WHAT WAS THE FIRST GUITAR PEDAL?

Over the years (and even this morn­ing), I have re­ceived emails, DMs, or com­ments on You­Tube about my claim that the 1962 Gib­son Mae­stro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone was the first gui­tar ped­al. Usu­al­ly, the tem­pera­ment of these mes­sages is harsh and re­sem­bles one of those clas­sic “meet me on the play­ground at 3 p.m. so we can set­tle this” scenes in an 80s af­ter-school show about life choic­es and how bul­lies all end up in a prison some­where in Texas. None of us want that for our lives, so in hopes of help­ing my future haters and any cu­ri­ous souls on their jour­ney of gui­tar elec­tron­ics his­to­ry, I want to ex­plain my po­si­tion and de­fend my out­ra­geous claims against hu­man­i­ty. #sar­casm

1

The Basic Requirements

Let’s start with a ba­sic check­list of what I con­sid­er non­nego­tiable for a device to have the term “gui­tar ped­al” be­stowed upon it. The most of­fen­sive thing about my opin­ion may be that I don’t be­lieve that be­ing a device at your feet and be­ing used on a gui­tar is enough to con­sti­tute a “gui­tar ped­al.” I'm aware this makes me insane and pos­si­bly ir­ra­tional, but I am as I may be. At a min­i­mum, I be­lieve it should check these four box­es:

“It should of­fer an “ef­fect.”

When in use, it should trans­form the sound of your gui­tar into some­thing dif­fer­ent, some­thing not pos­si­ble by way of your gui­tar and amp’s al­ready ex­ist­ing con­trols. There is noth­ing wrong with a clean, nor­mal gui­tar sound (ask Mark Knopfler), but most of us want change. Any­one OK with just a clean gui­tar sound is not con­cerned with this top­ic. They live a sim­pler life we will nev­er know. I’m kin­da of jeal­ous. On the oth­er hand, we need to live a rad­i­cal life through our gui­tar so that our nor­mal lives, full of gro­cery shop­ping, den­tal ex­am­i­na­tions, tax­es, and small talk, feel a bit less painful. We want weird, and we want it at the stomp of a ped­al (more on that lat­er).

”It should con­tain with­in it­self an ac­tive cir­cuit.”

What­ev­er it is, it should be a self-re­liant elec­tron­ic de­vice that am­pli­fies, alters, or changes sound, de­pen­dent on no ex­ter­nal or ad­di­tion­al com­po­nents outside itself. It is a pow­ered elec­tron­ic de­vice that needs no help from some oth­er box or gad­get. The foot switch to your Fend­er am­pli­fi­er’s built-in re­verb and tremo­lo is not a gui­tar ped­al. It is a re­mote con­trol that ac­ti­vates ef­fect cir­cuits lo­cat­ed in­side the am­pli­fi­er’s chas­sis. This does not count.

“It should be de­signed to sit on the floor and to be used by the touch of your foot.”

I refuse to ex­plain this. My brain will melt, and I will move to some re­mote vil­lage in Green­land to es­cape the pain and tor­ture of such un­need­ed ex­po­si­tion.

“It needs to have a foot switch that ac­ti­vates its sound/ef­fect.”

It needs to be not only ac­tive but ac­ti­vat­able. We might sud­den­ly be afraid of the sound we are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing and want to re­turn the se­cu­ri­ty blan­ket of what is al­lowed and what is nor­mal. We aren’t as brave as we think we are de­spite how in­vin­ci­ble that one Creed song made us feel in tenth grade (Face­less Man was a real banger, and you know it). Also, if an ef­fect is al­ways on, is it re­al­ly an ef­fect, or is it just THE sound? I pon­der this in my heart.

Now that the con­di­tions have been laid out, know that I will glad­ly salute any device as a cer­ti­fied gui­tar ped­al if it checks those four box­es. Easy, right? So, we’re done? No. Not at all.

I promised to de­fend the FZ-1 as the gen­e­sis of gui­tar ped­al­dom, and that’s what you’re gonna get.

2

What About These?

What you are about to read is a dra­ma­tized rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what I read as I haphazardly glance at mes­sages ad­dressed to me con­cern­ing this top­ic. To pro­tect the in­nocent, this is not based on any one his­tor­i­cal event. It’s bet­ter this way.

“Dear Josh, be­fore I tell you to go and die on a hill, you should know that Rickenbacker made a ped­al only a cou­ple of years af­ter their in­ven­tion of the first Elec­tro Span­ish gui­tar in the 1930s. You prob­a­bly didn’t know that. Fur­ther­more, you should also know that Epi­phone, DeArmond, and a few oth­er com­pa­nies made vol­ume and even “tone ped­als” as early as 1936. Go and die.”

Now that you have an in-depth look at some of the sub­ject mat­ter of my private therapy ses­sions, let me ex­plain why I don’t con­sid­er these vol­ume and tone de­vices to be “gui­tar ped­als.” Sim­ply stat­ed, they are ex­ten­sions or al­ter­nate versions of ex­ist­ing con­trols found on gui­tars or am­pli­fiers. They do not of­fer any­thing new or weird to the foun­da­tion­al sound of the gui­tar. They al­low more flex­i­ble con­trol, but I can’t call that a gui­tar ped­al. Any­thing these ped­als achieve could be done by ad­just­ing al­ready ex­ist­ing con­trols with your or your band­mate’s hands. I know some of you think this is a ridicu­lous state­ment, but chances are, you get help all the time for things that could eas­i­ly be auto­mat­ed. IMHO, mak­ing it eas­i­er doesn’t equate to the claim of “the first gui­tar ped­al.”

This is se­ri­ous stuff here. The Cold War is en­vi­ous of our predica­ment at hand. My oth­er ma­jor hang-up is that these are not ac­tive elec­tri­cal cir­cuits. They add
Noth­ing. They sim­ply at­ten­u­ate the vol­ume and fre­quen­cy con­tent that al­ready ex­ists. A gui­tar ped­al should cre­ate a new sound and add some­thing that did not ex­ist, and these do nei­ther. These sit on the floor, and you use your feet, but the last time I checked, two out of four isn’t a win­ner.

3

But Bo Diddley?

Here is an­oth­er dra­mat­ic recre­ation of how I am some­times at­tacked for my FZ-1 claim -

“What­ev­er. You are en­ti­tled to your opin­ion, but what are you go­ing to do about the 1947 DeAr­mond 601 Tremo­lo Unit? It was fif­teen years be­fore the FZ-1. I will crush you in your own web of stu­pid­i­ty. How dare you even breathe in my pres­ence? Go and die.”

This one is easy. It doesn’t have a footswitch. It doesn’t sit on the floor. It isn’t a ped­al. The term ped­al that we use should be as­so­ci­at­ed with our feet, and if you've ever used a sewing machine, you will understand the term's etymology. De­spite the numbing pain I feel in typ­ing even a sin­gle word more than I al­ready have, I have to say that the 601 Tremo­lo is best de­fined as a gui­tar ef­fect, not a gui­tar ped­al. It was rev­o­lution­ary, and I think we owe it the ti­tle of the first-ever stand­alone gui­tar “ef­fect,” but it’s not the first gui­tar ped­al. The cir­cuit is ge­nius de­spite its al­most cer­tain abil­i­ty to eventually kill you. If it’s good enough for Bil­ly Gib­bons, then I think it’s good enough for us all.

Again, two out of four is not gonna con­vince any­one. Ef­fect units were every­where from the mid-40s all the way through the 70’s and even fur­ther in evo­lu­tion by way of the rack units of the 80’s. No one would ever call a Fend­er Spring Re­verb unit or a Lexi­con Re­verb a gui­tar ped­al, so why does the 601 al­ways get brought up? It’s prob­a­bly the same mys­te­ri­ous force that ag­gres­sive­ly cred­its Link Wray in every com­ment section to a video where I have never men­tioned the ori­gins of dis­tor­tion. I blame chemtrails and pos­si­bly those weird tan M&Ms that we were fed in the 90s.

4

My Final Non-Legally Binding Statement

To wrap up here, I think it can be clear­ly said that un­til that fateful day when Glen
Snod­dy’s con­sole chan­nel mal­func­tioned in a Nash­ville record­ing stu­dio, caus­ing the first hit song to uti­lize a fuzzed-out gui­tar tone, a gui­tar ped­al had nev­er ex­ist­ed. Even then, it took months for Glen to have his friend Re­vis recre­ate this ac­ci­den­tal sound by way of sol­id-state cir­cuit­ry, pitch it to Gib­son, and Gib­son take a chance on a self-contained ef­fect box for your feet that even they didn’t know how to use or how to sell.

Watch this video of me lis­ten­ing to the orig­i­nal demon­stra­tion record, and you will feel the weird­ness of the prod­uct and Gib­son’s in­abil­i­ty to clear­ly com­mu­ni­cate it to the pub­lic. 

More can be said about how the abil­i­ty to have a small, por­table, self-con­tained, and in­stant­ly ad­justable ef­fect unit changed the world. Play­ers like Jimi Hen­drix were able to in­stant­ly turn on and off their new rad­i­cal-sound­ing FZ-1 with their foot in an age when mu­sic was al­ways a live and in-the-mo­ment per­for­mance. In the early years of the rock & roll revolution, the ad­van­tages of “in­stant” were para­mount to a play­er’s abil­i­ties on stage and in the stu­dio. The FZ-1 was so rad­i­cal and frightening to the status quo that they knew it needed to be turned off or risk the danger of riots, arguments, and babies crying to no end. If War Of The Worlds had a sonic equivalent in music history's landscape of ideas and products, it was that pedal. We take this for grant­ed, but they didn’t. The FZ-1 was a first. With­out it, we wouldn’t have 99% of the gui­tar mu­sic we love and cher­ish. Af­ter its re­lease in 1962, it gave per­mis­sion to every wild sound imag­in­able, and it paved the way for the gui­tar to not only re­shape pop­u­lar mu­sic but also cul­ture through­out the mid-late 1960s. The FZ-1 was a tip­ping point in technol­o­gy’s abil­i­ty to in­flu­ence pop­u­lar mu­sic and the pub­lic per­cep­tion of more in­di­vidu­al­ized art be­ing ac­cept­ed in the main­stream.

Identifying the first guitar pedal is important not just for inventive bragging rights but also for understanding the guitar's transformation over the decades and its ever evolving ecosystem. We cannot understand where we are going unless we have a grasp on where we have been, and the discussion of the first guitar pedal is a perfect subject of study in understanding how ideas turn into products and how those products hold potential to change the world. It's not just about sticking a flag in the ground as first to the scene, it's about the evolution of technology until it finally has impact, and that is something every creative mind could benefit from knowing more about.

If you want more in­for­ma­tion on this sub­ject, I have a video you may re­al­ly en­joy.

A while back, I also wrote a five-part es­say for gui­tar.­com about the FZ-1 that dives deep into the his­tor­i­cal and mu­si­cal sig­nif­i­cance of its creation. Begin part 1 here.

Every­thing I have writ­ten here is my opin­ion, and you may dis­agree. Just know that I don’t state these things light­ly. I have ded­i­cat­ed count­less hours to in-per­son in­terviews, re­search, and dig­ging which have led me to my con­clu­sion. If you have any infor­ma­tion you be­lieve I am miss­ing, please don’t hes­i­tate to reach out. That’s the fun of a civ­il and ra­tio­nal so­ci­ety. 

Have a great day and if you have insight or information you want to share outside of the comments - blog@jhspedals.com