Anyone knows the first guitar FX/pedal ever made?

[tle4]

wd-40 wasnt an accident .... it took 40 trys before they got it right

[nightingale]

rangmaster?

[Mark Hammer]

First pedal ever made?

Probably one of these:




Doug


:wink:

Oh, I remember that band.  Terrific surf band from Mindinao called The Coprolites.  It was one of the very first location shows that Ed Sullivan did in the 50's.  "And now, for all you pinoy youngsters out there, we have a brand new act.  Let's REALLY hear it for them.."

Actually one of RG's first tech papers was "The Technology of Two Rocks and a Blunt Piece of Wood".  I think Steve has the schem for that floating around somewhere.  Could have been a Dave %^&*erell design.  And just to correct a misconception, my ancestor Marcus Van Hammer did not *design* Ye Mistyryous Boxe of Noyse.  Rather, he discovered that by merely orienting the wooden cover in a different direction that more "noyses" could be achieved.  WE certainly are proud of him, but the family is the first to acknowledge his singular lack of originality.  He was known to have died with an immense collection of partly finished devyces in his barn.

Seriously, though, good question.  Important to distinguish between:

a) "effects" associated with electronic music
b) "effects" associated with studio engineering tricks, and
c) "effects" that came in a self-contained unit oriented towards stage use.

The latter has me asking "When did the first SPDT stompswitch come out?"  I wish I knew the answer to that question AND the one prompting the thread.

The recent Dave Hunter book cites the Rickenbacker Vibrola as the first guitar "effect".  This used a system of motorized pulleys to do what I gather we ended up doing mechanically with a whammy bar.  The unit was not stand-alone, though, but was actually part of the amplifier, a kind of mechanical extension from the chassis.

More to the point, he notes:" The first commercial standalone effect ever manufactured appears to have been a tremolo unit offered by DeArmond in the late 1940's, which used a spinning motor to trigger a mercury switch to stutter the signal passing through it."  No pictures are provided of the unit, so I have no idea if was something the user could actuate via their foot or whether it was a behemoth sitting in a chassis on a table or chair.  Given that it was the late 1940's though, it obviously used large-ish technology.

Spudulike,
Honoured to have been deemed worthy of a tongue-in-cheek reference.  I'm not THAT old, though. :lol: