What is the effect I need to research to get the tattered box/stroke look on the Friedman BE-OD? Both the box around Friedman and the stroke around the pedal.
I don't have an illustrator at hand at the moment, but the first thing that comes to my mind is a rectangle and edges painted with an appropriate brush. Hand painted brush, grunge, or something similar. You can also google some ready made frames with hand painted edges. Or google - illustrator torn edges.
I'm sure there couple ways of doing this - brush, clipping mask, edge stroke.
The closest auto filter that I’m aware of would be effect/brush strokes/spatter, but you’d still need to do a bit of tweaking either before or after applying it.
Create rectangle/rounded rectangle. Set fill color.
Select it, go to -> Object -> path -> offset path. Enter desired value (negative, you need a smaller copy).
Set fill color for the smaller rectangle.
Set stroke color of the smaller rectangle (black or orange in this case)
I'll have to play around with all the cool stuff you all posted above. If in doubt, I have it looking great without any effects applied and I'll just roll with that. I just hope my decal paper will look good over the black pedal box. It might be too washed out by the pedal color.
I actually prefer vector brushes in Illustrator, Especially when making masks for etching and you can easily tweak style and width as you build out the design.
Pro tip. when using Brushes in Illustrator, the line "width" works differently than you might think. It will get wider and thinner as you change the unit up or down, but a 3mm brush will not necessarily be 3mm wide for instance.