Rarest Electro-Harmonix Pedals EVER
In this interview, we're going to travel to Massachusetts, to my good friend Daniel Danger’s private Batcave. To my knowledge, Daniel has the largest collection of Electro-Harmonix pedals in the world. This interview/extended jam session got a little out of control, but I still want to give you the highlights. Scientists have postulated that Daniel is an alternate universe version of me-- or possibly I’m an alternate universe version of him --and they are definitely right. Both Daniel and I have collected an obscene number of guitar pedals, and we probably devote more thought and energy to these collections than we do to our own families.
Yeah, Daniel has a problem, but so do I, and it's a problem I really don't want to fix.
Let’s go ahead and dive into that interview.
JOSH
[Daniel Danger and I] met through this book where we showed our collections and rare pedals. I have a lot of Electro-Harmonix pedals, but they're very white bread. They're like, “Oh, here's all the stuff that people know about.” And I thought it was cool, and then I saw Daniel's collection. He has stuff I'd never heard of and never seen...prototypes and crazy things.
DANIEL
There's hundreds of Electro-Harmonix pedals [in my collection,] probably 500 with everything else...There's a lot of Maestro stuff and Univox stuff, but Electro-Harmonix is my heart and soul.
JOSH
You've been collecting 20-ish years?
DANIEL
Yeah. I got my first pedal in probably 1999. And it was an Ibanez Soundtank [DL5 Digital] Delay, my favorite delay of all time. And I got my first Muff probably [around] 2000, 2001. Somewhere in there I had a friend, an older kid, and he had a suitcase full of pedals. He had a bunch of Electro-Harmonix stuff in there, like Bassballs and Doctor Q. It just instantly clicked with me. I love the way things look, the aesthetics, everything. They were just big noise Legos, and I dove right in. The fun thing about Electro-Harmonix is that the tree never ends. There's [always more] variations and weirdness and things that shouldn't exist. That's all my favorite stuff. They're the weirdest pedal line.
JOSH
I think I know something, then I see another color way or an inverted print or some random version that doesn't exist, or a prototype. Just this experience being here has been completely bonkers.
DANIEL
I mean, I'm 20 years into an obsessive collection. Like, when I say that I think about Electro-Harmonix every day, I think about Electro-Harmonix every day [and have] for 20 years. Even as [recently] as three days ago, I saw [products] I had never seen before. And there's very few hobbies where you can be 20 years in and go, “I've never seen that.” And that's just super fun. It's a blast. They let the designers in the seventies and eighties try really weird things. And Mike [Matthews] supported really weird visions and the result is some amazingly strange stuff.
JOSH
(gesturing to a table stacked with Electro-Harmonix gear) Those are your favorites. As you pull them out, we're going to jam on them. So why are these your favorites? What’s first?
DANIEL
I think the things that are generally my favorite are the things that were too weird to live, failed as a product or just did unexpected things. Like this [Electro-Harmonix Guitar Synth EH-8000] which is an almost unusable item. But the sounds you get out of it, you will never recreate again.
JOSH
I've never seen this in person. I've never played it. So this'll be interesting.
DANIEL
Only about 50 of these were made, but according to the designers and people I've talked to the majority of them failed within the first year or two. They just weren't soldered right. So very few have survived. I've tracked down two of these. I think they are the funnest thing to play with, even if it's so impractical [that] you can never use it for recording or anything. You sit there and have the fun of turning knobs and just diving into it.
JOSH
What year is this [from]? Like seventies?
DANIEL
Early eighties...I'm going to play one of the very first Big Muffs ever built. This is the perf board. The perf board is in a different place than usual. This was probably made on the very first day that Mike was actually assembling these-- if it was Mike who actually [built] it.
JOSH
The only one I've ever seen with that position on the board as well. So they hadn't quite figured out how to use them.
DANIEL
Yeah. So the perf board is horizontal in this, and it made getting the case off [difficult], because a lot of it's point-to-point wired...So if you try to take the case off, it's a very good chance you're going to clip something and pull it out, so very quickly he adjusted it so that it would go vertical. But this is a horizontal one, meaning he made a couple before he changed it.
JOSH
Signed by Bob Meyer. That's cool
DANIEL
It's different than a Triangle [Big Muff]. Basically, it says fuzz, but these knobs operate a little bit differently, [so] it sounds a little bit different...One of my next choices is the Deluxe Octave Multiplexer with a “senitivity” knob. It's like sensitivity, but it's more sensitive, ’cause it has less letters. As far as I'm concerned, this is seventies [Black] Sabbath rock in a box. It doesn't track well. It sounds strange. It has this weird subharmonic thing that just sounds weird, like angry dinosaurs. And [it has] a strange fuzz circuit built into it. I love this pedal. It just sounds like nothing else. I don't want to say it sounds good. It just sounds like nothing else. And that's usually what I want in a pedal. This is just a blast to play.
JOSH
(picking up another pedal) What do I have here?
DANIEL
You have a Mogwai Muff.
JOSH
How many of these were made?
DANIEL
Between 50 and 100...They were given to record executives to promote the release of Mogwai album Rock Action in the early 2000s. They almost entirely went to record executives, many of which didn't play music, so they just got thrown in basements. Every once in a while, one will pop up in someone's estate sale, or [when] someone didn't pay their storage locker fee.
JOSH
I don't have this pedal at home.
DANIEL
[The Mogwai Muff] has a little bit of that unobtainium vibe to it, where people are convinced it sounds better because it's rare. It is just a normal early 2000s $50 Big Muff. There is nothing different about it, but you get these people on forums that are like, “No, it's got more high gain.” Nope. They just printed the new [label] on there. Mogwai [has been] a favorite band of mine since the late nineties. When [I found out] this existed, it was like the merging of two great interests of mine, and I had to have it. It took me a long time to find one.
JOSH
Two of these knobs also say “rock” and “action,” which EHX never does.
DANIEL
Yeah. They didn't do clever knob names, but you would think they would. The designs are largely very mechanical and clean, and then the sounds are just insanity. [The Mogwai Muff] is a pedal that's by one of my favorite bands and one of my favorite pedal companies. It's all my favorite things combined. And it's in a fun box.
JOSH
What's next?
DANIEL
A Sovtech Electric Mistress prototype. It was never released. There were [only] six or seven of these made...You can never really know how many production samples were made. We do know that a lot of Electro-Harmonix prototypes ended up in the trash. There’s maybe seven of these currently in existence. They're all a little bit different. The casings are all a little bit different. I found mine at a shop in New York. They didn't know what it was. It was on my birthday, so it was a very special gift to me.
JOSH
So Mike [Matthews] has lost the trademark. He's started Sovtek, and he's seen that the vintage [Electro-Harmonix] stuff is selling, so he's thinking of reissuing. He's done the Muff by now. And he's like, let's do the [Electric] Mistress. This line also has Bassballs and Small Stone. Those are pretty common.
DANIEL
I see tons of the Big Muff or the Small Stone. There are Bassballs. I think they did a very small run of them, maybe 50 to 100.
JOSH
The [Electro Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay] pops up and the price is so bad. There's one [available] right now, I think, but I just refuse to pay that much.
DANIEL
[This pedal] is like...when you go to a cowboy bar and they have the mechanical bull. This is the mechanical bull of pedals. If you can ride this thing, kudos to you. There are very few people who can pull it off. Nels Cline does it beautifully. There's a couple of other people I've seen do it. It's just one of the things [where] you have to just sit down and dive into it. And then whatever happens, happens. I've had tons of late night fun [with it]. Like, when my daughter was born and I was up all night, I was just in the basement literally putting loops [together] and having the Zen garden [experience] of moving things around. For the sake of discussion, the Two Second Digital Delay is the pedal that predates [the 16 Second Digital Delay], but it doesn't have a lot of the same features.
JOSH
What year did it come out? This is [from the] early eighties as well?
DANIEL
Yeah.
JOSH
From an interview I did with Mike [Matthews], I know that the tech in this was crazy. No one had done this. And when [Mike] goes bankrupt, he ends up needing to sell the tech and Akai buys it. That's where we see the [Akai E2 Headrush Delay/Looper]. But this was revolutionary...I'm going to play-- ’cause I've never played a real one --the Attack Decay. You've seen the re-issue on the JHS Show a bit, but it has presets and stuff.
DANIEL
It's different. It's a completely different pedal.
JOSH
Pre-sets are exhausting...What year was this [released]? Is this [from the] seventies?
DANIEL
I don't entirely know, to be honest.
JOSH
Honorable mentions.
DANIEL
The whole collection is honorable mentions. That's the issue. And there's so much weirdness everywhere. I can tell you the things that excite me the most: Solid State Reverb. Once again, it's kind of a production prototype. Like they made some to see what it would look like in a final thing, [but it] never came out...This is like a desert Island pedal for me, and I don't say that just because it's literally impossible to find. It sounds beautiful to me. It's exactly what I want in a weird, janky digital reverb…(pulling out a pedal enclosure with no circuit inside) [This] was a recent find. You were with me when I found it. This was found in literal trash. We dug through trash together for a day. Once I realized that these amazing things were in the trash, we had to go through all the trash-- all of it. And this is the first thing I found.
JOSH
So why is this special? It is a triangle case, but there's no circuit. That's not right.
DANIEL
No, but it is cool, because this font here appears on no other Big Muffs. It was made for this advertisement. This little text wouldn't have shown up in an ad this small, so they made one with bigger text that could be read in the ad. That's my theory. Anyway, I don't know. I've been seeing this one picture, ’cause they took one photo and used it for a couple of different ads. I've been seeing this photo for 20 years now, and I just naturally assumed I would never in a million years see this [pedal]. So when I found it in a pile of trash, I grabbed it and I ran outside and just paced around my truck for a little bit.
JOSH
I saw you disappear and come back later.
DANIEL
I don't want to say it's the first Triangle Big Muff case, but it's something really special...It's so nerdy, ’cause it's not even a [complete] pedal, but for the aesthetic designer in me, I was just unbelievably thrilled that it was me who found it, and that it's safe.
Finally, the [Electro-Harmonix Clockworks Rhythm Generator] is a polyrhythmic control voltage generator. Basically, there was a line of these units: the Super Space Drum, the Sonic Boomer, the Crash Pad, the Rolling Thunder, the Panic Button [and] the Clap Track. I have an entire cabinet filled with these kinds of synths and sampler and drum units. And the [Electro-Harmonix Clockworks Rhythm Generator] was the brain for them. You could take the drum machine and you'd run the [Clockworks] through the in and out, then you could send these signals to the individual drum machine to trigger them and then run everything into a mini mixer...[Then] you'd have this giant tabletop setup where it's just like space. This represents a really fun hunt. Had to find it in some weird Eastern European country. It's another one of those things that fits into the Electro-Harmonix vibe that weirder is better. Everything about the era is just unbelievably fun.
Josh here again. I think it’s safe to say that Daniel and I get each other, and this was a very fruitful interview. If you want to add something a little strange into your Band Camp rotation, make sure you stream Daniel’s album xCrime Dogx.