Who are the Adam and Eve of Pedals ?

[Vivek]

So many circuits are clones or heavily inspired by others.

We see same circuit ideas (sometimes with same part values) in many pedal circuits. The genes of that pedal are obvious.

We speak of "oh it's just a modified Tube Screamer" or "it's another Klon clone"

I wanted to study a genealogy tree of pedals, to see how many "originals" are there, which are the branches of that family of pedals.

I know by now that Tube Screamer and Klon are two of the ancient ancestors that are distinct species.

I needed help to fill up the tree

Could you post sentences like this :

Pedal yyyy is a distinct species, different than other identified species

Or

Pedal xxxx is a Tube Screamer but they modified the ccccc

Or

Pedal look is a chimera, they took the Red Lama and added a BMP tone stack

With all that data, I hope to build up a "Family Tree" of pedals.

Unless such tree already exists.

[Andon]

http://www.effectsdatabase.com/ actually does a pretty good job of this in the "related" tab under common pedal searches (e.g., looking up Ibanez TS9 and scrolling down) if you're interested, though the website can be a bit cumbersome to navigate.

[Vivek]

Thanks Andon.

I give you your first "like" on this forum for your helpful post.

[teemuk]

Maxon reputedly introduced Tube Screamer to compete with earlier Boss pedals such as OD-1 and DS-1, which were some of the first distortion pedals that no longer sounded like a "fuzz" effect. (Maxon had previously released few similar, fuzzier distortion effects).

Tube Screamer is similar to OD-1 but with symmetric clipping and and adds a tone control.

Boss DS-1, on the other hand, is similar to Big Muff but replaces its cascaded distortion stages with a single high-gain opamp followed by shunt clipping diodes.

[teemuk]

Fuzz Face is the second stage of mk 2 Tone Bender. Tone Benders, on the other hand, were initially British clones of American Fuzz Tone effects by Maestro. (Similarly as Marshall started by cloning Fender amps).

Fuzzrite -style fuzz circuits are clones of the "Red Box" that studio engineer Orville "Red" Rhodes built first for himself (to mimick tone of a broken audio transformer) and subsequently on custom basis.

You can likely trace the rudimentary circuits, which are very generic, to transistor manuals of the times.

[anotherjim]

I've a feeling the opamp driving clipping diode species may have started with MXR D+ but I've also a suspicion some circuits published in hobby magazines might have got there first.

[teemuk]

Boss OD-1 1977
Boss DS-1 1978
MXR Distortion+ 1978
Maxon OD808 (Tube Screamer) 1978

Negative feedback -based diode clipping is featured already in Big Muff (1969) and generic shunt diode clipping in i.e. Vox UL series amps (1966) or Jordan Bosstone (1968). Deeper searching will probably find earlier examples. Diode limiting (in other applications than generating audio signal distortion intentionally) has most likely existed nearly as long as diodes. First patents naturally employ vacuum tube diodes.

[Marcos - Munky]

Just to add a bit of info. Is not because one effect is called "just a something clone/variation" that the "something" effect is the "Adam/Eve" of that pedal line. Instead, in some cases it's just because the "something" pedal is more famous than any of it's parents.

Some examples were already pointed out. TS can be called a modded OD1, but you don't see people saying "this one is just another OD1". Instead you see people saying "this is another TS". The same goes for some Marshall-like amps, some early Marshalls were just clones/mods of Fender stuff, but people refer to similar amps more often as "Marshall-like" than "Fender-like".

[anotherjim]

MXR distortion+ was 1974. All of the classic MXR pedals like the Dynacomp were around by the mid 1970's. All of them progrock staples.
The classic Boss 9v boxed pedals were later (I think of them as post-punk) and 1978 seems about right.

[teemuk]

I stand corrected. Very similar opamp driven designs, Dan Armstrong Blue Clipper and Gretsch Controfuzz, are from the same period then. I believe introduced in 1973 and 1974, respectively.

Gretsch was CMI company back then and, IIRC, Gibson and SG Systems amps of that early 1970's era also had diode clipping distortion circuits. There were also few transistorized Laney amps with "Klipp" circuit, which in this case was just solid-state clipping diodes. I can't remember if they were opamp-based or discrete designs though. Anyway, the scheme was becoming very popular - I believe due to its consistency vs. discrete gain stages, overdriven or not.

[iainpunk]

a bunch of family names:
the big muff
the op amp big muff,
foxx tone machine,
mayer octavio,
ampeg scrambler,
green ringer,
super fuzz,
tonebender mk1
fuzz face and earlier tonebender mk2, the tonebender mk2s are basically fuzzface with an input gainstage added,
tonebender mk3
maestro fuzz tones, all of them i find distinct enough to give them their own family, not put them in one,
gretsch controfuzz, its a really cool one, and certainly unique
companion fuzz//mosrite fuzz ( im not really sure about the lineage, they have stuff in common but also a lot of differences)
roland bee baa fuzz,
BOSS HM 2
BOSS metal zone
BOSS blues driver
BOSS turbo overdrive
bazz fuss
bronx cheer
lockhard wavefolder* (transistor wavefolder like in 'tripple fuzz' and zvex 'machine')
opamp wavefolder* (i have no examples but my own diy projects, it sound distinctly different from the transistor version)
the marshall bluesbreaker and guv'nor are a different species, and a lot of pedals are based on them, KoT, morning Glory


happy? this it just what i remember off the top of my head

cheers, Iain

* they aren't actually pedal families, but circuit blocks, however they are rare enough that most pedals that use them are hard to put in to other families of pedals and are designed around the circuit block

edit: just remembered:
rangemaster
LPB1
electra distortion
alembic stratoblaster
jordan bosstone
harmonic percolator

[iainpunk]

There were also few transistorized Laney amps with "Klipp" circuit, which in this case was just solid-state clipping diodes.

the klipp circuit was a range master build into the amp

[teemuk]

No it's not. It's a non-inverting differential amp circuit with starved plate voltage supply and a "gain" control that blends between distorted and clean signal in their Klipp tube amps and a generic diode clipping circuit in their solid state amps with the Klipp feature. Schematics for the tube amps can be found very easily (and are almost impossible to find for the transistorized models) and nowhere do they depict a Rangemaster -type circuit.

[Vivek]

What was the first song to use distortion ?

Can't remember if it was "I cant get no Satisfaction"

or Rumble

[teemuk]

Names being derived from the source that popularised - not invented - them is spot on. Sometimes names have nothing to do with the circuit but are sustained via perpetuation.
i.e. "Big Muff tone control": Originally Basic circuit that blends between RC low-pass and hi-pass circuits developed already in the late 1930's.
Or "Baxandall tone control"... let's not even start this.

[teemuk]

Goree Carter's "Rock Awhile" ...? (1949)

[Marcos - Munky]

What was the first song to use distortion ?

Can't remember if it was "I cant get no Satisfaction"

or Rumble

Distortion were already gotten by means like damaging the speakers in early 50's. But the first commercial fuzz unit seems to be the Maestro FZ-1 (62), which was the one used by Keith on Satisfaction (65).

[iainpunk]

What was the first song to use distortion ?

Can't remember if it was "I cant get no Satisfaction"

or Rumble

its 'rocket 88' by ike turner.
when you want real fuzz, its; 'don't worry' by marty robbins, about 10 years later

[iainpunk]

No it's not. It's a non-inverting differential amp circuit with starved plate voltage supply and a "gain" control that blends between distorted and clean signal in their Klipp tube amps and a generic diode clipping circuit in their solid state amps with the Klipp feature. Schematics for the tube amps can be found very easily (and are almost impossible to find for the transistorized models) and nowhere do they depict a Rangemaster -type circuit.

in that case, i have been misinformed, thanks for the correction.
https://youtu.be/v4coJgwLXBY?t=190 this link is timestamped for the source of the misinformation.

cheers, Iain

[ThermionicScott]

What was the first song to use distortion ?

Can't remember if it was "I cant get no Satisfaction"

or Rumble

Distortion can be heard in Charlie Christian's playing for Benny Goodman in the late 1930s.  You might as well ask "when hasn't distortion been a part of electric guitar?" 

I was surprised the first time I listened to Tiffany Transcriptions-era (1945-1947) Bob Wills.  A fair amount of dirt on some of those guitar, electric mandolin, and steel guitar solos -- and Bob didn't seem to mind a bit!

Or are you really thinking of the first song to use a distortion pedal of any kind?