Electro Harmonix Pedals You Have Never Heard Of

on today's episode we're going to look at the absolutely positively most underrated electro harmonics pedals ever made it's the ones that you need to know about that you need to tell your friends about and they need to tell their friends about so that people can know about them they're just underrated we need to change that let's go [Music] there aren't a lot of pedal brands out there in history that can compare with electro harmonics when it comes to iconic and legendary pedals we think of the memory man the big muff the electric mister small clone small stone it goes on and on and on but one of my favorite things about electro harmonix is that they have continually pushed innovation and circuitry in ways that make someone like me listen to some of these designs and go how in the world they even do that some of the circuits are so fantastic and spectacular that they leave me scratching my head and some of them are so underrated and underappreciated that it makes me incredibly sad inside i mean the very definition of underrated just means it's not getting the appreciation that it needs people aren't giving attention so today i'm gonna give eight electro harmonics pedals that are so underrated that it's a criminal act some attention let's go first up i'm gonna play two pedals together they're spectacular the first is the hot tubes now the original version is from the late 70s i think it's around 78. it's a big box with three knobs i don't have that one i'm gonna be okay it's fine i'm not gonna buy it on reverb immediately after we're finished filming [Music] it's totally fine i'm not gonna do that but it is really cool and it's the same topology circuit that you see in the way huge red llama there was a diy book by craig anderton it was guitar electronics and uh george tripps used that to make a lot of his way huge pedals and i don't exactly know if they used it or not but it's a cmos overdrive it's a chipset that they use in a very interesting way and it makes for a very interesting and unique overdrive distortion so this version has the on and off for a tone control a lot of people prefer just drive and volume uh so you can do that by turning off the tone or you can have the added tone now this is a fantastically realistic and organic sounding overdrive uh it doesn't sound like you turn on a pedal it really does sound like the tubes in your valve amplifier just crunk a little bit more so i'm gonna use that and i'm gonna use the pitchfork this guy came out in 2014 i bought it the moment it came out and i got really excited because it very accurately replicates the original v1 digitech whammy octave up setting and that meant a lot to me because of the bins my iron lung i used to tour and play with this on a board and i would gaff tape the toe down and just use the nasty glitchy octave up this is not a pretty octave in some of its positions it's not pristine you're not going to strum chords and have accurate tracking but that's why it's magical i'm going to plug in an expression pedal here it'll be down on the floor and you'll hear some pitch movement and i'm going to use that octave up you can do simultaneous octave up and down you can do like just octave down you can do three octaves one octave two i'm going to be on the two setting uh it does mel there's all kinds of crazy stuff you can do harmonies i won't get into that but we're just going to jam and you'll see how amazing these are [Music] so [Music] next up is my absolute favorite electro harmonics fuzz it's not the big month it's probably something you've never heard of that makes me sad because you talk about all the other fuzzes you know electro harmonics is a living organism and you're ignoring part of its soul yeah you're ignoring this amazing fuzz pedal i'm about to show you i need you take a breath exhale the graphic fuzz with variable envelope response you've never seen this maybe you have it doesn't matter it's amazing here's the deal here's the lowdown you can turn the fuzz off that's cool you could like eq in and out use it like an eq it's kind of boring let's turn the fuzz on this is where the magic happens now it's not a crazy massive wall of fuzz like i would consider a big muff or something and they know this because they label the slider overdrive distortion they know it's a fuzz but it's it's not quite crazy enough to fall in line with like the big muff then you have dynamics envelope controlled volume that responds to the level of pick attack and volume in your guitar's output let that settle in you don't even know what i'm talking about but you need to think about it and then you have sustain it's the sustain of the envelope i'm gonna play this and then this is where the real magic is fuzzes tend to disappear so i'm gonna start with 500 hertz kind of down and then i want to stop in the middle of the riff like super cool like you know like i know what i'm doing and i'm gonna max 500 out and the fuzz is gonna jump out slap you in the face and change your entire life uh along with that i'm gonna play the memory toy these did not get enough respect there's like memory toy memory boy it's awesome inside of it if you rip it apart i don't recommend that there are true bucket brigade chipsets 3208s it gets like how many milliseconds 550 550 it does almost amazing like crazy runaway stuff but what i like is it'll hold the ambience and not run away completely too fast here we go [Music] so [Music] uh [Music] number three in this video i mean it's not the third pedal we've done two for the whatever matt's hard the third little section here from 2000 2001 the tube zipper tube zipper tube maze it's confusing it has two 12ax7 tubes it's massive it's really hard to use it has potentially a couple more knobs than it should have had but it's really unique super underrated and there's a few of you out there you're going to want this and you're going to want it to the point you're going to buy it right after you're already buying it right now you need what this has to offer it actually has a patented moving filter control now circuits are really hard to patent they patented the moving filter in this i don't even know what that looks like there's probably a guy at the patent obviously what the crap is this they did it they pulled it off that's underrated we're gonna play this it's gonna be like if the chili peppers jammed with like bruce springsteen and madonna i don't know i don't know let's just do it [Music] this next petal it's super cool it's gonna end up on a board um it was first released when i was negative two years old it was 1980 a lot of stuff going on heated political climate music was changing disco was dying brit pop new wave thing was there's a lot going on they released this pedal uh it's the attack decay tape reverse simulator if you notice for the acquiring eye reverse has reversed letters in it is super clever typeface so they reissued this last year it made it onto my favorite pedals of last year that episode no one watched it it's fine i'm not hurt it's really cool so here's the deal they wanted to emulate reverse delay meaning the tape running backwards what they did is they made a really complicated pedal that if you spend some time with it it does crazy stuff that's amazing one of my favorite things that this does is it absolutely almost perfectly 99.99 replicates an ebo and the sustain that does not stop so i'm going to show you some different settings one is i'm going to play uh some clean chords and you're going to hear this envelope swell up like reverse distorted guitar of what i just played then i'm going to hit the poly switch and basically it's going to turn into like this infinite sustain thing mixed with the aspects of a boss slow gear like an auto swell again it's wild it is really crazy it has a send return you can put things in the loop [Music] me [Music] mmm [Music] the final and most fun thing to show you i think out of all this is two pedals put together one is the slap back echo this is the 18 volt model from 1978. this is one electro harmonics if you're watching i beg you to just reissue this or like let me do it or something i mean i could do it it's amazing it uses an out of production chipset blah blah blah that's not a big deal you could replicate it but it's just simple it's a simple slapback echo with not a bad sound and the wet to dry ratio is really interesting and almost perfect it reminds me of a lot of brit solos in the band's spoon how it just feels right it just feels like the slapback comes out of the other speaker almost and it pulls it off in mono it's really cool some of my favorite graphics from this time so this is going to be the echo i'm going to kick this in and then there's this the double muff i could only find a modified version lurking in the bottom of some bins and upon this i discovered i do not have the original 90s big box version there's a picture in the corner i don't have it i'm not going to go buy it immediately although i will and then i don't even have the unmodded nano i'm really a failure but i do have the modified version i'll try to put it in this stock mode as possible here we don't mod these anymore don't ask us and i don't even know where he could find this so for a lot of people this is complicating and you just have to forgive me this pedal is really cool it is nothing like or nothing associated to the big muff although i think that the original muff fuzz is in play here with the namesake for the big muff that came after and then i think on the double muff there is an overdrive called the muff overdrive i don't have that either there's a lot of stuff i don't have it it's fine i'm [Music] that okay anyway this is basically two of these guys uh this one's super rare reverse print not a big deal you know anyway we're just gonna play this i do have the box to this one it's smushed but i have the box it's a smushed box which is still a box [Music] hmm [Music] today's record time is brought to you by an album originally released in 1994 the month of november and it has been re-released with some extra goodies that are really exciting this is my favorite tom petty work so the wildflowers record the new reissue is called our wildflowers and all the rest so basically you have the original four sides they did it on two records and then you have 10 extra songs so he wrote a lot of stuff during these sessions and it's awesome so a lot of the heartbreakers band benmont on keys mike campbell co-produced most of this i believe and plays guitar it's just a great feeling album you've probably heard you don't know how it feels uh it's good to be king it had some hits on it but the title track is such a beautiful song and it's just awesome it's underrated when you think it's on petty other things usually get thought of and i'm glad that they put this back out so go check it out it's fantastic it's a ton of music might be like two hours of music or something so yeah thanks so much for watching this episode i hope you enjoyed it and i hope that you enjoyed these really strange underrated electro harmonics pedals if you did in the comments let me know which one was your favorite do you have a vote you'd like to cast for the most underrated electro harmonics pedal their catalog is massive it spans all the way back to the late 60s so i'm sure there's some that you're thinking of some that you have owned or some that you currently own that you love drop it in the comments below hit like if you like this episode subscribe to the channel click the bell icon to get notifications of future episodes check out thejustshow.com for shirts like record time and such and also if you'd like to be a contributor to the patreon account which helps us with all kinds of things archiving history equipment traveling for interviews all this stuff we're doing check out that link in the description as well we do extra giveaways i do a monthly long-form talk if you're a pedal nerd go check it out there's a lot of stuff you'll like see you next week yeah bye

Channel: JHS Pedals

Views: 169,110

Rating: 4.9655371 out of 5

Keywords: JHS, JHS Pedals, The JHS Show, Guitar Pedals, Guitar Effects, Guitar Gear, Guitar Pedal Demo, Music History, overdrive pedal, chorus pedal, distortion pedal, boss pedals, compressor pedal, univibe, delay pedal, octave fuzz, reverb pedal, reverb, eq pedal, boost pedal, behringer, EHX, electro harmonix

Id: zcfg-Blhepo

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021