I wonder if it is related to claiming taxes. Maybe it makes it simpler this way
NSFW What's up with the buffers in cornish designs?
- Thread starter lrgaraujo
- Start date
jesuscrisp
Well-known member
It's probably a low estimate and really depends on the Youtuber. Not all of them state their prices, but for example Andy Ferris (Guitar Geek) does on his website. Pretty sure Andy Martins, Ola Englund or somebody with similar status costs you quite a bit more.
giovanni
Well-known member
Which part? I’m not trying to be cynical here, but maybe I phrased things too harshly? What I mean is that the circuit design is not something that the end consumer really cares about so pedal companies are not incentivized to care either. As many expressed in this thread, the average pedal buyer judges with their eyes more than ears. But maybe that’s just part of capitalism? Or maybe it’s just people being people and has nothing to do with the economic system we live in?
Fama
Well-known member
Whenever I see discussions like this, I wonder if we are all just complaining about how capitalism works. There are no rules in the free market and we all know that private companies’ only goal is to make money and squeeze as much out of customers as they can. Intellectual honesty and integrity have no place in private industries I’m afraid (I don’t want to give examples because I don’t want this to turn political).
What do you guys think about that?
Yeah it was worded quite strictly. Private companies are not only trying to make money, and 29 pedals is a great example of that, even. If they were, they'd make the power side much simpler and use a cheaper enclosure and transfer all that cost to profit. Intellectual honesty and integrity do matter, too - whether it's enough to make a real impact is a different thing, but at least Fulltone is a good example that the free market is not just a perfect automaton system where values do not matter (it's a bit unclear to me whether they actually closed down for good or not, but at the very least their operation was disturbed).
I understand where you're coming from but I just feel like you're leaning too much on the side of the builders while exaggerating the criticism pedals receive (yes, there might be one or two people bashing a YATS pedal and not many exited people, but there's a lot of people who visit this forum and this market is much less enthusiastic about new things that are not radically different, for obvious reasons). I haven't seen lynch mobs unless someone is blatantly lying, or for people who charge $800 for a basic fuzz face, which is pretty much the same as blatantly lying IMO.
For the EUNA specifically, I can understand wanting a nice looking enclosure (which is expensive), and an unnecessary power supply (which is expensive) for a glorified buffer, but that means you're basically selling a status symbol for guitar nerds.
I would guess the strong counter reaction to his reaction to tracing is because of this. Why is he so afraid of tracing when he's selling what's practically a status symbol? Is it because he thinks or knows that people actually want a cheap, good buffer with nice EQ options, and if they have the choice between that and the status symbol, they won't go for the expensive one anymore? But in that case, why pick only that route and not put out a cheaper version too? Combine that with the misleading ad copy which says how buffers can be bad for you but this one is a line driver and that's completely different, and it's easy to make the conclusion that he's just trying to mislead people into buying the expensive pedal when they would rather have a cheaper version. I wouldn't say it looks like a scam exactly, since the customers still get a nice buffer with nice EQ options, but it looks like it's edging up there.
And please do note, I'm talking about optics here, I'm not making any assumptions that that's what he's actually looking to do. I don't think he's doing it maliciously, and it would make sense that he's just afraid in general for his company's future, but I can see why he gets so much hate (or, well, guess at it - I could also be wrong, of course).
Just imagine the response if he also put out a $150 125B 9V version (without the loop, even, so you can get the Premium version with the Anything power system and the Super Vintage Loop addons plus a Swanky Enclosure). Make the cheap one with SMD parts and use through hole on the big one for the Super Tone Experience or whatever. And be frank that it's just a really good buffer instead of trying to mislead people.
jesuscrisp
Well-known member
Builders are afraid of tracing for no reason IMO.
If your pedal is worth a damn and marketed well enough, people will buy it.
If people really care about the pedal, copycats are inevitable, but few pedals become "important" enough for companies to clone them.
If companies like Demon FX, Mooer, Joyo, Hotone, Caline and so one WANT to copy your pedal, they will.
The DIY guys that want to build your pedal, or at least are interested in the trace, don't usually buy your pedal anyway.
DIYers and small builders that basically just put together PedalPCB kits won't cut into your profit margin considerably, as their copies have no resale value and too many guitarists are still concerned about "is it really just like the original?".
Regular guitarists don't know crap about your circuit and even if they open up a pedal to look, it might as well be a rocket engine to them.
Putting in your PCB upside down for no reason, gooping PCBs, scraping markings off your components and any other measure to obscure the circuit just come off as insecure or insincere to me. It feels like the builder is hiding something.
If your pedal is worth a damn and marketed well enough, people will buy it.
If people really care about the pedal, copycats are inevitable, but few pedals become "important" enough for companies to clone them.
If companies like Demon FX, Mooer, Joyo, Hotone, Caline and so one WANT to copy your pedal, they will.
The DIY guys that want to build your pedal, or at least are interested in the trace, don't usually buy your pedal anyway.
DIYers and small builders that basically just put together PedalPCB kits won't cut into your profit margin considerably, as their copies have no resale value and too many guitarists are still concerned about "is it really just like the original?".
Regular guitarists don't know crap about your circuit and even if they open up a pedal to look, it might as well be a rocket engine to them.
Putting in your PCB upside down for no reason, gooping PCBs, scraping markings off your components and any other measure to obscure the circuit just come off as insecure or insincere to me. It feels like the builder is hiding something.
szukalski
Well-known member
So many topics here.
Builders and tracing
I understand the reaction. You've put a lot of effort into creating something which you identify as part of you (whether this is a new thing or tweak of something existing). The DIY market asks for a trace and someone obliges, and it feels like your identity is being taken (regardless of whether it's hurting financials or not). A reaction is normal. Nobody knows how much work it took to get to that point, especially if they've gone to lengths to understand EE and circuit design.
On the other hand, there is a financial incentive for DIY to trace new circuits whilst they're in vogue. DIYers salivate over new things, and if you can bring them to the shop for the "new fancy pedal" they will add a few more delicious goodies in their cart.
This is clearly different from days past where it was "hopefully" a schematic, or maybe a vero for those capable to use.
There is definitely risk from loss of income there, not necessarily from loss of sales to DIYers, but the cowboys who make shitty clones/traces and then say "new fancy pedal" sucked to all their friends.
The pedal business
Anyone who thinks there is a lot of easy money in the pedal industry hasn't had to run a business at any sort of scale. Just look at the brilliant commercial builders we have on the forum (I'm not calling anyone out on purpose), they have awesome stuff and have good demand. How many still have their day jobs?
Yes, the cost of components themselves can be pretty low. The threshold for making a quality product is low (yay for SMD assembly) but there's an actual business to be run.
Let's say you want to be paid a living wage, let's say $60K (which is questionable whether it's a living wage for a family). You make a pedal for $50 and sell for $150. Just to pay your wage, you need to sell 600 pedals a year. 50 pedals a month out the door before you turn a profit. Oh wait, shipping costs have doubled, now you need to sell 55 pedals each month to break even. You need some tools and capital assets, let's not forget depreciation. Now we're at 60 pedals. You're backed up building these things and they're not reaching your audience. You need some sort of marketing, you've lucked out and got some YouTubers to do some paid demos. Fudge, 65-70 pedals a month now. JUST TO BREAK EVEN.
Oh fudge, we forgot returns and failures and are edging towards 75 pedals a month. We're losing sales because people don't want to wait for their pedal to be built, so we need to maintain an inventory. That number of pedals is building higher.
Oh damn. I forgot to include taxes in all of this.. accountants.. you get the picture. The real world of business is not selling a $50 pedal for $150 and smiling. It's 2-3 years of no profit and then scraping upwards slowly.
But Dave.. you just run the pedal business on the side of your day job until it's going.. oh yeah, great idea. Working double, no time for family.. can't see why I would get emotional when my baby is seen traced fresh on release..
Original designs
Apart from a few scammers, designers are putting their heart into making things they believe are better. EUNA included. A bunch of people who are building PCBs by numbers are in no position to crap on that. If a Klon were newly released today, the forum would be full of comments like "it's a Distortion+ with a clean blend" and they'd be right, but it's still innovation.
Marketing
Lots of fud here. A cloned circuit with a series 0R resistor is an "innovative new design". I get it, marketing equals sales and people have mouths to feed. Often, marketing is out-sourced to someone who is a specialist in marketing and not in pedal design.
If only we could have peace, love, and happiness in the pedal world.
Builders and tracing
I understand the reaction. You've put a lot of effort into creating something which you identify as part of you (whether this is a new thing or tweak of something existing). The DIY market asks for a trace and someone obliges, and it feels like your identity is being taken (regardless of whether it's hurting financials or not). A reaction is normal. Nobody knows how much work it took to get to that point, especially if they've gone to lengths to understand EE and circuit design.
On the other hand, there is a financial incentive for DIY to trace new circuits whilst they're in vogue. DIYers salivate over new things, and if you can bring them to the shop for the "new fancy pedal" they will add a few more delicious goodies in their cart.
This is clearly different from days past where it was "hopefully" a schematic, or maybe a vero for those capable to use.
There is definitely risk from loss of income there, not necessarily from loss of sales to DIYers, but the cowboys who make shitty clones/traces and then say "new fancy pedal" sucked to all their friends.
The pedal business
Anyone who thinks there is a lot of easy money in the pedal industry hasn't had to run a business at any sort of scale. Just look at the brilliant commercial builders we have on the forum (I'm not calling anyone out on purpose), they have awesome stuff and have good demand. How many still have their day jobs?
Yes, the cost of components themselves can be pretty low. The threshold for making a quality product is low (yay for SMD assembly) but there's an actual business to be run.
Let's say you want to be paid a living wage, let's say $60K (which is questionable whether it's a living wage for a family). You make a pedal for $50 and sell for $150. Just to pay your wage, you need to sell 600 pedals a year. 50 pedals a month out the door before you turn a profit. Oh wait, shipping costs have doubled, now you need to sell 55 pedals each month to break even. You need some tools and capital assets, let's not forget depreciation. Now we're at 60 pedals. You're backed up building these things and they're not reaching your audience. You need some sort of marketing, you've lucked out and got some YouTubers to do some paid demos. Fudge, 65-70 pedals a month now. JUST TO BREAK EVEN.
Oh fudge, we forgot returns and failures and are edging towards 75 pedals a month. We're losing sales because people don't want to wait for their pedal to be built, so we need to maintain an inventory. That number of pedals is building higher.
Oh damn. I forgot to include taxes in all of this.. accountants.. you get the picture. The real world of business is not selling a $50 pedal for $150 and smiling. It's 2-3 years of no profit and then scraping upwards slowly.
But Dave.. you just run the pedal business on the side of your day job until it's going.. oh yeah, great idea. Working double, no time for family.. can't see why I would get emotional when my baby is seen traced fresh on release..
Original designs
Apart from a few scammers, designers are putting their heart into making things they believe are better. EUNA included. A bunch of people who are building PCBs by numbers are in no position to crap on that. If a Klon were newly released today, the forum would be full of comments like "it's a Distortion+ with a clean blend" and they'd be right, but it's still innovation.
Marketing
Lots of fud here. A cloned circuit with a series 0R resistor is an "innovative new design". I get it, marketing equals sales and people have mouths to feed. Often, marketing is out-sourced to someone who is a specialist in marketing and not in pedal design.
If only we could have peace, love, and happiness in the pedal world.
cdwillis
Well-known member
I understand the 29 Pedals guy being upset about his stuff being traced (especially so quickly), but I also think he's doing a little snake oil sales and some of his defensiveness stems from that as well. When you've got a needlessly overly engineered circuit that you're promoting as better than a simpler design and someone calls you out, it's probably pretty annoying lol. Sometimes it's better not to engage.
szukalski
Well-known member
It may also be that there is a whole different perspective from the 29Pedals person into their design and architectural knowledge, which we are just not getting because how things went down meant that discussion can't be had. Like I said, I doubt many people are out to fleece the overall pedal community (such a naive human I am) and there is likely some logical design decisions into what they're doing (not debating the correctness or not). Maybe there are reasons for their over engineering which we don't understand, maybe there's just over engineering instead of a simple solution.
I always remember that thing which went around.. "Americans spent millions making a pen which would work in a weightless environment for space, Soviets just used a pencil.." Everyone would laugh about the smart simple solution. The actual point was that graphite shavings cause shorts and fire is not a fun thing in enclosed environments far from home.
I always remember that thing which went around.. "Americans spent millions making a pen which would work in a weightless environment for space, Soviets just used a pencil.." Everyone would laugh about the smart simple solution. The actual point was that graphite shavings cause shorts and fire is not a fun thing in enclosed environments far from home.
Laundryroom David
Keyboard Cowboy 🤠
cdwillis
Well-known member
Don't get me wrong. I don't think the 29 Pedals guy is being malicious. If he was trying to fleece people he would have made the design simpler/cheaper to produce to make even more money. It seems like he geniunely believes in his design. Personally to me it just seems like cork sniffer BS to run a buffer at such a high voltage, but the effects loop for other effects like fuzzes is a nice touch. That's just my opinion. I'd love to compare a EUNA to running something like a Micro Amp at unity volume. My gut feeling is there would be no audible difference beyond placebo effect.
When “things went down” the guy straight up admitted that the case and power supply were what made his product “cool” versus what was already on the market.
Sometimes a cigar is a cigar.
(The charitable view is that dude sunk time and resources into designing a power supply (well, retrofitting an existing power supply for use by pedals, but sure, let’s charitably say “designing”) that can take any input voltage because he was trying to solve the apparently universal problem of “I can’t afford a 1spot to power my boutique pedals!” (I mean we’ve all been there right?), and (again, being charitable) due to sunken cost fallacy logic just can’t admit to himself that the cost and current draw, at least for the things he’s hooking them up to (buffers, boosts, overdrives), is *ridiculous*.)
To bring it back to Cornish and this thread, at least Cornish’s buffer solved a problem and is a genuine selling point. It wasn’t “cool” for the sake of it.
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
He doesn't need to be aware that he's fleecing his customers for it to be true.
Fama
Well-known member
fleece verb - Definition, pictures, pronunciation and usage notes | Oxford Advanced American Dictionary at OxfordLearnersDictionaries.com
Definition of fleece verb in Oxford Advanced American Dictionary. Meaning, pronunciation, picture, example sentences, grammar, usage notes, synonyms and more.
www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com
Well, I'd say it fits the definition more or less if you make the product too expensive by adding unnecessary stuff. Not all dictionaries include that definition, I think it's more commonly used with some connotation of fraud or scam, but I'd say "it costs too much partially because of the unnecessary power solution" is a big part of the complaints I've heard. Or just "it costs too much for what it is". The creator doesn't have to make bank on it, necessarily, for the definition to apply.
I think he just overbuilt it because he (29Pedals guy) thought it needed it. Then he added his value on top of it and made the power supply a selling point because he was proud of it.fleece verb - Definition, pictures, pronunciation and usage notes | Oxford Advanced American Dictionary at OxfordLearnersDictionaries.com
Definition of fleece verb in Oxford Advanced American Dictionary. Meaning, pronunciation, picture, example sentences, grammar, usage notes, synonyms and more.
Well, I'd say it fits the definition more or less if you make the product too expensive by adding unnecessary stuff. Not all dictionaries include that definition, I think it's more commonly used with some connotation of fraud or scam, but I'd say "it costs too much partially because of the unnecessary power solution" is a big part of the complaints I've heard. Or just "it costs too much for what it is". The creator doesn't have to make bank on it, necessarily, for the definition to apply.
From the manufacturer's POV it is not unnecessary.
Again, it doesn't matter how much the snake oil salesman believes his salves cure diseases, he's still selling snake oil.
I'm sure most people in MLMs believe in what they're doing; people should still stay the fuck away from them at all costs.
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
I've never run a business, but just doing the napkin math, it's pretty easy to see why it's insultingly naive to say (for any product), "You're charging 10x when the cost of components is only x! Ripoff! Scam!"
It's not just pedals. I've seen this play out on the myriad forums I've been on (going back to the Usenet days, to date myself), and people always bellyache about the cost of boutique items when "I could make that myself for 1/10 what he's charging!"
Hyperbolic marketing also exists beyond the pedal world. Go look up "audiophile-grade" power cables that cost over $1k. And then go read audiophile forums where people are absolutely convinced that $1500 power cable was like "removing a pillow from the front of my speakers". If the person who bought that cable truly feels it improves their listening experience, then it was a fair trade for both the seller and buyer.
And status symbols are nothing new. I wear $13 Urban Star brand jeans from Costo, which fit me great and seem pretty well made. But you can easily spend 10x that (and more) on jeans. Different strokes for different folks! I'd rather have more money for guitar stuff! But there's probably a doppelganger of me writing the exact opposite post on a fashion forum right now, poking fun of my cheapness.
I read this many years ago, I found it interesting: Schiit Happened: The Story of the World's Most Improbable Start-Up. It's the story of how Schiit Audio got started, written by one of the founders. I don't own and never have owned any Schiit products, but the story is interesting as an autobiographical account of a small business startup. No matter how you feel about the company, it gives some perspective on what goes into starting, running and growing a business.
Again, nobody would be shitting on 29Pedals's shit if it was a $150 boost in a 125B with a MAX1044 charge pump, because (especially here in a DIY pedal community where we all have a pretty fucking good idea both of what pedals cost and what we'd need to charge to turn a profit) we know that's what it would cost to build something like that and turn a profit.
We shit on 29Pedals because most of his cost is in a power supply that solves no issues (and creates new ones, and also many or may not actually operate safely within its stated spec). Any decent designer would've realized "holy shit even though I spent way too much fucking time and money developing this power supply, there's absolutely no reason a buffer needs to draw 144mA at idle, I'll remove it from the design because it's ridiculous", but instead he tried to turn it into a selling point for his oversized boxes.
Also because he personally came onto this forum being a giant fucking douchebag, which can not be overstated enough.
Yeah, and I spend a lot of time talking people out of buying shit like overpriced cables, too. We all should be, because those industries are built on bullshit. Just because it *does* exist, doesn't mean it *should* exist, much less exist unchallenged.
Hard disagree. Just because it's not illegal, doesn't mean it's fair, doesn't mean one party is pretty damn clearly taking advantage of another party's ignorance.
Did literally anybody on this forum *ever* say this? Like, not even just in this thread, but *ever*?
We all know what raw parts costs are, we all can do enough math to know what we'd need to charge to make a living, and that's why most of us don't.
---
But 29Pedals is NOT selling a $50 for $150. He's selling a $50 pedal, strapped to $50 worth of bullshit that do *not* actually improve the product in any meaningful way, for $300.
And then getting absolutely livid when people point out the $50 worth of bullshit is, in fact, bullshit.
Designers shouldn't put bullshit in their designs, and people shouldn't be buying bullshit.
(I say "shouldn't" because obviously both things are happening, a lot, but that doesn't mean those things should happen unchallenged.)
Again, it doesn't matter if the snake oil salesman "believe"s his salve cures diseases, he's still the one selling snake oil and should absolutely be called out on it.
But let's be charitable - credit where credit is due, 29Pedals dude's "real" innovation is his "whatever" power supply (which in my estimation creates more problems than it solves, but-), not the analog circuits he hooks it up to.
Maybe if he wants so badly to be a power supply designer, he should go off and be a power supply designer (hell, sell your tech to Strymon or Eventide, high-draw DSP is an *actually* good use-case for a well-protected power supply).
Because going about it the other way - starting every design with "hmm, what can I hook up to my weird-ass power supply?" and working your way *back* to a modest analog circuit, is just producing laughable results.
Bricksnbeatles
Member known well
this thread took a weird, though not unexpected, turn 
Someone brings up potential snake oil in pedal designs, and all the hits start playing!this thread took a weird, though not unexpected, turn