The Story of the Morning Glory

In this article, I want to walk you through the definitive timeline and history of one of my own pedals: the Morning Glory overdrive. If my pedals were my children (and they pretty much are), this would be my firstborn. I do my best not to play favorites (any parent will tell you that’s a recipe for disaster), but let’s be real--

The Morning Glory was, is, and always will be my favorite JHS pedal. Period. We could invent a pedal a few years from now that literally cures every human disease, and I’d probably still say, “Yeah, I like the Cure All Uni-vibe. It’s a solid pedal. But my heart belongs to the Morning Glory.”

Do we understand each other? Cool. Moving on.

Having produced well over a hundred episodes of the JHS Show at this point, one thing consistently drives me crazy: when I dig into a company's history or a particular pedal’s story, and a lot of information is lost. I'll go to great lengths to find this information, traveling across the world, sitting down and interviewing people, trying my best to build the story, put it in place, and preserve history, but I can only do so much.

I've always thought that I'd done a really good job at preserving the JHS history, even though we’ve been in business now for over a decade and a lot has happened. But upon putting this episode together about the Morning Glory, I’ve realized that I'm part of the problem as well. It’s true. I didn’t keep records on this stuff like I should have. There's something about when you're busy doing the thing, you don't remember the thing.** If you grabbed Davy Crockett while he was fighting at the Alamo and asked him what year he represented Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives, I’m not sure he could tell you.

**Fairly sure Abraham Lincoln said that in the 1960s.

That said, I'm going to do my best today to show you how the Morning Glory happened, the more or less complete history of this pedal, and I’m going to include all the nerdy details that I can, because that’s what I do.

Version 1 (2007-2009)

It all started in 2007, with me modifying BOSS pedals in Jackson, Mississippi. About a year later (late 2008), I wondered if I could adjust or modify this classic Bluesbreaker pedal that had been on my board for a while. These pedals originally came out in ’91 and they're great, but I wanted it to be louder. I wanted it to be slightly different. So I found a DIY kit, I built my own Bluesbreaker pedal, and then I modified it, constantly tweaking it, playing with it, seeing what I could come up with. This was my first experiment in actually building pedals, not just modifying them. The results were the very first prototypes of the Morning Glory.

But here's the problem: I can't find any of these prototypes. They are gone forever. I think there's 5 or 10 of these out somewhere in the world. They're in an MXR-sized enclosure and they're hand painted with the sun on a blue sky (I think, but I’m honestly not 100% sure what these first pedals looked like). What really eats me up is that these pedals are JHS history. They’re a link in the chain, except now it's a missing link and that bothers me.

By the summer of 2009, I was selling way more modified pedals than I ever thought I would, and people wanted me to build recreations of classic circuits. Things like that modified Bluesbreaker that I had been tinkering around with. As a result, I introduced the very first version of the Morning Glory overdrive.

If you take a look at this Morning Glory V1, you’ll definitely notice some cosmetic differences. We have a plain enclosure. I actually bought these from New Sensor, which is Electro Harmonix, and they came powder-coated. At this point, I did not know how to label them. I refused to use a sticker for the Morning Glory V1, because it would have driven me crazy. I have horrible handwriting, so writing the name directly on the pedal was out.

Then inspiration hit while I was walking through a craft store with my wife: rubber stamps. I saw them, the lightbulb went off, and we bought a ton of them. That’s what you’re going to see on these V1 pedals, the JHS letters stamped into the bottom left corner and under the three knobs near the top. Lastly, I saw a sun stamp and naturally put it on the pedal at the heel. It’s important to note that around the same time, some other JHS pedals, like the Pulp ‘n’ Peel, didn't even have a stamp at all. I was still using stickers.

So, the Morning Glory V1 is released right in the moment where I discovered stamping. In looking at these first pedals, you could tell that I was still experimenting with aesthetics.

Version 2 (2009 - 2010)

Okay, chronologically, it would make sense to go from V1 to V2, but I want to focus on a transitional prototype here for a second, a strange pedal that’s kind of a link between them. It has a really wild story. The prototype in question is the third Morning Glory like this ever built, and it has an added toggle in the upper right hand corner. This is interesting, because I'm almost certain that I kept building Morning Glory pedals like this with or without this toggle for a while longer.

I would identify a V2 as having the toggle, but there’s this nebulous transitional period where I can’t say for sure whether the pedal I’m holding is the V1 or the V2. For instance, the prototype I showed in the JHS show episode is one that I built in August 2009 for a friend of mine, Steve, who became the general manager of JHS years later, but even though it has the toggle I’d still call it an experimental modified Morning Glory V1. There’s custom features on this, like the added high cut switch, which tames the high end when you turn the drive up, and the LED clipping. Basically, it’s a custom V1 masquerading as a V2.

You’ve gotta understand, I used to build custom stuff for people all the time when we first got started. In fact, some of you may still have versions of my circuits from these early days that don't really make sense in a timeline. Honestly, that's part of the fun of this. This isn’t a Behringer pedal that rolled off an assembly line. This is me, in real time, trying to figure out how to build a pedal, and selling these different versions as I went along.

I know for a fact that I continued to build versions without the switch, but for the sake of it, we're going to have to go nonlinear and just say a Morning Glory V2 has a toggle switch and version ones don't. That being said, V1s and V2s were being built at the same time in 2009, so the official point where we transitioned from V1 to V2 is hard to nail down. We do definitely see the introduction of a JHS logo on these V2s, as well as the addition of the high cut switch in the big enclosure.

Around this same time, another friend of Steve's asked me, “Can you put that Morning Glory in an enclosure with a Tube Screamer?” And I said, “Do bears poop in the woods?** Absolutely, I can.” That custom built pedal became a product called the Double Barrel. The guy who requested it was a hunting, fishing, live-off-the-land kind of guy, and so I put a picture of a double barrel shotgun on the Double Barrel pedal as a nod to that. If you open up this pedal and look inside, it’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. It's completely crazy inside, because at this point I was still experimenting with how I would possibly wire these if I sold this as a product.

**Again, the details are fuzzy on this, so it’s possible I actually said, “Is the Pope Catholic?” or “Does a one-legged duck swim in circles?” I’d have to play that tape back to know for sure.

Version 3 (2010 - 2015)

Sometime in the summer of 2010, we transitioned from the big box into the small box, which is V3. There are some obvious differences between the V2 and V3: the V3 pedals are different colors, they're in a smaller case, but they do have the same exact circuit board. They sound identical, but this is just a true transitional unit.

At this point, I still wasn’t satisfied with the Morning Glory sun icon, so instead of shipping with an icon I didn't like it, I didn't put one on it at all. That's how OCD I am. I am still that way. But later that fall, we came up with the current icon, which is a Roman candle. I liked it. It looked good. At this time, we also moved to a printed circuit board. These pedals were made much better and more consistent.

Several years, starting in 2010, JHS starts growing fairly quickly, adding employees, new circuits, and it's bonkers. The Morning Glory is front and center of that, but a lot of stuff happened/was released during this time, including new pedals based on that Morning Glory circuit. For instance, in 2010 I’d gotten deluged with customer emails asking me if I could make the Morning Glory high gain, so I started experimenting. You’ll see a few modified V3 Morning Glory pedals that say H.G., which means that it's the original circuit, but made for high gain. They're incredibly rare. You ever see one, buy it, mortgage your house, do whatever you need to do. You’ll want to have this pedal in your collection, trust me.

Then in fall of 2012, we had the idea for a pedal called the Patriot, which was basically the All American, which was my Rat-style pedal, put together with the Morning Glory, making this gnarly Rat/Bluesbreaker combo. It's fantastic, but we never really got beyond the prototype stage with this, so somebody out there should make this. You reading this, John? Or Jeorge? Jamie or Julie? If so, please make this pedal a reality.

Okay. Moving on.

On Black Friday of 2012, we released the State Line, which was the Charlie Brown and a Morning Glory together. This was a limited black Friday only sale; we only made about a hundred of these all together. They're really rare, really expensive. If you happen to have one, here’s a cool piece of trivia: the stars on the enclosure are the cities where I lived: Muscle Shoals, Jackson, and Tupelo.

In 2013 (or maybe 2012? I’m honestly fuzzy on this date as well), we did a very strange Christmas limited edition series with a ton of existing JHS pedals. The enclosures had different images (Santa’s sleigh, reindeer, etc.) and the idea was that if you had the complete set, you could lay all the pedals out and show the complete Winter Wonderland scene. As a responsible person who owns a pedal company and was making lots of pedals at this time, you think I’d date something like this, but we didn't. We just wrote “Christmas” on the back of the pedal in sharpie, because why not? As a result, I don't know how many we made, and I’m not even 100% sure the year we released them. I think we put a bunch of these out to dealers.

If you have anything like this in your collection, please let me know. I have a lot of questions.

While we were still releasing the V3 in 2012, we did make a few changes. It was still the same sonically, but we redesigned the stamp. It looked so much better. I was finally able to sleep through the night. This was a good year for JHS.

That said, we made the biggest company-wide transition cosmetically in 2015. By this time, we could no longer stamp all of these pedals. We just didn’t have time. We were producing close to 20,000 pedals a year, so we put on our big boy pants and bought some printers. We scanned the original images and printed them all on the enclosures, like you see today. Around this time, dealers requested that we put the names of the controls instead of letters, just to be easier for people to use on the fly, so we did that, too.

Also in 2015, our beloved Kansas City Royals won the World Series. This was a big deal. We had a parade. The kids were let out of school to celebrate it properly. Maybe I hired a skywriter to write “KC Forever” in the clouds. Maybe I didn’t. I don’t remember. But JHS did release these limited edition pedals we called the ’85 Revive. We released this limited run with a few different printings, but they all had the white base and the KC Royals logo on the enclosure. They're really, really rare and fun, especially if you're a Royals fan.

Then I collaborated with my hero, Robert Keeley, which was maybe the highlight of my entire life. He modified his compressor and I modified my Morning Glory with some of these high gain mods, and we put it together into the one pedal to rule them all: the Steak and Eggs overdrive, which is really, really fun.

Version 4 (2016 - Present)

The Morning Glory we’re currently producing is the V4, which we initially debuted at Winter NAMM 2016.

I say we released the Morning Glory V4 with the red remote system in 2016, but it had actually been about a two year design process to make this transition from V3 to V4. It really started at the breadboard level. How could we take a Morning Glory V3 and revise it for a V4 without changing it tonally? I did want to add the red remote feature, which was actually a pretty simple upgrade (basically, you take the red remote controller, plug it into the jack, and instead of a high cut switch, you actually have a boost or a gain stage.) The “hi-cut” toggle moved to a side dip switch, which remotely activates the onboard toggle.

This was the best possible version of my favorite pedal of all time: the Morning Glory, but with the red remote feature, which meant we could sell an overdrive with two gain stages, something you could change up on the fly. I loved this release, and I still do. There’s a reason it’s 2020 and we still haven’t released a V5.

Like I mentioned earlier, we did some hand-painted versions of the Morning Glory through the years as well (from the V1 all the way through the V4). At this point, I've lost almost all of them, but they’re a really cool collector’s item if you can find them. The last and most current revision that we're going to jam on here is the new icon on the heel, since we’ve rebranded and use a different font now for JHS pedals. It’s the same exact pedal, though.

The JHS Morning Glory is a huge, pivotal piece of my story. It's why the JHS Show even exists. It's why JHS is successful in any way whatsoever. So, I'm really thankful to all of you who have supported it over the years as a product. The Morning Glory was, is, and always will be dear to my heart, and it’s really cool to see that our customers love it, too!