CAN GUITAR PEDALS SURVIVE TECHNOLOGY?
“Hey Josh - How do you feel about digital pedals taking over the pedal market?”
To answer this question, I need to tell you about lasagna. Yes, lasagna.
My wife makes an incredible lasagna, and it has a few secrets. I can’t share those secrets because I value my marriage, but I can tell you that when you take a bite, you immediately notice that it is a bit different than what you expected and definitely better than it should be. I say this because lasagna, like many great things, has a “should-be” — a set of expectations built from centuries of refinement. Alice’s recipe honors the expectation and tradition of the dish while adding something that surprises and delights. You’re eating lasagna, but you’re having a unique experience in a familiar place where you actually wanted “the same old thing.”
This is exactly how the best guitar products work.
In contrast, you don’t eat a McRib and have this experience. No sane person believes there’s an actual rack of ribs between that bun, and no one feels connected to the age-old traditions of BBQ while biting into meat that was pressed into rib form through culinary force.
Guitar thrives on products that connect directly to its original recipe while allowing variations, changes, and innovations that keep it grounded in tradition and recognizable sound. The magic happens in the space between “exactly what you expect” and “something you’ve never seen or heard before.” Guitar thrives on where it’s been more than where it’s going.
Fight me.
How Guitar Survives on the Past
Guitar is a fundamentally backward-looking instrument. While most technologies chase the cutting edge, guitar culture thrives on connection to its own history. Players don’t just want to sound good; they want to sound like the music they love. They want to access the same magic that created the moments that made them pick up a guitar in the first place, and an overwhelming majority of those moments are analog.
When an electric guitarist picks up their instrument, they’re not trying to invent a completely new language. They’re trying to speak in a dialect that already exists, to add their voice to a conversation that started in 1932. Very few people are chasing revolution or deconstruction in guitar because it’s easier to change instruments than reinvent the wheel. Want a different sound? Use a different instrument.
This isn’t just individual preference — it’s generational transmission. Guitar teachers show students how to get “that sound” from specific pedals. Parents pass down their pedalboards. The culture perpetuates itself through relationships, not marketing.
To sound like Hendrix, you need a Stratocaster from the fifties, a loud amp and a fuzz pedal from the sixties. If you want to channel St. Vincent, that recipe isn’t much different. Radiohead? Metallica? Beck? Taylor Swift? Strip away the production and arrangement, and you’ll find the same foundational guitar sounds, and those sounds are classic, not new. Much of what we hear and play as guitarists are tones that were perfected the day they were released decades ago.
As much as the forum warriors declare that they want “new and innovative” pedals, amps and guitars, the sales numbers tell a different story. Telecasters, Les Pauls, Tonebenders, Tubescreamers, Big Muffs, Dynacomps, Bassmans, and AC30s continue to dominate the market after years of supposedly “better and smarter” innovations.
Digital can recreate these sounds but the analog is the purest form and it will always be in demand.
The Legacy Industry Phenomenon
This isn’t unique to guitar — what we’re dealing with has a name: it’s called a legacy industry. Watches, fashion, photography, wine, and furniture operate on nearly identical principles. In these fields, new isn’t automatically better, and tradition carries real value that can’t be disrupted away.
Consider mechanical watches. Despite smartphones making them functionally obsolete for timekeeping, the luxury watch industry continues to grow. People pay thousands of dollars for mechanical movements that are less accurate than a $10 quartz watch. Why? Because a Rolex Submariner connects you to a lineage of craftsmanship, to the divers and explorers who wore them, to a story bigger than telling time.
The same principle applies to guitar pedals. A vintage Fuzz Face circuit doesn’t just create distortion — it connects you to 1966, to the sound of a specific moment in musical history, to a lineage of players who used that device to create sounds that changed everything. Guitar pedals carry a story, and these stories are more valuable than most companies or customers realize. We buy certain products because we can visualize ourselves inside the narrative of that product’s past, not because they are new and groundbreaking — many now defunct companies have hung their hat on new innovation alone when they should have embraced innovation within tradition.
We see this same phenomenon in the vinyl renaissance — streaming is more convenient and sounds technically better, yet vinyl sales have exploded because people crave the ritual, the artwork, the connection to music history. Guitar pedals operate in the same space.
The Kahneman Factor
Behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman wrote about two modes of thinking: fast and slow. Fast thinking is intuitive, immediate, emotional. Slow thinking is deliberate, analytical, rational. When gear companies and tech evangelists argue for the superiority of new technology, they’re appealing to slow thinking — specs, features, capabilities, logic.
But guitarists make most of their musical decisions with fast thinking. They respond to how something feels under their fingers, how it sits in a mix, how it makes them feel when they play. These responses are often subconscious and rooted in decades of cultural conditioning about what “good guitar” sounds like.
A vintage overdrive pedal might objectively be inferior to a modern digital recreation in every measurable way. But if it inspires a player to write a better song or play with more feeling, which one is actually better?
Better is not always what’s best.
We’ve Been Here Before
This isn’t the first time people have predicted the death of guitar pedals. In the 1980s, the conventional wisdom was that rack-mounted processors would make stompboxes obsolete. Why have a pedalboard full of individual effects when you could have a single rack unit that did everything better, with MIDI control and digital precision?
Remember the rack-mounted wah? I do. It’s gone.
Yet here we are, decades later, and the market share for guitar effects is bigger than ever. Those rack units are now vintage curiosities, while the “primitive” circuits they were intended to replace are still in production — and commanding prices higher than we have ever seen.
The pattern keeps repeating. Every few years, a new technology emerges that’s supposed to make traditional pedals obsolete. Digital modeling. Software plugins. AI-powered effects. Each time, the technology does find its place and serves certain needs, but it doesn’t replace the thing it was supposed to kill. It becomes a sidebar that either stays complimentary to the analog origin or it simply fades away on the same trend it arrived on.
Don’t get me started on the dozens of digital effects in my museum that I can no longer operate because they require a certain software, cable or interfacing system. Meanwhile, small pedal builders have multiplied exponentially. Why would someone start a boutique pedal company in their garage if digital was about to kill analog? The maker culture boom around pedals isn’t accidental — people want to touch, modify, and understand their tools in ways that software doesn’t allow.
That’s a whole other Substack for another day.
The Recipe Remains
Here’s what I think will happen: guitar pedals will continue to thrive alongside digital technology, serving different needs and inspiring different kinds of music. Some players will embrace the infinite possibilities of digital modeling. Others will chase the specific character and limitations of analog circuits. Most will use both, depending on the situation.
The foundational sounds — the ingredients in guitar’s lasagna recipe — aren’t going anywhere. As long as people pick up guitars, they’ll want to connect with the sounds that made guitar matter in the first place. They’ll want their Bluesbreaker-style overdrive and their Jazzmaster, even if they also own the latest AI-powered multi-effects processor.
Because guitar culture isn’t really about having the best or most advanced tools. It’s about having the right tools to connect with something larger than yourself — to add your voice to a conversation that has been ongoing for almost a century and shows no signs of stopping.
Lasagna is about seven hundred years old. Guitar pedals are only sixty-three years old. I suggest we let the podcast hosts of the year 2664 worry about whether they’re going to survive.
In the meantime, go play guitar really loud. And if you make pedals, keep making pedals. Everything is fine.