Your best and worst pedal hot takes? šŸ”„

If it got the original "properly designed" chair with no options or twiddly bits, I would have returned it and spent the past two years auditioning chairs from designers who think their singular vision is the Right chair and "screw the customer if they want the arm rests lower so they can sit at a desk that isn't exactly the same height as mine" and still might not have one that works.

Clearly your chair isn't some place where somebody else can sit in it and screw all your meticulous settings in 3 seconds.
 
I have a really nice Hermann Miller chair that felt like absolute shit when I first sat in it and almost dumped me to the ground when I leaned back. I twiddled with the arm rest angle, height, stiffness of tilt etc for a day, THEN it fit me great and I haven't messed with any settings in the two years since.

If it got the original "properly designed" chair with no options or twiddly bits, I would have returned it and spent the past two years auditioning chairs from designers who think their singular vision is the Right chair and "screw the customer if they want the arm rests lower so they can sit at a desk that isn't exactly the same height as mine" and still might not have one that works.

I know you actually get this point, but to participate in the socratic dialog: with the "buy one, see if it works, buy another one" approach takes years, a big budget, and a endless hassles to buy all those pedals, audition them with your own gear, in your setting, to figure out which one works.

I started there, then bought/built pedals with options to EXPERIENCE the options.

After years of that, I have definitely settled on single purpose pedals for my gigging pedal board. (that is, the pedal board I would gig with if I actually gigged, and if I was actually good enough to gig. etc...)

So my opinion is completely hypothetical and academic and based upon the imaginary band that only exists in my head.

So.... yeah.... I'll shut up now...

Clearly your chair isn't some place where somebody else can sit in it and screw all your meticulous settings in 3 seconds.
To get away from the chair analogy for a bit. EHX has given us a good example of this design conundrum in how the Hog2 became the 9 series. The 9 series are essentially fine tuned presets without all the complexity of the Hog2 fiddly bits.

Personally, I have next to zero interest in the 7 different 9 series effects, but would love to have a Hog2. That is obviously not for everyone since the 9 series is a big seller and the Hog2 is not.

Another good example is that Earthquaker also did this with the Palisades and Dunes.

My take šŸ”„... We should always have Basic And Deluxe versions of every effect.

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Hog Templates

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See this is where I disagree. If a pedal doesn't match your guitar and amp, then get one of the other bajillion pedals that are out there.

Why do we have so many YATS? Because there's probably one that's right for you.

(BTW, not really meaning to argue with you, just taking my hot take to the extreme. I do see the point in versatility).
I have to agree with the other point where yeah, it's nice if you hit that pedal that just works for your guitar and amp (except if you have multiple guitars and amps, then it gets tricky), but you probably need to either build or buy multiple pedals to find ones that reaaally work well for you.

And obviously there is a balance - but we mostly just disagree where the balance is. For example, I don't see much love for one knob pedals here. That's too little for most people. But 5 knobs is still doable for me, for example - it's not automatically "the designer was shit" or whatever.

The Chop Shop doesn't work well with my strat unless I turn the tone down on my guitar, and it's annoying to do it for that one pedal. The second version with the tone switch presumably would fix that. But just to use that as an example, I often love a "presence" control in pedals together with a treble or tone, because I can set the treble or tone to where it cuts nicely, and then tame the extra brightness from the strat with the other control.

There is no absolute right or wrong way, I just think that "more than three controls means the designer didn't do their job" is a really stupid take.
 
Personally, I have next to zero interest in the 7 different 9 series effects, but would love to have a Hog2. That is obviously not for everyone since the 9 series is a big seller and the Hog2 is not
H.O.G. = decent barbecue
9 series = day old mcrib sammich

I feel like the H.O.G. was the end of an era. It was the last thing EHX released that I got truly excited about. It's newish tech but still has a bit of the o.g. aesthetic. I have no interest in the little ones. Too ugly and too use specific. Whole H.O.G. or gtfo. There's an uncanny valley thing going on too. It's like they're too close to sounding like a real organ while still not being convincing at all.
 
To get away from the chair analogy for a bit. EHX has given us a good example of this design conundrum in how the Hog2 became the 9 series. The 9 series are essentially fine tuned presets without all the complexity of the Hog2 fiddly bits.

Personally, I have next to zero interest in the 7 different 9 series effects, but would love to have a Hog2. That is obviously not for everyone since the 9 series is a big seller and the Hog2 is not.

Another good example is that Earthquaker also did this with the Palisades and Dunes.

My take šŸ”„... We should always have Basic And Deluxe versions of every effect.

hog2-f-900x600.jpg

I've got the Synth9, POG2 and Microsynth and WH Atreides which covers a lot of synthy ground. But, the holiest of holies would be the HOG2 which I simply can't afford, haha. Someday, though.
 
That one doesn’t really get my panties in a bunch I guess. Clean tone, bypass tone, we all know what they’re talking about right?

If they didn’t demo their gritty bypass tone that would be misleading, but as long as they play it for you I think it’s plenty clear what you’re getting.

I bet if they called it bypass tone it would be even less clear to the average pedal customer what’s going on.

I play at home through a clean amp at low volumes, so a demo set up like that is cool to me, but people pay a lot to get that driven tube amp sound and I bet some of them want to know what a given pedal sounds like into it.


I've seen a few demos where the person actually said, "This is my base tone" while playing slightly gritty before kicking in the fuzz/OD/whatever...

Also heard one demo-reviewer say "Here's my base tone, which you can tell is not clean at all but already a little dirty."





A point about chairs, seating in general...

The average person is taller than ever before in the history of human-beings, so why are seat-pitches in trains, planes, & all manner of auto-mobiles getting smaller? Why are the seats getting narrower?

I'm taller than most people, so "ergonomically-designed" bus-seats, airplane seats, car seats...

ARE NOT @$%*U$#%^# ERGONOMIC AT ALL.

The bolster that should hit the small-of-the-back hits my iliac-crest if l'm lucky and then the seat curves back leaving my own small-of-the-back lacking any support at all while the head rest hits me squarely between the shoulder blades and the seat itself offers zero support under my thigh leaving me sitting on a knife-edge of the bones behind my glutes and possibly my tailbone.

SO FCUK THE ONE-SEAT-FITS-ALL ATTITUDE, give me a Herman Miller or something equivalent that can be adjusted in multiple ways on multiple planes [sic] so I don't have to suffer MULTIPLE PAINS.

Now extrapolate that to pedals...

FFS.
 
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