKII. This is the lowest gain offering and my personal favorite of the four Foundry Series pedals. Let's talk about the pedal. It comes with four knobs: level, drive, tilt EQ, and boost. I’m gonna level with you here. Tilt EQ is one of my favorite EQs ever. It's better than a tone control. It's better than a normal tone sweep. This feature originally came about because of radios, then people started putting it in Hi-Fi equipment. I've used it in my Pulp N Peel and in the Crayon. I'm a huge fan, and I think Pettyjohn is the only other builder I've seen use this in a drive circuit, so he gets major bonus points for that.

The Chime MKII also has a high pass filter, sweeping from 700hz down to 30hz, which is very useful to trim and tame any kind of weird rumble frequencies you might get. You also have a clipping control in a knob instead of a toggle switch, which is classy. Normally builders -- myself included -- just put on a toggle switch, give the guitarist one option or the other, and call it a day. Not Stephen. When the Chime MKII, you get to blend them. You can go from germanium to LED clipping, or anything in between. Honestly, it's just those little things that make this line of pedals stand out.

I’ll go over the other two pedals in the Foundry Series a little more quickly. The Iron MKII covers the middle ground between high gain and low gain, kind of an American amp tone. It’s also fantastic on bass because it has a clean mix control.

The Lift MKII is also amazing. It has true studio grade, passive EQ as well as a killer drive section, which you can engage to add grit and dirt along with a general boost/enhancement. This was originally made as a pedal that you would turn on and leave on, but it can also be an overdrive that you turn on or leave on, or you can engage it. It's a really, really versatile tool.

The Core Series

The Core Series is also super cool. They use this brand new Gørva enclosure, which isn’t being used much yet in the pedal industry. Take a second to look up a photo of this. The Gørva enclosure really does make a rounded, beautiful-looking pedal because of its unique shape. The Core Series pedals are only $199, but the quality is still studio-worthy. You’ve got incredible headroom, high voltage internally, quiet bypass, high-end parts, the complete package.

I want to start with the Rail, which is a really unique fuzz pedal. It has lows and highs, with the lows being pre-drive emphasis, meaning you can distort using frequency, which is really, really great for a fuzz and quite unique. You can run this at 7-18 volts and the drive control is a stepped rotary pot. So as I turn, it actually clicks into the different positions. The very last position is wild. It's like an infinite sustain with tons of saturation and clipping. I love it.

The second pedal in the Core Series is called the ODI, pronounced “odie” kind of like Garfield's dog pal. In fact, this pedal is called the ODI because it's based around the 1978 BOSS OD-1. Basically, Stephen used to have one of the vintage OD-1s. It was his first overdrive ever, and he had it in his rig, used it for ten years, sold it, and decided he missed it. Instead of tracking down the old pedal like some people -- again, myself included -- would have done, he made his own better, updated version of it. Because why not?

He actually managed to improve on a BOSS classic, which is no small feat. Case in point: the original OD-1 doesn’t have any tone control, meaning that the pedal is just stuck where they set it, but Stephen added in tone control. This is a real prize because there's a lot of drive pedals, a lot of Tube Screamer-style pedals, Bluesbreakers, stuff like that, but no one's really taken a BOSS OD-1 and put a unique tone control on it. No one except Stephen. I’m just sayin’.

Possibly my favorite pedal in this whole dang series is the ROUS, which Princess Bride aficionados will tell you stands for Rodent of Unusual Size, AKA, the most genius clone of a ProCo Rat I’ve ever seen. I don’t say that lightly. I know that everyone and their grandmother has made a Rat clone, and there are some pretty good ones out already. Pettyjohn has seriously taken it up a notch. Like the other Core Series pedals, you’ve got four knob controls: level, drive (which he has really done some cool stuff to in the lower registry), and then he replaced the filter control with his low and high control knobs.

That’s already a pretty fantastic pedal, but it actually gets better. He’s got a “swamp fire” switch, because what else would you have on an ROUS pedal? The swamp fire engages mystical germanium diodes so that you can pull off some really unique sounds when you're down in the swamp section. Everything about this is unique. It has the normal Rat features that you love, but the low gain sounds are exceptional.

Conclusion

I want to end this article by letting Stephen speak for himself. I asked him, “What do you want people to know about your company? If you had an elevator pitch for what Pettyjohn is all about, what is it?” Here’s what he said:

“In a totally non-pretentious way, because I really respect everyone's work, my core view on the Foundry Series is [that] these are professional tools that are on the same level on every single part as anything on a rack in the studio. The analogy for me is that I want to be the Milwaukee [Electric Tools]...of guitar pedals. Someone else makes a good tool, too, but if you have a Milwaukee [power tool] you have this idea that you're not going to find a better tool. You can find a different tool, but you’re going to be pressed to find something that's better quality and [more] well-rounded. I'm trying to push the envelope on what is theoretically possible with an analog circuit in a pedal box.”

After looking over these baller pedals, I think we can all agree that Stephen has ticked the box for “pushing the envelope.” The next time you have a free afternoon, I’d head to the nearest guitar shop and try out a few of these pedals. They’re definitely worth your time!