History of the ProCo RAT Pedal and Myths Debunked

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hello everybody welcome to a special video podcast version of the jhs show it's going to be a deep dive into the complete i dare say unabridged history of the rat it's not for the faint of heart there's never been anything like this done it's a reflection of about 10 years of work and my observation of no less than 100 physical rat pedals that i've studied um and it reflects a photo web history essay there's a link in the description you can go read that it is a massive huge work that took our entire team to pull off uh involved interviews and just and just everything you can imagine it's crazy we took rats apart for several years between 2018 and now to be specific to release the pack rats so this is a celebration of the pack rat but it's mostly a celebration of pro co the amazing story of several people the invention of the rat and where we are in 2021 and it's going to be good we're going to go through them we're going to play the most rare things things that you can't find we're not going to bother demoing like a rat reissue or it's pointless we're not going to demo stuff that you can hear anywhere else um that's it i think we're going to roll right into it how you guys doing good excellent i'm excited about this yeah what were the inter like we just got back we did we just got back from kalamazoo we interviewed six eight people people uh who worked at proco at one time or another and boy howdy did they have stories they did they had lots of good stories and i have a whole new appreciate i've already been a self-proclaimed fan of the rat you're an actual like true rat fan oh yeah cause you multi-instrumentalist and you're just rat like all the time i love the rat yeah but um getting to know the people behind the rat was especially cool and it's more fun than the pedal yeah that's what's fun about this yeah people are cooler than pedals fact how about you what was the trip like for you it was really fun i loved getting to meet the people i'm a rat convert very recently i've been like on the clock i'm a rat vert i i like that because yeah i got my first rat it's a i got it years ago i think 2002 or three and then i've been a pretty steady user i'm an addict i'm a rat addict and then you have always just like loved it since the all-american probably and then you have been skeptical yes i mean you've been around here for a bit now right yep and so how did this like affect you yep it started uh for me just stuff we've been working on music using like rat plugin from uad the raw uh and then you let me borrow a rat i think it was probably last week yes after a trip we came home i plugged it in i was like whoa this is fantastic and today for the first time i plugged it in on base and i think i have a new overdrive distortion circuit for base that may take the place of a class so you've got a the pack route over there on the base i do a lot of people don't know it is such a versatile box the first studio uses i ever saw paul moak said i use it on vocals all the time and then i realized oh that's been a thing like you got it from other people drum overheads very famous use vocals it's a it's like that's the main spot uh and then you get into the plug-ins and you start playing with it and a lot of people don't realize the pulp and peel when we did the 500 series the approach there was like i'm a big fan of like the sound toys decapitator and all that and we put the rat distortion circuit in the pulp and pill it's been in there forever people just don't notice that i think you guys have an episode we may or may not have something to cook it um but yeah it's like such a great base circuit because of how the low-pass filter works and just the way the clipping works it's very unique but yeah we're like we're coming fresh out yeah of like a rat-tastic journey like we've been deep into it very deep i've never been so deep into a subject so which says a lot yeah um this is truly ten years of the the acquisition and collection um partnering there's another connect collector named dana we were able to photograph and with the employees prototypes i mean i've spreadsheets that are insane i have um just like just crazy stuff like like crazy people stuff yeah um just graphs and like it wasn't enough to simply play them i wanted to get like i'm really tired of shootouts right right i'm really tired as you can tell if you watch the show like i want to prove stuff i think there's there's like a validity and a really great honor to these amazing pedals to actually break them down scientific control talk about the circuits why do they work and get rid of these myths um yeah so many young players that just so many myths so at the end of this we're gonna bust a few myths at least three and i think that's what we're doing yeah yeah y'all good i'm so excited hopefully you're good and like i said this is the kind of episode you can wash the dishes put the headphones on yeah it's going to be a long one and uh i guess the best place to start is the rat comes about in 77 or 78 i'll get into that in a minute but the rat is because firstly because of one man named charlie wicks i have a photo of charlie here um this is that is an amazing picture wow this is an ad turbo era so it's post 89 let's just say 90 whatever that's what it looks like that's charlie a lot of times when you open a rat you'll see a message that says captain of the universe well captain of the universe was charlie's moniker a marketing guy came in and they started calling him that and his business card said it that picture represents what we've learned about profiles yes it really does i just want to keep staring at this is amazing i gotta ask did he come up with captain of the universe or did someone call him that you know i think you know through the discussions candy the building supervisor they kind of talked about there was this period where they knew they were different and sometimes hippie is like a negative yeah right they were like truly free of all the like business bullcrap right right and they ran this and this charlie was a genius he was a brilliant marketer he was brilliant at customer service and and and i think there just came this point of like maybe that was his nickname and that's that they brought in a marketing person to help facilitate who they were and he became officially captain of the universe so it's pretty cool so charlie there was a place called the sound factory and the sound factory is there in kalamazoo so this photo is on kalamazoo avenue i think that's what's called streeter avenue and basically it was an old ice factory or something like that and then it's a pretty big building let's see only photo i can find it's like when you're you're desperately trying to find this stuff um the sound factory was like a it was like if you watch parks and rec it's like the entertainment 720 right right music it's a conglomerate so upstairs there's a studio called dirty dirty something i don't know i mean this is systec which is a famous pedal company in some regard is there you have guitar luther's you have charlie wicks had a music store in there yeah just a ton of stuff i think it was multiple multiple businesses and that place goes bankrupt and i just want to show this again so charlie charlie the next day i believe it's a bankruptcy you know they shut that whole thing down and he says i'm starting proco sound inc today we're gonna make cables that are better than everybody's cables they were the first cables to put heat shrink on the end no no how simple is that that is such a simple thing yeah yeah microphone cables snakes stage boxes studio panels and i think the biggest start of the engine was they had this brilliant cabinet designer builder and if you're familiar with sound systems they've changed a lot you know now we have like the behringer xr98 that fits in your pocket but back then it was like here's a freaking cab that's the size of me that you need to power with an amp and you you know they partnered with jbl i believe or eve one of those companies and they made these cabinets and they were like a regional famous cabinet like a midwest famous thing so proco started 74. there are a few people employed with charlie a lot there's the um what were the girls names they called themselves cable queens cable queens which is a group of women who are amazing um we'll share like there will be stuff you'll see this stuff later in the years we'll do we'll do a big rat kind of expose like a bio or something but then there's two engineers primarily who are very important one of the engineers is named steve this is an older photo of him again just killing it with the photos they invented i believe the first like cat five uh snake yeah i think that i think that's what we're seeing here i don't know the term i don't know a lot about the pro code right catalog but um yeah so this is steve corelli uh this is well into the 90s uh he was much more wood stocky when they started you'll see that in this that's steve steve was referred to as uncle steve and always forgotten he like always got shifted around in the story although he's like this undercurrent of genius yeah um everybody spoke very like every time they mentioned uncle steve it was with so much adoration and like you know it was beautiful yeah it was really sweet and then there's another guy scott burnham this is him my assumption is this is probably 72-73 this is like sound factory days scott burnham's a guitar player and he's also a brilliant mind engineer genius guy i'm a huge fan of this man and he you know the story has always been he does this and steve was a guitarist kind of the dod story which is like david's right nerd and john johnson's like make me an overdrive and then they the two combined as superheroes kind of like pedal the music you saw the narrative this wasn't like this was actually scott really did design the rats steve is also a friend they're both modding amps they have like a fairly i don't know famous is the right word i don't know all the details but they're known around the area the mod out in hot rod amps yeah they're modding fuzz faces distortion pluses you know they're doing all this stuff and scott burnham this is scott at his desk he's doing some accounting or something i can't remember what this picture is but this is the look you know this is this is yeah era-ish appropriate late 70s scott burnham and he said you know i can do a better distortion box than these things i can do something better i don't like these and i there's an also a story where steve modifies a fuzz face with different transistors and scott makes fun of him supposedly he's like we got to do something better than this so scott is credited mainly and i think that's accurate designs the rat steve's involved steve has passed away we're not sure what the involvement is but it doesn't matter they both i give them credit they both design their out i think scott's the main designer and that's you know there's some really good reason to believe that's as early as 74 if they had the idea and let's say scott breadboarded in 74 that's sick because it puts it on par with in one year distortion plus 250 dod the armin square wave the dan armstrong blue clipper and the rat in one year and they're all op amps going into hard clipping diodes and to me that's like yeah i want to make that movie right i got so excited when i heard he could have actually done this in 74. yeah so they launched proco what we do know is 77 or 78 if we go to the top down here uh this is referred to as a bud box rat again we're going to talk about stuff if you want to see this stuff clearly we've done a lot of homework for you go to that link there's really great photography we're going to keep it at this level but this is a bud box and that reference is to this enclosure is honestly just a diy bud industries they still make cases um you just buy them out of a catalog and put your prototypes in them it's kind of like you know we buy the stock 125b cases earthquaker does you just buy the case but bud box it's uh primered spray-painted crinkly black and a really crazy traffic warning orange screen print that's pretty wild um this is the origin of the rat there were 12 bud blood words as hard there were 12 bud box circuits made there has been some misnomer that there are 12 of these there are not 12 of these there are 12 circuits that went into 11 petals so to clarify that that's why it's going to be nerdy you got to hold on to your belt or whatever this thing is so there's this guy this is a double bud box that dana owns i declare this officially with no argument you cannot argue the rarest rat ever made and possibly the rarest one of the rarest pedals on earth wow i would rather have this than the clown number one all day this is like such a piece of history it was found in a basement in the rafters in kalamazoo right yeah and a guy contacted dana and said you want this dana's collection's immense a huge thanks to dana uh here's the inside of that so there's two of those circuits there wow so scott burnham sets it a bench makes 12 circuits and 11 petals and if you do the math that means there are how many of the bud boxes 10 10 yep we pass math so there's 10 of this prototype right here and um let's play it no one's ever demoed one to my knowledge on youtube i don't like why the rest of them are i know dana has one okay we actually had four of the circuits in one room and it was like thanos rings of power jokes going on i think there's one in australia and there is one in america and i think the landfills have the other i mean these are very rare um but i've never seen one demo the photography that's posted in the description is the best photography ever taken of this pedal i may go a little crazy and do more of that later we took it i just don't know if we have time to post it but you want to jam on it let's just do it yes all right so we have i've got an old memory man if we go top down here i have a memory man and just an rv5 going into like a a basement and um [Music] it's a pack rap this isn't about we're not going to deal with this it's here in case i need it but last week's episode shows the pack right well go watch andy at reverb don't we're not going to demo this let's do the history so here's the bud box the first a chord to my knowledge through a bud box on youtube [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] that's world premiere content right there and you're not not you're not even paying for this looking at my eyes it's totally free world premiere content of a bud box um appropriate color scheme too i must say yeah for the time of year it is it is it's very cool um [Music] yeah so next again we're not going to get into things we're not going to demo stuff it doesn't matter right right you know what a rat sounds like yeah so the bud box let's briefly talk about it the only difference is with the bud box are that there's a hum that ain't me all right the only difference is with a bud box is that it's actually buffered bypass which is really funny um the pot codes in this date accurately and strongly across the to the double that dana had the single on this they're all identical there's a 74 pot but there's a 77 78 pot so we know it's not 74 you can't time travel so this is truly i i place it in 78 um and so the idea there is he made these he sold them to friends something like that a custom order charlie wicks was talked into this there's actually a cut sheet you can see it's posted on that link in the bio like the essay where they advertise a photo of this sort of and then by 79 we see the version one it's actually in in my timeline we're going to call it the version 1a which is a fringe logo now something that's never happened properly with the rat is that's fine it's the battery clip something that's never happened properly with the rat is version numbers because it's a mess yeah it's like a hot thick soupy mess yeah and um so i feel like i put effort into it people can not be okay with it but i have identified what i believe to be the ultimate proper seri like version number and and variation letter so it's like numeric alphabetics so this is called the uh basically the fringe logo which is the version one dash a it's the version one first article a and this is after the bud box and um you see the fringe logo here if we go top down i'll try to focus that yeah look at that technology you have the logo kind of fringes off of the uh you know it's like a thick rat cartoon tail yeah then you have these little fringe lines they're hard to see but how's autofocus not happening come on sony you get the idea so you know it says the that that font is not used ever again the t has fringes and then also notice those knobs those are not familiar to the rat they're like a knurled silver top knob they're not common they're the bud box knob so you see that carry over from here and it says tone control that's important so you go from this you you can hear these i've demoed it i believe on the show um when i demo one i'm gonna turn it upside down and then we end up with the these are 1979 all of these so version one is crazy 1979 they were switching graphics constantly through the interviews and what we've learned this is charlie wicks charlie wicks walks in let's change it up let's make it exciting and it's just like constant graphical changes screen printing things also cause them to change design if you're a graphic designer line weight is a huge issue and they're like trying to print with screens and sliding over some issues there so then we end up with a really quick i think there were probably a few thousand of these made maybe a thousand one thing i need to cover on the back of that is a serial number it actually says 401 590 that's an old systec 401 flanger serial sticker that was left over oh wow these are cool yeah this is nerd stuff then we end up the tone control so this is what we call version one b uh no it's not version one b i don't have dana had it version one b is right here yeah it's okay it's okay version one b is cool it drops the fringe logo and has the bud box knobs this is really rare don't have one i'm totally fine like i'm i'm totally fine it's haunting even this finger so that's a cool version that's going to be the 1b so a tone control fringe knobs and then we have there's another version in 79 that is ultimate rare which is the version 1c tone control metal knobs and these metal knobs come from another petal in 79 that's again crazy rare these are all dana's thank you dana this has the rust disease that's known on many rats because of improper painting this is a custom order base rat it has an effects loop that you can hit a switch turn on the loop a clean blend blah blah blah but those knobs the scenario in my opinion the professional opinion here customers said can i get those knobs yeah i think it might have been that easy we know that they had been using those blood box knobs charlie wicks is a very economical man historically he wanted cheaper knobs whatever the metal knobs are probably too expensive and then we end up with version one this is also 79 version 1d this is the last 1979 rat it is the tone control rat so this is uh pretty well known that's the one i held up actually it's this guy so this one is just straight says tone control above it um and it's the knobs we're used to so if we do top down the knobs we're used to the classic more less cartoony rat tail there's some evidence that scott burnham was bothered by the cartooniness we were told also charlie just constantly changing stuff so this is the rat knob we know just stayed with the product forever this is the classic uh logo but it still says tone so this is v1 all the version ones say tone and that's important so then we get to 1981 and we see version two appear version two is the same thing it says filter so just backing up to the version ones version ones all sound the same they're the same circuit it's cosmetic printing changes knob changes that's it like we've been lied to i remember doing this initial push to study yeah i'm just being so mad yeah i like when we get to the white face i'll try to i was just like version two so 1981 uh year before my birth i just like saying that sometimes uh yeah it just says filter so what's the difference same exact circuit there is a difference there's not a tonal difference at all there's a user interaction user ui difference user interface and the user interface difference is that on the classic rat that says tone as you turn that knob up it gets brighter okay so the belief that i have right now i am open to change i think through the interviews and what i've learned they got some feedback that you know you're playing a fender amp telecast or whatever there's something about brightness that's like you want it to feel gooier and they were getting some complaints about being too bright so scott or steve it could have been either one i don't know um they reversed the soldering points of lugs three and one same circuit that's it they switched the two wires and made it rotate and reverse at a different taper now this time what happens is visually as a guitarist nobody like turns their pedal on turns a knob down right right you kind of put it like right there you're like 60 yeah like rock and roll it's darker it has presence it's a better like user experience off the bat right but it's the same exact circuit um we can get into the myths about tantalum caps later remind me of that yeah because that applies to this error anybody have a question i so you could argue perception of that knob change is so it is different but it's same circuit but our perception's different so that's maybe why we think they sound better or take a version 1d that says tone control no fringe logo and the no bud box knobs so that that classic 1d tone control wrap there's a lot of those put it up next to the filter v2 every single sound is in them both identically if you move the filter pot to where it needs to go got it right and there's a sweet spot of adorable uh is there a word auditory perception it's a podcast yeah auditory perception makes you like it more yeah oh totally i think it it's it's that thing where it's like if you get a pedal and you plug it in and where the knob set when you turn it on is kind of like your first impression um but i i find it funny because the the original uh taper makes more sense to me as a user for some reason yeah it's most pedals like yeah it's just it's just funny that that was a choice because i would i always just associate turning things up with getting brighter you know yeah i think that it's the reason the rat i think it's one of the major reasons that stood apart it it actually you know we joke a lot on the show all the pedals are the same the rat is a really beautiful different circuit yeah when you look at mxr distortion plus or 250 those are almost the same pedal it's like exhausting arguing with people but the rat like has some things and then when you add that ui thing where it's like so different in your perception and use i think it helped with like buy this thing it's difficult right right yeah i like the filter is this what i'm used to my first my first was like i'll get to in a minute but that's what i grew up on is that yeah right backwards style so then in 1984 they have to fix a problem and the problem is that looking back down at this um you know look at these photos if you want to get real intricate but it says proco and then next to that you can't read it because the sony camera is stupid but pro co sound ink and then you have the rat here's the problem when you try to screen print that it's it's interesting so hold on to that thought and then here's the other problem so they're dealing with that already at this point but there's another problem what year is this 1984 we see this pedal hit the scene the white face this is cult classic i'm gonna have fun talking about this why do they go small who's the biggest pedal company in the world boss boss ibanez has the ts9 dod has like the whole america's pedal yeah right they're like killing it with the fx series eh has gone bankrupt but they still have like killed everyone up until that yeah and the rat is this big old pedal and so they make that decision and they say we have to shrink it down and that's why this exists here is a very unpopular fact this is the same exact circuit as the filter big box v2 the v3 a this is v3a i'm going to check my notes every time because it's so complex v3a is a version 2 in a smaller box you have been told that a white face has unicorn hoof and witch hair wound inside of its being or whatever yeah no this is smaller box same exact circuit because they need to compete with the market and this is really important to know it's the first time this is the one when i did my first test in 2018 i've spent time in this room i was in here for a few days you might remember i'm just playing around with a notebook losing my mind like eating subway and crying in the corner and just like oh this one's not yeah they just like all soundless there's like this thing where it's like there's no difference well that was that was just auditory and then we went to the scientific control test with equipment and it's like dude these are the same exact thing yeah no i remember being in this room and you were like man i'm trying to pick units for the pack rat again years ago yeah and you're like i'm trying to pick versions but like all these ones i thought were different aren't and it was kind of like it for a second it was like is the packrat gonna even exist right because it was like is there enough variation yeah it was kind of wild because i felt initially like this isn't gonna happen uh and this idea was from 2013 that's how long ago that i said we're doing a pack rat it had a different name and different approach but yeah this white face is covered in lies band name yeah it's killer though it's so beautiful there's the nostalgia to that logo i l i love the aesthetic of the white face i think it's the best looking yeah well i have a surprise for you i'm giving you this one no you're not i have i have two i know you don't have one you're kidding me nope not at all that's one that cliff had repaired so it has replaced pots and i don't need it i have two other ones there's no box i don't care oh my gosh i'm so excited right now sweet we're just making dreams come true making dreams come true um it's real so the white face is 84.85 and it it brings he's over here like weeping it brings a different problem right the smaller box equals smaller logo yeah they were already having trouble with sony come on man i'm calling fuji immediately uh just hold it out in front of your face in front of this camera there you go there you go oh wow just hold it like like further whatever whatever okay oh you're a g i used to we used to do this all the time what's my problem so if you look over here they're having trouble here there's smudges and like ink blobs and any is there term you know it's just messy yeah like the screen's not holding up so then they shrink that joker what's gonna happen it's gonna get worse it's worse and there and so candy she's telling us like they're losing money left and right the printing they're throwing they're having to clean cases and spend days on this yeah and just to clarify candy is she is basically the head of the assembly process for proco um back in the day um that's her that's her in the crimson shirt yeah we're not going to tell you who the guy is back there yet yeah she that's the assembly boxing she was one of our favorites she was awesome she was so fun she had so many fun things to say so this is a problem so 84.85 they have to make a decision the version three a turns into i feel like an accountant i have like i have like my feet because it's like i gotta get this right yeah no editing it's live so version three b arrives version three b i'm gonna use nick's editorial directing wisdom there we go there you go clean 80 there we go 8485 white face and it gets its name because it's a whitefield logo whiteface this is 85.86 and this is uh i mean sorry 86. yeah 86. and it's called a black face because black fell yeah they just they just printed the words instead of not printing the word just like an inverse logo now there's one major difference here the white face is the last time we ever see sound ink on the pedal and again because you can't print that small yeah and guess what these are the same circuit yep yeah so i've seen i saw a guy get punched in the face on reddit he was bleeding people attacked him the internet blood same circuit you know what's different screen printing you know what doesn't affect the tone of a guitar screen printing or does this oh this is like i'm jokingly saying this but like i had issues because i wanted these nuances like we want that yeah yeah right but i'm actually more excited i feel like i've gone through like some type of like counseled healing yeah the side of my being stages of grief i'm in like i'm in a nirvana of freedom which is i know the truth right right and it's like this is great and i just i'm excited like i no longer have to believe the bull crap that a white face is worth more because it sounds better right it can be worth more because you're collecting them and you love how it looks that's it and all day go buy it spend money it makes you play better too on a philosophical level that's sure you're gonna play the crap out of that man i'm just so excited over here well we talked about this on expensive pedals where it's like just understanding why you like a thing but being honest about it like admitting it just admit like you like the printing that's different you know and that's that's okay if that's all it is i like the real clone because it's beautiful right but i don't care it's not any better than like right right 100 other clones being made yeah there's a thing with like let's admit it we need a shirt let's admit it yeah right right so they have another issue lots of issues version 3c comes along in 86. so this is what we just showed which is version 3b notice there's squares around the look at this look at this there's brackets we're going to call them brackets around the lettering right well i'm in here up to my tankless cankles a word i don't know i'm up to my ankles and neck in like just circuitry like i'm so immersed in like the feedback or this like just in there and katie walks by so she's part of our team here or a brand graphic designer and she's like those don't have squares around them like i was asking her do you see anything and she just literally within how many seconds five seconds she goes there aren't there aren't any brackets around the words and i like spit or something because i've never noticed i've never noticed it my first rat was no brackets and this is the final version of the v3 so the small box wraps with this and guess what same same thing but it's like these cool moments of three aesthetics we've never i've never seen anyone mention this surely someone has but i'm going to pin it for fun no brackets so hopefully we see reverb where it says no brackets wrapped that'd be going to happen and it could be also called on reverb the katy no brackets rat if you want to forever immortalize katie's vision her eagle hawk font and graphical vision the katy no brackets vintage wrap yeah and just because it's no brackets it should cost more right yeah but yeah so that's where we are on that and so that's the version 3c so so far there is no circuit difference after the tone knob changed to the filter to be technically correct right it's from the v1 right okay the sounds are all the same with the changes version two is a user interface experience yeah same circuit but there ain't a sound gone from either one okay the bud box uh it's there's like slight because it has a buffer on the front which kind of affects loading of the guitar but honestly like i i spent some time on that and it was like nah still wasn't but what i am going to do if we look down here and let me know in the comments if you're interested i think we will do a special product release of like some limited like we'll build some of these for fun and like make it like because it's all about the look it's about like right a cool reproduction if the sound is not worth wasting a spot on the pack right yep so on on the note of the buffered input are you going to talk about the switch at all how he it was steve right yeah we'll get to we'll get that no let's remember that there's a lot to remember that'll come along it's this one oh it is this one good timing good timing so uh next up we are now in 19 at least 87 this is a hard one to date in 1987 we have several people a guy named scott particularly a guy named bill and then we have uncle steve and we have this prototype here um there's some more pictures of this i didn't want to pull them into the system there's a photo of the inside of this pedal and there's a little strip board like a vero board which has a circuit on it and it's like shoved into this is obviously a blackface chassis so just laying around the shop they grab it this is a theme you're going to see they grab a case modify it for a new idea this is all the protos are in some type of wonky like go grab that thing that's in the drawer and like they make it everybody talks like that apparently especially in michigan i don't know they don't at all nope but the uh they they have this circuit in there because they're getting tons of feedback like they're getting swamped in the same way they were getting swamped like boss pillars are smaller your rats too big they make the white face then we get through and it's like we're in 1987 at least and there's no led boss drops the perfect led switching system in 77. the math on that is 11 years 10 years at least with a pedal that's your only pedal yeah you've shrunken it and you're still not putting an led on it this is a bad one right right yeah like how do you feel about that as a player well and i remember i can't remember exactly who said it but there was definitely some uh conflict within the company about adding the led oh yeah i believe there was somebody mentioned a comment like well you'll know it and it's on when it's on like why do you need to that was scott yeah yeah scott scott seemed like a purist and i back him up like it's his pedal say what you want to say like he i think he was like leave it alone yeah right let the kids go by the other people right right whatever do what you want so i think you know this is a point where he and there's some truth to the fact he kind of becomes distant from his own product as it keeps evolving so they prototype i had it up here didn't i yeah they prototyped this this is the rat two prototype the rat two is version four a okay version there's gonna be a giant like portal of time where you don't hear me say four until i say it way after other versions there's a 4b that comes so there's this parallel hold up i am a rat i am look at me i am a living rat meme okay so there's like a parallel here where there's like stuff going on on this side and this side of time and the rat holds this is deep this is scientific philosophy um scientific philosophy of america it sounds like a like a journal magazine you have to pay 80 for the three people read so yeah you have what's called this pedal and it comes out um let's get it in focus this is the 4a rat 2 which it's funny that name is funny to me but that tells you how they viewed it as an actual new product right that's a massive hint yeah the people that made it never created this bull crap right right versions yeah yeah that's really important yeah they were like this is two like they told they this has been in front of us yeah the answer to the mystery has always been right there in that petal this is version two but we don't listen no we don't we we feel and we want magic right and then they're like this is rat too but but it's the only difference that's just that there's a there's an led yes you yes and that's it the difference it's a little deeper and cool it's aesthetic completely aesthetic and user interface meaning led so there's a circuit added to this where and i believe steve designed this and it's freaking genius and he deserves all the credit because i've used it in versions of pedals and there's so many builders who use this yeah it's a circuit called millennial bypass and all you need to know is to turn an led on and to switch an input and output at the same time for bypass or through a circuit and a pedal you need three poles with two throws well they didn't have that switch they had two poles with two throws and you have to figure out like i gotta switch the led but i need both poles because i have an input one and an output two that's two two so math is hard and so he develops this circuit that senses the change and turns on an led with a transistor and that's how you do this uh it is not in the audio path it doesn't even touch it and there's like comical points in our interview where people are like calling in like it sounds different i hear it and it's like physically impossible right right it's like saying that painting the hood of your car red from blue slowed it down right right it's a good analogy yeah full of it it's just like it's maddening so the rat two it's it's still this is important it's still sloped this is why it's version or variation a in the version so just notice it's flat okay and oh it's not sloped it's not sloped okay flat at this point so this is in 1988. there there it could be late 87 don't want to split hairs i want to split hairs but i don't really know i mean i think it's 88 um and the screen printing is still an issue yeah so what do they do no more screen printing they use this mylar plastic sticker system where they get these sheets of stickers they're cut they lay it over and stick it on and that's why you see a lot of rats um over the years i have some over here come on sony there we go you'll see like breaking along edges right it ruffles up and that's just because this is a big sticker and it glows in the dark so we think the origin of that is just the company gave them some options and go we have a glow in the dark and they're like i mean i would say yes to that right so that's the uh version 4a okay we've only jammed once that's true i think people are fine we're about to jam a lot oh yeah i need to remember to play the weird bud era proto maybe we do that okay just a second yep you wanna do it now let's go yeah yeah let's do right away we create our own destiny that's right i'm going to come back at 1989. y'all hold me to that so let's 1989 1998. grab that silver box we have quite a mystery here um this one's cool here's the bud box no pressure no big deal just so this will actually hit me box i i came across this from uh an awesome guy named chris this came from the factory when they shut down uh when they sold and moved out of kalamazoo they're in missouri now so i had this and i'd seen there's like one photo of this that's literally the size of a pinky nail literally like the resolutions like yeah it's like eight bit and so you can tell what's going on here and i always had the songs like that's the bud the enclosure and so when i finally got a bud box um you open this up and this primer paint is in this and then you see this is the same exact case same exact knobs same exact very interesting g308 op-amp which is just a really old lm-308 and it's a ring modulator rat we're here prototype that's so strange that's cool that never made it into production yeah and supposedly scott burnham has commented on this through some conversations it's 18 volts two batteries shoved into this rat's nest of chaos and it's a craig anderton ring modulator that scott built and maybe modded or not i don't know and so i think the world should hear it right absolutely [Music] so yeah let's see what we got here we got the knobs aren't lame bolts [Music] let's just take a shot at something chaotic just start a drum bass loop or something i'll come on mic tell me what key random will go [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so you know it's it's not as usable as a wrap right you know what i'm saying it's different yeah so that is it squealing as well everything's happening this is old gear so this is cool it's a could have been i don't know it's a bud box scott burnham prototype ring modulator designed by craig anderson and i don't know it's amazing it's crazy so that's a really back to possibly even before the bud box for all we know maybe everybody starts you know no one just immediately builds their app right right so he's obviously learning from craig anderton which is an amazing person to learn circuits from through those books you could argue maybe that did come first if he's sort of developing i mean maybe who knows yeah i mean a lot of this is like we're in the desert we're digging for the spins right right we find a bowl the bowl has sand on it and the sand looks like the sand next to a sphinx right right so we go that bowl is with the sphinx yeah i don't know yeah but it but it could be just like a ziploc bowl that someone like yeah you know we know he made that he said he did yeah yeah yeah and we know it's in the same enclosure that's all and that's it well he did he mentioned craig anderson and he said what he wrote on it too i forgot that maybe oh yeah yeah maybe somehow this this podcast will bring yeah healing to the service i think he said the writing we wondered i read last night i found a comedy said watch out i think he wrote watch out nate i think that's what he said something like there's some kind of like ex what explains that explanation explanation expletive is not like watch out exclamation unless you live in a certain country in europe watch watch out i don't know is that offensive i don't know i don't know all right up to 1989 1989 starts this incredible journey of an engineer builder named grape grape grape is the absolute why did i not pull a picture of grape up grape is in the in the article go look at grape he's amazing yes ah should have done that whatever you can't redo the past unless you edit which we're not doing so grape uh is this number one unsung hero of the rat like you're about to see great constantly doing things we interview grape he pulls up on his motorcycle sets down and just goes just yep he's insane he's so clever he's so smart i like wanted to hire him yeah as he walked through how he thought and what he did for proco i was like at one point you remember i was like what did they pay you for he's like yeah yeah yeah he's just an awesome dude so 1989 grape is a guy there he plays a marshall distorted and he doesn't like the rat because you plug a rat into a distorted marshall and you get like sludge i mean if you're in like a shoegaze post sludge band that's great but grapes playing like you know rock and roll yeah yeah and he's like i don't like this so he has built some circuits he's also a big like craig anderson books and diy and he sees a craig anderton article on diode clipping craig anderton's someone we need to do a story on yeah he's still alive um and he sees where you can replace the clipping diode so the way that a rat works it's really simple you have an amplifier and the amplifier just amplifies the guitar and sends it out louder than it was created and puts it through these diodes and these diodes clip the waveform it's they're like i've said it before there's an episode called history of 1970s distortion or something op-amp distortion i call them like distortion monsters so diodes like grab the signal and like chop the top off and suck it off to ground like kind of like the under what's the stranger things uh the upside down it's like the upside down yeah yeah yeah the demogorgon or whatever yeah yeah yeah harry potter nope demogorgon you're right i don't know fiction's hard so they do that and he reads well i'm not like pop we have these leds lying around because we've had this rat too now and they use five millimeter red leds underneath this print underneath the plastic and so he reads you can use leds they have a higher threshold meaning they're they're they're more chill monsters they're not gonna they're not gonna right if it's a cookie monster he's these are less hungry right right so they're on the opposite spectrum the one in four one four eight the traditional rat sits in a middle you're gonna hear me talk about this in another version and the led ism is a less aggressive one meaning it's going to let this the boost be more of a boost louder and cleaner and when you do clip it's going to cut off in this way that's a lot like a two bam so when he said he designed it he popped him into a case and he turned the volume all the way up and had the gain back and he's like in heaven and he shows it to charlie and charlie goes all right turbo rat 1989 they put it out amazing and this is the first slope enclosure 1989 with that approach they're still evolving to meet the era they add they make it smaller they add an led and they're like everybody and their mom for 10 years has put the foot switch lower than the knobs it's time yeah so that's a turbo rat and i love the turbo rat it's a great overdrive so this is the first time we see a change to the rat circuit yes 1989 up to this point they're all the same yeah okay yeah yeah crazy yep it is crazy this is the first time we see the change for sure in a released product got it there's a hazy thing of when these tinkering start and there's one very naughty product that's impossible to reign in and that's the r2du and we'll talk about that right okay um yeah let's see we have next they released the vintage big box reissue so this is the boom of the vintage market you know guitars are selling for like a billion dollars it's like way before the bubble burst back in the day and charlie's like hey let's reissue the big box and i think it was also a way like the turbo i don't think scott was a fan he's like why are you changing it you had an led and he's like getting annoyed i think this is a way to say like to try to even get scott back in yeah make him like it this is the reissue the way you tell a reissue apart it's simple it simply doesn't say sound inc next to proco so if you see a big box without sound ink and someone's on reverb claiming it's vintage become a reverb please i will deputize you now message them and say no no no that's a 91 reissue or later change your price bam we have to change the world one pedal all the time that's right amen so these went these were made all the way until 2005. is that what i'm reading 2005. that's a long time i also see that on reverb being misrepresented because i've been looking for rats i don't have to look for rats no more let me just say but people people say like mid to late 90s is the last bit of these vintage bits that's the case 2005. yeah 2005. um like anything rat yeah anything's possible okay i there was a huge gray market meaning that's right there were like employees literally walking bags and products out to their cars like crazy stories rape actually was telling us stories about watching the security footage and watching people like take bins and like oh do like side alley dealings with rats so there's at one point scott said he devised the security system right where you stepped for the that was for the um the rats nest which was the basement shop where scott and steve worked they developed this multi-pronged security system where you had to step on these different things you stepped on a nail touched another nail and it connected the circuit and the door popped up yeah no one could figure out how to open the door yeah this is who we're dealing with right right yeah this is not your normal right this isn't like gibson like this is yeah yeah okay so next up we have uh the next version version 6a and version 6b version 6a and 6b are the same exact pedal they just have different printing on them and they came to be when guitar center approached charlie wicks and said we love the rat it's awesome and i'm i'm inserting this because i absolutely believe this is why i think i could prove it easily dod is a home run the grunge is the best selling pedal in the world around 96 like the numbers are astronomical because of kurt cobain and the whole just the vibe and they say hey we want to compete with that in the store the rat's a little pricey for kids we need a rat that we can buy from you for 15 that's crazy and charlie wicks businessman goes absolutely not knowing how to do it and guess who he assigns great great so grape is told to make a american-made rat that's unique for the the hot retail market of kids getting into guitar because of nirvana basically yeah yeah and grape does it and it's called the roadkill and the roadkill is the telltale signs are all over this first of all blood splatter graphic this is dod yeah yeah jason lamb era chase yep yeah the knobs the other tell headlights screech and splatter rat doesn't do this rat is a simple man rat is right right a blue collar it's very straightforward i'm gonna work nine to five i'm coming home i'm drinking an old style i'm watching andy griffith i'm going to bed leave me alone and this is like hey dad can i have the keys to the car yeah yeah roadkill you should illustrate that later i will so yeah this is what happens charlie over anticipates as a good businessman should do sometimes he orders a lot of boards right so grape devises this thing first of all from a pvc pipe screen door actually yeah he explained how there's actually screen door parts they used here in the rubber footing this battery door was like this genius idea because it's plastic with metal sides easy to assemble the circuit has an input buffer it's the most original rat circuit there is and i want to say this before i keep talking this is maybe the coolest rat there is that gets no appreciation because it was so cheap got it it looks silly yeah and then the brat which i'll show the same pillow they just they don't look pro right they sound so good the switch is kind of broke what's cool is we put this in the packrest so you'll be able to play this reliably it has soft clipping like a tube screamer as well as the rat hardcore it's this hybrid thing it's got capacitor changes tons of low end uh we didn't spoof nirvana with this at all last time no so anyway charliewicks orders too many things and they have to use the same bill of materials to clear out inventory and obviously guitar center can't sell the amount he ordered so they decide to make a world market version they'll sell in all the stores they call it the brat i like to think that means budget rat i'm making that up but it makes me feel better the box says extreme distortion unit the vibe is insane yeah that's that so that is version six version six is one pedal with two faces that's the second coolest looking rat in my opinion next to the white face it is it's nice all right next is the doozy i'm gonna get through this fast um it it's it's a doozy it starts with it's the deuce tone so let's talk about the deuce tone where are we at where it would do stone the deuce tone tell me that guy so the deuce tone is deuce rats is that the word i don't know how to i don't know the phrase that so the deuce tone is a pedal that came to be basically it's a two-in-one rat with a bunch of clipping options isolated this is like the one of the first two and ones ever made i'm sure uh it's got to be there might have been a prescription electronic thing full time i don't know doesn't matter so the deuce tone comes about because charlie wicks this reissue thing does well the vintage mark and charlie comes in and the story is hey you know we had that rack unit thing we made in custom numbers and we sold like eight of them let's like reissue that and everyone at proco goes no this is like no please don't reissue this horrible product that no one bought it's a rack unit we have to build you know it's essentially two rat pedals probably blackface and they just shoved them in an enclosure yeah so i have a prototype here this is the this is what i believe to be the deuce tone first proto work so you'll notice there's toggles and that's these aren't on do stones deuce tones are really weird they're really rare dana and i were talking all day yesterday i can't nail down when this rack unit was made yeah the internet says 84 that is the biggest pile of bull crap on the internet yeah like there's nothing worse than that there's no way it's 84. every every one of them has a backlit led or a blackface simple thing or actually no brackets so it's like it's in that era after the white face in some literal like steve lucather wants one and they make it there's there's no press we see an ad in 88 it's in the description in the whole essay and so this one though is modified with all these clipping toggles and grape did it and this dates 87. so grape again was tasked obviously they talked charlie out of making the wrap yeah maybe they didn't at first and grape's like i gotta change the thing get some energy on it but eventually grape goes hey this thing has a foot switch right it has a midi cable he goes let's just use the footswitch case and put them in there and make a pedal like a normal company because it'll fit and it was a light bulb moment and so he took that foot switch shoved two pedals in it this is it is the actual prototype this is like i am holding time damn it's so cool he wrapped them it's just it's like two you get the idea he wrapped the stickers has the clipping toggles and then this comes out 2002 is that correct yeah 2002 and it introduces a lot of cool stuff on the back it has the turbo right so you have the turbo mode leds vintage rat one in four one four eights and then each side has a unique wrap that's never been seen okay never been seen and one of them makes it out of this petal into its own world and one never does one is called clean wrap clean rat has never become a product but we have the prototype we have a great tried yeah that's awesome so this let's play this i love that there you go you can see the writing yeah this is a rat is it a yeah this is a rat two with a flat panel flat top with the uh the sticker peeled off white tape and rats messy handwriting and it just says proco preamp prototype let's plug it up you you just had to drill the well during our interview it was riveted and i was like horrif i was like did he rig this to self-destruct i've had this thing for a while this came from chris as well nice during our interview we showed grape and we're like grape what is this he goes well that's my handwriting that's uh that's that's everyone yes have you ever seen this and he i'll just like yeah i made it it was like the most amazing moment so it's a rat with no clipping leds at all so no restraint no distortion monsters at all how crazy is that so it's it's just gonna be what it is here it's like a [Music] it's just so crazy loud my volume is it's if it does clip it's all op-amp distortion so it's like real like yeah it's crazy you want to jam it yeah yeah i'm gonna we know it does a nice clean boost and i don't care about that i'm gonna take it to the max let's see what we got [Music] there might be a reason this never came out let's see that's just an op amp being destroyed [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] that's the new hit song from the no diodes that's pretty bad joke so that one never makes it right but one does make it and i won't get into that yet you already know what it is before we have that we have a uh another kind of reissue i don't give those version numbers so if it's like a deuce tone juggernaut reissue it's not i just think it is what it is we just should call it what it is i said the same thing twice so one day charlie wicks walks in he goes you know what it's been 25 years since we released the rat this day was in 2003 if you do some basic math this debunks the idea that it was 77 the math says 78 for the bud box 79 78. so it's it's kind of a help because it says 25 years of grunge so internally 2003 was the 25th anniversary what's do the math real quick is that correct 25 years yep 78 78 yeah would be the box state 2003 we're talking right even though scott burnham has said in a museum thing that he helped curate 77 but i i have to stand with the fact they put this out knowing what they're talking about and memories are hard 78 bud bucks that's why that's why i've stuck to that you know it was the 70s and yeah you know a little fuzzy maybe so there's a fun picture of dana the collector friend uh crazy rat collector he shows up at proco and charlie just gives him one so these are just 91 rat reissue boards candy i think made most of these she signed them all and there's like 25 of them on earth they gave them to like jeff beck david gilmore people that were just like it was just charlie literally walking in and going get some silver cases let's use those boards we've had in those boxes and let's thank people for 25 years of a pedal to change my company wow yeah that's awesome never seen one on the market um yeah it sounds like a rat but it's cool it's a wrap cool piece of history next up we have version seven which we did put in the pack rat it comes out of the deuce tone the deuce tone and it's called dirty rat so dirty rat remember i said that a stock rat 1 and 4 1 4 8 diodes are like the middle ground right they have the rat saturation we're used to the turbo led is less of a distortion monster so it's a little more touch since i hate that word phrase words touch sensitive amp like responsive and then if you swing to the other side equally so one in form for its leds over here if you use a germanium diode it's a one in three four a originally it's the other side it's the most distortion monster this thing's hungry it's angry yeah it's clip in the wave form it's compressing the crap out of the pedal and that's the you dirty rat and i have pedals every there it is you dirty rat you've seen these um the newer versions use a bat 41 it's the same exact spec people are gonna tell you that the germanium is better that's not true i'm not going to go there there's a prototype that i have that makes no sense it's a you dirty rat that is supposedly a first article from england none of the employees knew even grape was like i don't know yeah it looks nothing like the fuzzy rat font we're gonna call that rat rat rat fuzz font um you can buy that pack on our website no you can't but the dirty rat is that is what font is that it's like do you know i don't know does it help that is helvetica can we say a helvetic type font okay so yeah we don't know that's you dirty rap we're not going to play it because you can watch a thousand demos of that version eight is a pedal that unfortunately has the wrong name and i think us a few employees agreed with this um it's an amazing and very very different rat in the same lane as you know what was the other pedal we talked about is this very the the brat like it's it's in the land of like very different and it's called the solo and we'll declare this version eight and version eight it has a scoop and a tone control and it has a three-way slider toggle for diodes so it has some interesting asymmetrical clipping which means you like combine a one in four one four eight with an led and you get kind of one side of the waveform gets the standard clip and one side gets the open clip or vice versa like asymmetrical standard clip on one side of the waveform and then germanium on the other and you have asymmetrical clipping that makes sense yep it's a hard subject so you have hot melt and burn and it says solo so why are you going to buy this nick because you got to do your solos with it man it's a bad name it is it i mean actually i don't mean that negatively i mean we i have named stuff so bad right this is a massive disservice to how cool the circuit is yeah because what grape did this is great he put in like a back sandal bass treble where the old control was and it's like if you know anything about distortion by now if you just take a boss g7 and place it in front or after your favorite drive you can change that drive yes this tone control allows the rat to be crazy i'm not going to play it but i do have a prototype this is original this is the original one and only there's no more there's apparently one of this proto it was going to be called ratzo which is a way better name it's less like pigeonhole like it probably would have done way better and he took a stumack um guitar dual pot like you'd put in a telecaster with like an active circuit and just shoved it in there like wow so cool wired it all up so it's called the ratso again if you're just tuning in i don't know how that's possible but you would uh just look in the description there's a huge bunch of photos of all this stuff so that that is um the solo and then we're back to version four from version eight to version four so version four starts with the flat flat top led rat two which we learned is an internal hint that it's the first change you know it's an led to them yeah that means all these other classic routes are the same thing everybody's on their mind that's basically what they're saying without saying it and they have a problem so the problem is that rat two although turbos are coming out and all these things are happening yeah so many rat tubes yeah and proco is a family-owned business at this point being ran out of a big room in the old gibson factory where heritage guitars was they had leased the space they're not huge they're they're about the size of our company so it's like a big small business and they're it's just killing them like they have other things to make and so charlie i believe tells this to one of their biggest providers of parts they have a company that supplies them with wire um cable ends and jacks and that's neutrik is that how you say it i always think you trick and people yell at me it's like i've always said new trick but knowing trick just say hey i think it's neutral say however you want to say it so charlie says to them um hey like this is a problem and they go we'll just make it in china and then they do that with stringent quality controls and starting in uh that year which is 2008 we have this which is the china i the only way to identify this really is it's sloped it's made in china so it's a rat 2 version 4b and i just pin it the chinese slope like it's made in china and it has a slope and that's the best way to identify it the serial number is very modern this camera loves white doesn't it yeah but you get it yeah this is the pedal you can buy right now for 69 bucks and it's amazing if you've never had a rat go order this right now like go wherever you want to go get a rat too this sounds exactly like the old rats i know you don't want to hear it the pots are a little trash in the sense that if you start modding this you're going to have problems you have to repair them but if you just own this like nick this is your rat yeah talk it's a working man's wrestling because it works 69 rat it sounds like it should just don't pull the knobs off and fiddle with it just use it just leave it how it's supposed to be and big update the power jack on the back yeah i mean you practical it's a it's a great 69.69 so like i should keep saying 69 so that's the 4b point of clarification rat twos are being made during all the rest of yes stuff right they're all parallel yeah they're all parallel and the rat two is the only one that's being made over there so they continue to make the turbos you dirty rats they're making everything else at home nice yeah and they still make most all that in missouri they relocated and the rat 2 still made by neutrik or new tricker however you feel like saying it and then we have another reissue it's a 2010 white face i think this is funny because it feeds here's where they're at people love this pedal yeah there's some new employees who are younger who are on the forums they see it maybe they believe it's better they should know better right but they put it out it's a beautiful pedal i'm glad they did they made it for one year but really a white face reissue is an aesthetic thing right right but they did have a ton of attention to detail it has the lm 308 chip it's like the right layout they really did it well like the battery things right they put sound ink back on right right now that's a problem because if you get on reverb you'll see people listing reissues for the price of a vintage win which is funny because they're kind of the same worth there weren't many reissues made i don't even have one this is dana i can't find one that's fine and like they're kind of worth the same thing i wrote yeah i was literally just on reverb on my phone what did you see they're they're pricey yeah these are actual reissues which i think you could the way the only way i can tell is they're the the screen prints a little smaller it's like just slightly like five four perc it feels wrong it doesn't feel wrong but like if you stare at it going you'll be like something's off i think we found one in real time what's it going for 380 plus 50 shipping that is one i can tell looking at that i don't know what it is there's something a little different it feels different there's also one listed for twelve hundred dollars so message me though i don't need it i don't need that nope i don't need it well if you're missing that particular one totally fine i think you need it let's keep rolling 2014 we have the introduction of the v9 the v9 is the fat rat right here the fat rat it's in a bigger enclosure it has a lot of mods this was kind of the work of three people but maybe more putting their heads together how can we bring the rat into a big new era i mean this is just what it is like procos coming up against jhs's and earthquakers at this point it's a different era yeah pro proco is like the grandad you know and they're like right but they're working hard and this is a killer pedal this is my second suggestion if you've never played a rad it's only like 129 yeah and it has like it takes the mods that like robert keeley started with i would do them there was a monty elms mod there was there was a lot of cool mods there was a there was one called like a i don't know some russian dictator's name i can't remember the name vodka mods something like that anyway and it's like a base edition mosfet clip stock uh clipping it's just cool like it's really and it's really heavy duty well made it hasn't done well which is crazy i would i think a lot of you would love this it's a little bigger but it's not obnoxious it's just like yeah it's like it feels good it's like it feels way more sturdy than this even though this is fully metal the china slope this does have a like a is there such thing as a petal girth like a yeah oh a petal girth like a yeah pedal girl that's a shirt pedal shirt so here's the proto to that um that's not that proto it is we can't say the name on public television but this was the original idea this is being overnighted to me for photography so we'll put all that in the thing as well very cool um yeah they use the silver anniversary on printed box this is the typical proco thing grab the stuff and make the thing okay then we have what i refer to back to version four after nine this version four is a parallel nightmare to track down yeah parallel nightmare parallel nightmare new band there's all kinds of names it's the version 4c the version 4d and the version 4e they started in 2015 and they're they're kind of consecutive through several years we saw this white rat pop up this was the first one i think this is the 2015 the white rat and this red one pops up a year or two years i actually haven't gotten to i just had to choose my battles on this study there's like a year at least a year later okay and then this this was 2019 i believe because i remember showing it in one of those episodes like favorite pedals or something that looks good that's a good-looking hat it's awesome it's just it's just a china slope like that's all it is it's painted different color and so proco has this one distributor dealer their biggest market is japan like at times astronomical percentage of the rat sales all shipped to japan and this dealer had a lot of pull he'd call him up what was his name do you remember it's oh no don't worry about it it's not going to try on but it's a distributor we're not we're from missouri it's i-k-e-b-e a kebbi i don't it's not right there's no way that's right nope paul gilbert's not here to tell me what it's because he can he always helps me he's not here paul help me anyway japan only but because of the internet that's funny right most everything that buys from japan with pedal collecting uh so yeah those are the other version fours and then this is the last version it's the lorax not little rap not little how adorable the lorette it's so cute oh my gosh and you know what it's made with all surface mount parts it's two inches and it sounds perfect yep wait but it has surface mount parts oh it's too bad yeah um should we jam shoot our what chip is in that lure at josh it's the op07 do we want to go there are we that's why i asked the question what do you want to jam we need to do one more jam and then there's also we're not going to do it here but i think it's worth at some point discussing [Music] how i chose the variant section so when you look at the pack rat it's like two courses of savory rat dishes you have the original pro course which takes a while yeah right you're setting down suit and tie right wine cheeses courses and then you change gears to variant courses right you're already full it's like dessert and so we went through tons of like how did i not why did i not use the very metal by dimarzio why did i not use the gaia tone whatever this thing's full of them and i'm just gonna let that haunt you i'll show you at some point so let's do any myths yeah yeah y'all ask me a myth and i'll try my best hey josh what chips in that lower rat is it the same lm 308 that was in the originals that actually sound better no it's not let me help you with that okay young son thank you the lm 308 is the original op amp that scott vernon used and it's it's a single op amp that sucks like most pedal op amps most of your famous op-amps are really bad performing audio op-amp so the 4558 tube screamer thing it is a horrible chip but it works great in the overdrive because it's it's weakness is its strength you're creating distortion yeah yeah yeah and so the lm 308 has a thing and the the primary uh the primary way that it's talked about is a thing called slew rate and i need to make this quick so slew rate is basically how it feels when it distorts i know that's a vague but there's a thing to distortion when an op-amp's clipping where there's an attack and a release just like a compressor that's over generalizing the crap out of it and someone hates me but that that is what it's called it's a slew rate it's how fast it responds it's how sloppy it is it's how bad of a part it is and the lm 308 has a slew rate that's real bad yeah and so part of the the thing is when scott burnham made the rat the story in the legend is and i think it's true he's making this rat he's building this op-amp boost with hard clipping craig anderton's obviously an inspiration here in some way and he puts the wrong resistor in an otherwise fairly data sheet operation of this op-amp and he the resistor value is too low in the gain network and it overloads the op-amp with signal and causes the actual amplifier to clip in front of the clipping of the diodes and so there's this like really complex harmonic thing happening in the rat where you have this when you heard the uh the preamp that i played it sounded like farts right right it's the original fart pedal you add to that this clipping at the end that smooths it out and then a fat buffer that further smooths it out and you have magic one thing alone is like yeah so around 2005 it's in the article my brain's dead too they these are gone got it but there's a drop-in replacement called the op07 exact same specs and people need i'll say this if you want to watch the myths tin meth what's it called there's a lot of views it's like over a million views i think 10 paddle mounts or something five whatever five and being told five six six seven whatever it's a number numbers are hard so watch that i explain this but we need to attach a physical evidence or reason to feelings we have and the op amp was chosen yeah and i think it is a massive disservice to the design of the rat scott burnham's design which was the design of the rat is not good because of the 308 the 308 is good because scott burnham used it properly and the op07 is the exact replacement part the 308 is not why the rat sounds good i could put 15 different chips in it it'll sound the same by saying it's the 308 you are creating fake magic you are talking about stuff you don't understand most likely and you're just coming up with a reason why you like a pedal when it's probably because you like vintage you like nostalgia you like that it's bigger you like the look of it you had one when you were younger but the chip is the reason and that's the myth it's not true busted any thoughts there y'all just wanna cause you've learned a lot about this i said through i mean every time i brought it up in the interviews people are like yeah there were so many people that were just like no this is the same thing it's not different yeah i do think it like kind of does a disservice to the designer like why would you you know there again it's not rocket science and these people are smart let's do top down uh is there a way yeah yeah all right this is this is hard to do here but that's that's the lm3o is that visible it's hard to tell hold it out in front of you and and show the there we go that'll work yeah do it this way let's try this camera that's worse all right let's do the top camera so this there you go yeah that is a comparison scientific analysis on an audio precision unit one line is blue it's the 007 and the op0 and the others the lm 308 and that's the differences in them i'm sorry you said there's two lines there there's two different lines there are you saying there's two different lines there's on the paper i can't here's another knob setting another knob setting where is it because there's two of this hold on hold on wait do you guys see the two lines do you see it or not yes or no that means they're the same and that's just like and that those specs are like or will be those be available for people yeah yeah cool the other problem is even if you have two like i see people shoot them out hate it shootouts are so stupid from a scientific perspective because you're hearing pot tolerance you're hearing older caps you just can't shoot out you need the one circuit that instantly changes the one part with everything else is controlled who does that so we did that with the packer ad and that's how you get these studies you have way more difference in sound across the 20 differences in pots so i gave you a white face i have two or three more i guarantee serial numbers put them within a few months or at least a year of each other on a couple they will sound a little different but every sound is in there if you just move the stinking pot a little and stop shooting them out on youtube like some mania right right yeah okay any other myths this is nice there's two there's two more that come to mind for me you said caps tantalum caps talk to me about it so the very the very first rats use tantalum caps these are little mustard tic tac looking capacitors scott burnham used them because nasa used them and he said that's cool they're look they're like 10 cents more and scott burnham huge cred and props to him he just wanted to make a high quality product he never was concerned with price there was some headbutting there with charlie charlie was economical um and you know it's probably for the good of the business and they butted heads on that and so charlie at some point they got rid of the tantalums and scott there's i have a conversation with him which he's like yeah we switched him out and we there was no difference like he literally says it and he goes we kept getting emails and people saying the old ones sounded better and they went in again and they were like because it doesn't make it's like it's like telling a cook that i don't it's something i can't the analogy is so hard to do because it's so dumb like this is different and it's not and these because it's just tolerance in these p and scott's like these people just want to hear a difference yeah yeah it's not true the electrolytic caps don't sound any different i'm sorry okay is there another one last one who who made my pedal was it was it a man named wood cutter that might be a wood cutter is it a wood cutter it might be yeah we have a few wood cutters so wood this is a wood cutter yes so this is a this rat too yeah that's a wood cutter labeled 971 cutter so yeah there's even a pedal called woodcutter by grant great guy big ear love the pedal it's a killer rat very like a rat clone um but who is woodcutter why what's the thing you hear you're a guitar player like what are people telling you they say that the rats built by woodcutter are superior that's the myth yeah that's just this that's impossible right so let's explain why it's impossible so who is woodcutter um all right that's woodcutter's back this is to my knowledge no one's ever seen him wow i don't think so so woodcutter was a schoolteacher and he was married to the girl in the blue shirt i think her name was tish and that's candy there the production there this is sometime post 91 which line you know that's when he built stuff late 80s i believe and then 91 on and that's the vintage reissue so we know that's why it's post 91 so he's sitting there he's focused if you look closely there's a he's got a rack holding roughly 20 rat circuits he's stuffing them probably the reissues and you see a lot of petals with a sticker on the pot so all rat pedals most rat pedals i'm actually not sure why some don't but you'll usually see the pot and you'll see a name and you'll see wood cutter on a sticker and this was one reason only when you build a pedal if you go downstairs we have to do similar things you got to know what who built something wrong right it's a quality control check so wood cutter is on a ton of pedals and here's what's crazy wood cutter was a school teacher and woodcutter just worked when he could part time but candy that girl in the crimson red this shirt she said he just outbuilt everybody even at part time he just murdered everybody's production numbers he was just super focused so he's just a dude who actually was like a timber guy like he cut a lot of wood and they had cutting wood yeah his name was doug and basically this is all in the there's more about this in the article but his name was doug and he there were a lot of dogs there at least two or three and he's just put woodcutter and they're like yeah woodcutter made it wrong right but he made so many that we see more of them and at some point someone had a better sounding rat it's not they just can't remember what the last one they owned sounded like there's scientific study that shows if you have a one second lapse of audio your brain cannot contain the accuracy of how do you like once you hear the silence wow like you can't do that so people are making these judgments like man i had that rats 12 years ago my god like it's just a good sounding rack because all rats are good sounding he just made a lot of pedals and the stat the statistics of seeing a wood cutter from late 80s through the 90s is really high because he was the best builder he was amazing he he passed away in an accident uh we'll probably do something fun with this on like a full bio kind of deal but here he is up close this is him at a party that's the first ever photo portrait i guess you'll ever might be the only one you'll ever see that's awesome that is woodcutter and i think we talked about this on our flight back um it's such a disservice to like wrap this myth around a human who when we we told certain employees and they laughed and never heard the smith right i was explaining to them like people have put him on a pedestal and they're like he would laugh his head off yeah yeah he built from a parts kit what was put in front of him he did not play guitar he did not build circuits he wouldn't have known what a capacitor what capacitor to change if he wanted to just like it's a disservice to wrap a myth around a really cool dude he actually gave a lot of time to like uh like underprivileged children he's a teacher and let's like remember him for that and not remember because of some bogus guitar player myth yeah this is it this is the ultimate history of the rat yeah it's a lot of pedals yeah so um any last words from y'all i say we do one last jam yup i say we jam on the little rat yeah and i say we all use a rat on our instruments i have a fringe logo on my drums right now and i say that's how we go out you have an ability to have an actual fringe light i have an actual fringe logo i have for all the bases out there i'm using a pack rat on my base yes it works on b nothing else inch in the chain just the pack rat i'm gonna use the la setting so let's just so people can hear it do your bass tone then you do a drum tone and then i'll be ready that was dry and here's with the la setting on the wrap [Music] it can be what give us so you have an effect mike you have a mic i have a mic right here you can actually hear me talk to it for a minute yeah yo [Music] so you have one microphone a rat and it's just like a mono effect do that one more time yeah [Music] oh fire i feel so much pressure i also have a little noise gate on too and you're using the cusack thingamajig cusack petal cracker yeah it lets you put petals in at line level yep all right you guys ready let me get it let me get a tone dialed in bro hold on hold on this thing sounds so good to be so small [Music] [Applause] thank you surface mount [Music] let's do something in d i'll bullcrap around you ready what's that yeah [Music] [Applause] so [Music] so [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Music] we made it through that with like some some synchronization this has been great um that's a wrap awesome that's a wrap if you enjoyed this episode and you hung around thank you this is a this is a deep hall remember the article also there's all kinds of pack rap videos if you're interested in that if you know something about rat history we have a an email address in that article we're very we want to learn as well so there's all kinds of stuff that are mysteries if we have anything wrong and you can prove it we'll change it on the website and credit you i think it's pedal history at justpedals.com you can email in only do that like don't don't tell me about your dog's hair or something don't want to hear that but if you like this hit like subscribe to the channel click the bell icon and that'll give you notifications of every future episode in the comments below let us know what you thought about this this is crazy let us know when you first played a rat when you first saw a rat when you first played a rat and if you like the rat i think that's three really good points there we're done we dove deep the first ever official really well done rat history yeah bye-bye we're patting ourselves on the back we are we're out [Music] you

Channel: JHS Pedals

Views: 112,444

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

Id: QfwpClT_26E

Length: 99min 34sec (5974 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021