NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN
A Pedal Maker's Theory On Why Everything Old Becomes New Again
The animals of the Pride Lands look up from below the edge of a high desert cliff. King Mufasa and his Queen, Sarabi, walk slowly to the cliff's edge, and the King raises his young cub Simba high into the air. Music pushes the scene along; a Zulu African choir chants rhythmic phrases about "a great lion" until suddenly, Sir Elton John drops the most profound pure fire banger lyrics ever to grace the cinematic screen: "It's the circle of life, and it moves us all."
Sadly, I didn't get it.
You see, when The Lion King dropped in 1994, I was more into watching Alternative Rock videos on MTV's "120 Minutes" than anything Disney was peddling. I had matured beyond silly cartoons (except for The Animaniacs), and if it wasn't related to Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, or Bush, I wasn't interested. I had standards.
Since then, I've lived a few decades, and I realize that I missed out on the profound reality that The Lion King was trying to teach me. Life, and all that it is, is cyclical. We keep coming back around to where we started.
This piece began as a Patreon talk I gave in December 2020. The response was overwhelming—people kept emailing me about it, asking when I'd write it up properly. Five years later, with the benefit of watching these patterns continue to unfold, here's the full framework.
The Pattern Behind the Chaos
If you love history as much as I do, you know there's nothing new under the sun. Hairstyles come back, fashion trends resurrect themselves, and yes—guitar pedals follow the same mysterious cycles.
I've spent years sketching timelines on whiteboards, looking for patterns and trying to understand why certain ideas explode, disappear, then return transformed. As someone who has lots of ideas, designs circuits, and runs a successful pedal company, this isn't just academic curiosity. Understanding these patterns might help predict where we're headed next and save me a lot of heartache along the way.
I genuinely believe in cyclicality—that there's tremendous value in studying how we as humans, creatives, and society repeat what has been done before. The future is typically just our past, modified. We remix, refine, and recontextualize, but truly new ideas are rare. What feels revolutionary is usually just a forgotten concept meeting new technology or a cultural moment.
I’ve found seven distinct eras in guitar pedal history, each with its own character, driving forces, and inevitable transformation into the next. Call it the sociological side of guitar electronics—human nature expressed through fuzz boxes and delay pedals.
Era 1: Genesis (1960-1968)
Everything starts with breaking things on purpose. The first manufactured guitar pedal—the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone—was born in 1961 from a studio accident during a Marty Robbins session. Engineer Glenn Snoddy and his friend Revis Hobbs then needed to replicate that accident and took a few radio transistors designed to cleanly amplify and used them to crush the guitar's signal into square-wave distortion. A few devices had existed before this as early as 1960, but nothing was commercially available like the FZ-1 would be in 1962.
The FZ-1 was manufactured and sold by Gibson but sat on store shelves gathering dust until 1964, when Keith Richards used its harsh but horn-like tones as a sonic placeholder for real horns on "Satisfaction." The song was supposed to get proper brass arrangements, but it was released as recorded with the fuzz still in. Suddenly, everyone wanted that gnarly, broken guitar sound. Culture forced the popularity of a product that was arguably a failure. It wouldn't be the last time we would see this in pedals.
By 1965, British engineer Gary Hurst had reverse-engineered the circuit, improving it and creating the Sola Sound Tone Bender. If the FZ-1 was aggressive, the Tone Bender was volcanic—thicker, more saturated, with a midrange snarl that cut through the mix. Clapton, Beck, Page, and even The Beatles all used these wedge-shaped devices to reinvent rock.
A year later came the 1966 Arbiter Fuzz Face with its simple two-transistor circuit in a perfectly circular enclosure. Where other fuzzes felt industrial, the Fuzz Face had a more organic and casual feel, responding to guitar volume and pick attack like a living thing. A year later, in 1967, Roger Mayer, a British naval engineer, invented the Octavia, and added psychedelic frequency-doubling to Hendrix's arsenal.
These legendary fuzz machines were the start of a never-ending stream of fuzz boxes from across the globe throughout the late 1960s. With each new variation, brand, and sound came more and more cultural impact. Fuzz changed music, and music changed our society. The British Invasion and the reformation of popular music rested on this effect as we closed in on the 1970s.
In 1966, the Wah-Wah was also invented, originally marketed as an effect for trumpet players. At the feet of Hendrix, Zappa, and Page, it became the voice of psychedelia.
The era also produced the 1968 Univibe, the first guitar effect of the decade that wasn't about distortion at all. Its swirling phase and tremolo suggested rotating speakers and radio static, opening new sonic territories. When Hendrix used it on "Machine Gun," it sounded like the guitar was breathing.
This era was pure DIY experimentation. No one was trying to build an industry per se—they were mainly curious tinkerers who accidentally invented the future. That said, businesses were making money, and the idea of selling guitar effects was fully established within almost every major brand in the electric guitar world. Guitar pedals were happening more as accessories in this era—truly thought of by company owners as add-on sales or ways to sell a few more things alongside their main products. There weren't necessarily any large independent pedal businesses of their own, at least not how we would consider large today. This all started to transform toward the next era around 1969 when Electro-Harmonix and Colorsound had become more established.
Era 2: Golden Age (1969-1977)
Think "golden age of comics"—the era when Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man were invented. This Golden Age of effects technology gave us the foundational circuits we still use today.
Mike Matthews launched Electro-Harmonix in 1968 with a mission: create "distortion-free sustain." His first attempt failed, but his second attempt at the idea eventually led to the production of the Big Muff about a year later. That's why it says "Sustain" on the knob, a subtle throwback to his original ambition.
The Big Muff captured something that earlier, more primitive fuzzes missed: musical sustain with controllable tone shaping. Where a Fuzz Face was wild and reactive, the Big Muff was smoother and predictable. It became the sound of 70s rock, from Gilmour's soaring leads to the modern heaviness of bands like Sleep and the Smashing Pumpkins decades later.
MXR launched around 1974 with the Phase 90—a simple four-stage phaser that made everything sound like it was underwater in the best possible way. This revolutionary effect was by far the king of the 70s, with every major brand recording their phasers as top sellers year after year. Their Distortion+ took the hard-clipping approach from Dan Armstrong, who appears to have pioneered the approach almost a year earlier with his Blue Clipper, and perfected it, creating a template for modern overdrive/distortion.
DOD launched in 1974 with more affordable effects like the 250 Overdrive Preamp. Where other companies seemed to aim for only professional musicians, DOD wasn't afraid of the bedroom guitarist, proving there was a huge market for good-sounding, reasonably-priced effects that could be depended on. DOD showed that the category was widening and no longer existed for the special or chosen few who had access.
ProCo's 1978 RAT represented the underdog story of a single man creating a new type of distortion box from a rodent-infested basement workshop in Kalamazoo. The RAT's jagged, cutting tone would define everything from punk to grunge to modern metal, and it did so as the only guitar pedal that ProCo would make for decades. The ability for such a product to have so much influence worldwide proved that information and marketing were now traveling almost as fast as the innovations.
But the real revolution was happening in Japan. Roland, emerging from organ manufacturer Ace Tone, released the CE-1 Chorus Ensemble in 1976. The first bucket-brigade guitar effect, and the first real chorus/vibrato pedal on the market. Suddenly, guitarists could access the lush, dimensional sounds previously available only in expensive studio gear. The circuit was so successful within the Jazz Chorus amp a year earlier that they decided to offer it as a standalone pedal—it wasn't the initial idea, but rather an obvious adaptation of proven success elsewhere.
American and British companies had created the industry, but systematic perfection was about to arrive from across the Pacific. The practice of adapting a guitar pedal from another non-pedal device was not common and marked a type of singularity in equipment that would only grow throughout the next decade.
Era 3: The Eastern Empire (1977-1990)
Japan didn't just enter the pedal market—they took everything from the Golden Age and perfected it. BOSS looked at every scattered innovation and asked: "How can we make this better, more streamlined, and more reliable?"
The 1977 launch of the BOSS Compact Series was like Apple releasing the iPhone. Three new pedals (OD-1 Overdrive, PH-1 Phaser, SP-1 Spectrum) questioned everything about what the pedal industry had been. The OD-1 Overdrive was a radical departure from previous overdrive approaches and offered players a much more musical, responsive, and quiet experience. The PH-1 and SP-1 each made equally bold statements about what a pedal could be. The Phaser was the best ever made and the Spectrum wasn't even an effect in the traditional sense. BOSS stated that a transitional moment had come, and it was about quality, economy, and fresh ideas.
BOSS's real innovation was in creating an experience that offered great sounds, not the other way around. They separated the footswitch from the area of the control knobs, preventing accidental setting changes. An LED indicator showed the on/off status. Silent FET switching eliminated the pops and clicks that plagued earlier pedals. The battery compartment opened flawlessly with a thumb screw instead of requiring a screwdriver. IN the blink of an eye, they created the most common standardizations within the effects category and the industry never looked back.
The late 70s Ibanez Tube Screamer, designed by Maxon, exploded in popularity by the early 80s. It took a hint from the BOSS OD-1 and adopted soft op-amp clipping, but with the addition of a new tone control, this idea soared to new heights, making the TS808 arguably the most sold and most iconic guitar pedal ever made. The TS808's midrange bump and smooth compression made it work for everyone on a stage or in a studio. It would not be amiss to estimate that 50% of all radio songs with an electric guitar from 1980 to 1990 had one in the guitar path.
A bit further into the 80s, companies like Arion proved there was room for ultra-budget alternatives. A groundbreaking idea to build pedals in cheaper, more efficient Asian factories and import them into the USA—Arion stormed onto the scene and dominated the catalogs that music stores had behind the counter. Everyone could order them, and at their lower prices, almost everyone did. Though they were housed in a cheaper plastic box, the circuits sounded surprisingly good, capturing the expensive pedals' tone for a fraction of the cost. Arion expanded access to pedals and further widened the market to accept later brands like the 1990s Danelectro Food Series and even the Chinese Amazon imports of today.
By the mid-80s, BOSS dominated global distribution while American companies like Electro-Harmonix and MXR went bankrupt. Sadly, many major American brands disregard BOSS pedals as a trend that would pass—they were wrong. The Japanese had come a long way from Era 1 and Era 2, where they mainly cloned and secretly built white label products for Western stores and catalogs. They had now transformed pedals from a cottage industry of craftsmanship into a mass-market consumer category that had the appeal of the K-Mart toy aisle. The advertising in the 80s, especially by BOSS, gave off a very Hot Wheels—Saturday morning cartoon vibe. Even other brands like Ibanez's showed posed army men standing by tanks in child-like scenes of play for their 1989 Soundtank series. Pedals were more than sound—they had become collectible and a novelty to many players—a perfect and affordable way to find your unique voice in an ever-growing world of noise.
Pedals were perfected.
The only problem is that systematic perfection eventually breeds rebellion.
Era 4: Renaissance (1991-1999)
Every renaissance looks backward for inspiration. By the 90s, a new generation of builders emerged with a simple message: "Corporate efficiency killed the soul. Let's bring back the magic."
The 1995 Klon Centaur embodied this rebellion perfectly. Bill Finnegan spent years developing a circuit that combined clean boost with gentle overdrive, creating something between a Tube Screamer and a transparent boost. But the real statement was aesthetic—twice the size of a BOSS pedal, with hand-etched centaur artwork and premium components throughout. When I spoke to Bill early in my career, he was extremely particular about every decision, explaining how the location of the LED, the offset footswitch, and other design choices all related to the guitar player standing above it. The Centaur was truly conceived as a work of art, not just a functional device. Everything about it screamed "anti-corporate."
George Tripps' Way Huge pedals took a different approach, combining vintage circuits from the 70s with modern reliability. His Swollen Pickle fuzz took the Big Muff concept and added multiple clipping options and a filter control, proving you could honor the past while pushing into new territory. The hand-stamped serial numbers in the enclosures and quirky names (Aqua Puss, Fat Sandwich, Red Llama) emphasized personality over corporate polish.
Lovetone's pedals represented the era's experimental extreme. Their Cheese Source featured wildly unique and innovative circuits that produced vintage-inspired sounds through completely original designs. The purple and orange graphics looked like psychedelic art projects, completely opposite to BOSS's clean functionality. The Flanger With No Name and Ring Thing showed the nonsensical brilliance of two Englishmen doing anything they wanted and getting away with it by mail order.
The Fulltone Full-Drive demonstrated how these 90s boutique builders could improve on classics. Mike Fuller modified the classic Tube Screamer circuit from the 70s and refined it, adding a high/low voicing switch and premium components as well as a second footswitch for boosting the gain level. It sounded familiar but better, and the thriving magazine industry within the guitar industry ate it up. Many builders like Fuller could sell hundreds of pedals, if not thousands, from a single Vintage Guitar magazine ad—something that is long lost today due to the change and evolution of our society.
But here's the key correction many miss: boutique wasn't born in the 90s—it was reborn. The original boutique era was the 1960s, when assembly lines of women in Italy were assembling Vox Wah pedals and fuzzes, or how the Macari family built Tone Benders in a back room and then applied rub-on letterings by hand—more craft project than guitar pedal empire. The 90s simply hit repeat on how it all started, but while they were at it, they changed the key of the song as well.
Era 5: Disruption (2000-2010)
I launched JHS during this era, so I lived through the chaos. Three major forces collided simultaneously—internet direct sales, digital technology acceptance, and new economic models—creating disruption unlike anything the industry had experienced before. This wasn't just technological change or cultural shift; it was both, plus entirely new ways of doing business, all happening at once.
The Line 6 DL4, which just squeaked into the timeline with its October 1999 release date, finally proved digital could work. People had feared digital effects because the earliest versions of anything digital were not good—it takes years and decades to improve on a technology like that. It took processing power that didn't exist and the right people with the right ideas at the right time to create something worthy of the stage. The DL4 definitely broke the doorway down and gave us a path to where we are now and is still used to this day on major pedal boards across the world.
Its green homage to the MXR Analog Delay was deliberate—it looked familiar while sounding impossible. It contained reverse delays that worked perfectly, tube echo simulations based on actual Echoplex units, and a looper function—all in one reliable box. Remove this one pedal from the historical timeline, and the pedal world we have now ceases to exist. I know that's a dramatic statement, but it's true.
Companies like EarthQuaker Devices emerged with a completely different philosophy. Instead of cloning vintage circuits, they embraced a relatively new and affordable DSP format to create entirely new sounds. Many of their most famous innovative designs relied on this DSP to break and manipulate signals in ways analog circuits couldn't achieve. The Rainbow Machine is a perfect example of making something broken that works beautifully. The Dispatch Master combined delay with reverb in a way that was intuitive, simple and unexpected at the time. The Disaster Transport was a modulated delay that felt familiar yet foreign—digital processing twisted into organic, musical shapes. They proved you could be experimental without being vintage-obsessed, using modern tools to create sounds that somehow felt timeless.
I remember doing what I believe was the first ever Black Friday guitar pedal sale via Twitter in 2008—I'd signed up for the service two days earlier and made a post from my phone offering Mr. Magic boosters for $75. No other pedal companies were doing this on social media yet. I sold more than I could make, and this experiment taught me to look for the odd places that were not yet understood. The internet had democratized marketing as much as manufacturing and was on its way to being the biggest disruptor the market had ever seen.
But this disruption created friction. Chinese companies who made clones suddenly appeared on guitar forums, Facebook groups, and Instagram posts with $40 versions of $175 boutique pedals, sparking the first “pedal ethics” debates. People chose sides: analog vs. digital, vintage vs. reissue, authentic vs. clone. The forum arguments that still rage today started here.
Era 6: Unraveling (2011-2020)
The 2011 Strymon Timeline destroyed decades-old arguments within its first year of production. It was everywhere—on stages of all our favorite bands, sounding fantastic and completely digital and worthy of being called professional. This was act two of what the DL4 started in 1999. It’s 12 delay types covered everything you would ever need, along with presets, MIDI, digital display, and intense editing capabilities.
That acceptance opened floodgates, and the haters of everything new or not from the good ol' days slowly faded into oblivion. Chase Bliss Audio's pedals combined analog circuitry with digital control, offering preset recall and extensive modulation options impossible with pure analog designs. The Warped Vinyl was a vibrato pedal that could save settings and modulate parameters in ways that would still be impossible with a room full of vintage gear. It was earth-shaking.
Meris (former Line 6 and Strymon engineers) followed suit with pedals that have the power of a computer but the feeling of something still accessible. Limitless sounds, choices and flexibility all contained in an enclosure that can sit next to your other pedals. Brands like Meris started to break through the already cracking wall of resistance to modern approaches in guitar effects design. Players were seeing what was possible, and the growth of these companies proved that the votes were in.
This shift in attitude extended beyond just accepting digital effects. I experienced this transformation firsthand when I started transitioning JHS pedals to surface-mount components around this time. The practical benefits were undeniable: lower noise floors, dramatically easier manufacturing, and significantly fewer repair issues. Most importantly, it kept my costs approachable during a period of strong inflation in component prices and company costs. For every fanatic of the “through-hole parts only” mob, you could find a pedal company somewhere closing its doors. Evolution isn't always a choice, and many of the decisions in this era were evolutionary in the fact that new methods had to be considered in the wake of a new and changing market.
What surprised me about moving to surface mount was the response—or lack thereof. Players simply didn't care anymore. Well, a few people did… Through this transitional period at JHS, I received a handful of concerned emails. Each one required only that you explain the benefits and ensure that the sound was the same. Sometimes this meant letting them test a new unit to find that they loved it. The old arguments about "through-hole components sound better" evaporated when people heard the results. A pedal that sounded great and worked reliably was beginning to matter more than the philosophical purity of its construction method.
In early 2012, I was on a Q&A panel at a guitar show in Los Angeles, where I was asked about being a boutique pedal company. I commented that I don't think I am—I think we make too many pedals per year, I have too many employees, and honestly, I don't know that I want to be associated with boutique. I said that if boutique means taking too long for your customers to get their order, having bad customer service, and being pretentious, I don't want anything to do with it. I remember this ruffled a few feathers, but I was right, and many brands in our sphere followed suit and stopped saying boutique. An apparent and healthy divide was happening between the old and new ideologies.
Old-school companies adapted too. EHX brought back discontinued classics like the Big Muff while simultaneously releasing complex digital pedals like the Super Ego synthesizer. BOSS updated classics like the Blues Driver and introduced game-changing multi-effects pedals that fit in standard enclosures.
This era saw the dissolution of meaningful industry distinctions. Boutique vs mass market became meaningless. Analog vs digital wars ended. Traditional categories lost their organizing power. Companies went out of business, career trajectories changed forever, and the foundations that had held the industry together for decades gradually came apart. By 2020, everything was working just fine, but nothing made sense in the old framework.
Era 7: Reconstruction (2021-Present)
Everything stopped. NAMM was canceled. No one went anywhere. People were stuck at home and decided to buy pedals, lots of pedals. Supply chains collapsed. The entire industry infrastructure was shaken, forcing everyone who wanted to survive to reimagine how things work. You had to think differently, sell differently, and be different—the rules of the old era had been erased.
Side Tangent: Maybe this wasn’t just another cycle? The pandemic didn't just disrupt business as usual—it exposed how much of the industry's foundation had already unraveled during the previous era. This moment may be witnessing something closer to what historians call a "secular cycle"—a longer transformation that takes 50-100 years rather than the 8-12 year patterns I've identified. The pedal industry might be transitioning from its founding era (1960s-2020s) into something structurally different that won't fully reveal itself for another decade or two. Who knows?
What's genuinely different is that we're not just reviving old ideas or perfecting existing ones—we're fundamentally reimagining what a guitar effect can be. Companies like Empress Effects release pedals like the Zoia—essentially a modular synthesizer in pedal format, programmable to create any effect imaginable. It represents a complete break from the "one box, one sound" tradition. My best-selling pedal is a kit based on the idea that IKEA could have been a pedal brand. None of these ideas have been seen before because the pressures and influences that formed them have never existed until now.
The first viral pedal was a box that makes the sounds of farts. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but it speaks to the economy of what is being made—where ideas are coming from and where things are selling. Attention makes money, and in this era, it's hard to get either by doing the same old thing.
My company, JHS, has continued to focus on making classic sounds more accessible through multiple approaches. Our 3 Series proves you can deliver professional results at affordable prices ($99) without sacrificing quality. My Legends of Fuzz series, released during the shutdown of the pandemic, demonstrated how vintage circuits could be updated with modern reliability while retaining a classic feel and attitude. Both approaches have worked extremely well, but neither would have in the prior era. The distinction between "boutique" and "mass market" eventually becomes meaningless when the $99 pedal sounds as good as the $300 one. Basic economic principles have never been defeated, and the laws of market acceptance are what they are. Cheap is not bad, and expensive is not good. The customer decides.
I've also released computer plug-ins for my pedals and sold digital profiles of my analog amp collection with success. These are just two examples of things I would've never dreamed would exist when I started this company. And I'm not even considered edgy. These are simply unfathomable products to think about happening 10 years ago.
The tools have democratized. Bedroom producers can access sounds that required expensive studios a decade ago. The barriers between player and creator have largely disappeared. And after 60+ years of history, we have an unprecedented palette of ideas to draw from and recombine.
What's Next?
Each previous era lasted 8-12 years—long enough for a generation of players to mature, short enough for technology and culture to shift. But guitar pedals don't exist in a vacuum. Exterior pressures change how we make things as much as the guitar players do. New technologies prove themselves useful at an accelerating pace, and the internet passes ideas at the speed of fiber.
Pedals are now affected by inflation, job markets, and governmental policies in ways we never expected. If you had told me that my company would be making product and employment decisions based on government-mandated tariffs, I would have never believed you. This era has obstacles we've never faced, which will inevitably create new and unique solutions.
We now sit at a trend no one saw coming: using a 1990s Tascam tape recorder as the sound of your guitar amp. My 424 Gain Stage perfectly replicates this sound from the 90s, replacing your amp and processing your guitar directly into an interface or mixer. This product would have been laughed off the shelves in any previous era. But right now it's trending.
We go in circles. We find ourselves back where we were, even if we don't like admitting it. And every time we do, it's an edit—like reading a first draft and coming back around to the second, then the third and fourth. Every time it's the same chapter, but it changes just enough to be more interesting and more concise.
But maybe cyclicality has more to it than we've experienced before. Maybe cycles don't always restart as quickly as we assume. Maybe everything needs to unravel completely before something genuinely new can emerge—and that process takes longer than a typical generational shift.
The circle keeps turning. That's why I still get excited about designing circuits in 2025—because we might not just be witnessing the next revolution. We might be watching the birth of an entirely new epoch.
What era resonates most with your own pedal journey?
And where do you think we're headed next?