***This product is excluded from WELCOME15 and SMS discounts. 

IT’S NOTADÜMBLË 'TIL YOU BUILD IT.

We're proud to present the NOTADÜMBLË V2 — the two-channel DIY Dumble kit pedal you asked us to build. The V1 accidentally had the wrong boost circuit. The V2 fixes that and gives several more new features. We added a second footswitch, an effects loop, an order toggle, and moved the Presence trim pot to the face of the pedal. Every change here came from your suggestions!

WHY V2 EXISTS

In 2019, Josh left a John Mayer rehearsal in Los Angeles with two extremely rare Dumble units in his backpack to reverse engineer. The first was the A Box Later, a device Howard Dumble built sometime in the 1980s as a buffer preamp boost with a built-in effects loop. John has used it in several situations over the years. We cloned it, named it the Box It Later, and that pedal has lived on versions of Mayer's pedalboards since 2021.

The second unit was the Dumble BBC-1, a far more obscure preamp boost. We cloned that one too and made John a private copy called the Basic Boost. At the time Josh assumed he was simply cloning a JFET booster that Howard threw together. He didn't know that years later he would discover that Dumble's BBC-1 was itself a near-part-for-part clone of a Barcus Berry acoustic preamp from the 1970s. The legendary Dumble FET sound — the one inside $200,000 to $400,000 amplifiers — is a clone of a piezo preamp. That rabbit trail belongs to the Fumble, not this pedal. Check it out here. 

The NOTADÜMBLË V1 was always supposed to use the Box It Later circuit as its clean channel. The one John actually uses. Two weeks after launch, while prepping a Short Circuit episode about modding the kit, we discovered we had used the BBC-1 instead. The two units look similar. They sound similar. They were both built by Howard, both clean boosts, both reverse engineered for John in 2019. Cliff Smith, our head of R&D at the time, did most of that reverse engineering. His notebooks were the documentation. Cliff passed away a few months after we shipped John's replicas, and when the NOTADÜMBLË kit was greenlit years later, the wrong schematic was the one that got pulled. It slipped through the cracks. 

I made a video called "The Biggest Mistake I've Ever Made." I told everyone. We sold through the remaining V1 inventory, discontinued the kit after our batch of 15,000 sold out, and refunded anyone who asked. Then we released the BBC-1 as its own pedal — the Fumble — so the circuit V1 owners loved didn't disappear. 

This is the V2. It does what the V1 was always supposed to do. Plus everything you asked us to add. It is unquestionably better than the V1. Consider it the Deluxe Edition!

WHAT'S NEW

• The correct clean circuit. The Box It Later (A Box Later clone) is in. The BBC-1 is out. 

• Two independent footswitches. V1 had a slider switch to choose between channels. You  wanted a true 2 in 1. Both channels are now independently footswitchable.

• TRS effects loop on the clean channel. Just like the original A Box Later has. Use a TRS-to-TS/TS Y-cable to insert one pedal, two pedals, or your whole board into the clean circuit. No cable inserted = loop bypassed automatically. Incredibly useful for building out entire lead tones from multiple pedals and activating with a single stomp!

• Order toggle. A front slide switch chooses which channel runs first in series when both are active. Drive → Clean is a lead lift. Clean → Drive turns the boost into a distortion driver.

• External Presence knob. The dirt side Presence trim pot lived inside V1. We moved it to the face of the pedal.

THE OVERDRIVE CHANNEL

The dirt side captures the sustaining violin Dumble tone heard on Larry Carlton records, Eric Johnson's lead voicing, Carlos Santana, Robben Ford, Robert Randolph and any Joe Bonamassa solos where the amp is doing the dirty work. It's a boutique overdrive lineage that traces back to a stripped-down, heavily modified Tube Screamer with unusual clipping and a different gain feel — the lineage that 80% of pedal builders have cloned in some form, whether they admit it or not. We didn't reinvent it. We made it affordable, and we put it in a kit so you can build it yourself.

Neck pickup. Medium-high drive. EQ rolled back. That's the violin tone that so many people search for. 

THE CLEAN CHANNEL AND THE LOOP

The Box It Later was always more than a boost. Howard built the send-return jack into the original design because he was building for rack-era players who wanted to buffer and insert a new pedal into their entire effects chain.

V2 brings that idea back. Plug a TRS-to-TS/TS Y-cable into the loop jack and you've got a send and a return. Insert any pedal. Insert a chorus and a delay. Insert your whole side board. Stomp the right footswitch and the entire chain inside the loop comes on at once. No tap dancing.

Three real-world uses:

• One-stomp lead preset. Put your favorite delay, chorus, and distortion inside the loop. One footswitch becomes your lead voice.

• Add a volume knob to anything. Drop a Boss tremolo, a Line 6 DL4, or any pedal that doesn't have one inside the loop, and you've just added two controls to it — the clean channel's Output (master volume) and Input (impedance and brightness shaper). This was the most popular paid mod we did at JHS back in the day. Now you do it yourself.

• Modulation or delay before or after drive. Flip the order toggle. Same pedals, completely different feel.

A note on the Input control: it's not a gain knob. It changes the impedance the signal sees as it enters the circuit, which affects how bright, dark, tight, or full things feel — in ways that depend on the guitar and pedals before it. Zero is thinner and more precise. Ten is fuller and rounder. On some rigs the difference is obvious. On others it's subtle. 

CONTROLS

OVERDRIVE CHANNEL — Left Footswitch

Volume – Controls the overall volume of the overdrive channel. Left is less, right is more.

Drive – Controls the amount of overdrive. Left is less, right is more.

EQ – Adjustable low-pass filter. Left cuts more high frequencies, right cuts less.

Presence – Controls the upper-mid range and treble frequencies in the gain stage. Left is less, right is more.

CLEAN CHANNEL — Right Footswitch

Output – Controls the output volume of the clean channel for the effects loop send.

Input – Controls the volume of the incoming signal on the effects loop return. Not a standard gain control — changes impedance, which affects tone and feel.

ADDITIONAL

Effects Loop Jack – Use a TRS-to-TS (tip) / TS (ring) Y-cable to insert an effect into the clean channel loop. Tip is send, ring is return. No cable inserted = loop bypassed automatically.

Order Switch – Front slide switch. Selects which channel is first in series when both sides are on.

JACKS

Input – 1/4" jack on the top right side of the pedal.

Output – 1/4" jack on the top left side of the pedal.

Effects Loop – 1/4" TRS jack.

POWER – Requires 9VDC center negative power and consumes 25mA. Do not use more than 9V DC. If you do, you will void your warranty.

****HOWARD ALEXANDER DUMBLE AND DUMBLE AMPLIFIERS ARE NOT AFFILIATED WITH OR ENDORSED BY JHS PEDALS. THE NOTADÜMBLË V2 IS A REPLICA OF CIRCUITS BUILT BY HOWARD DUMBLE AND IS OFFERED IN TRIBUTE TO HIS WORK.***