JHS 3 Series Livestream with Josh Scott and Sweetwater

[Music] what's up everybody glad to be here thanks for coming over to sweetwater's channel this is a special super duper awesome uh rendition of the jhs show live sponsored by sweetwater i think sponsored by they're not really sponsoring anything it's a takeover it's more of a it's a a polite takeover of their channel in regards to the three series let's switch over to this pedal board to show everybody what we're going gonna get into these are the seven brand new 99 jhs pedals um i'm gonna go through each one circuit secrets about each one i'm gonna tell you the topologies stories about them yeah so this is a hangout i think i want to prepare everybody um there's a lot of good demos there's a lot of excellent things out there to learn about how these sound we're gonna do some live jams here but the purpose of this live is for me to talk as the jhs person uh about where these came from what they are and to answer questions that we've been fielding through forums and our local community and the gear community at large yeah so it's a little bit different it's a it's a deep dive it's like a living room hangout i have some guests with me that are usuals on the jhs show but if you're not familiar with our show i'd like to introduce them to you first we have addison he's over here on the base um you're also what's up kind of moderate i don't know you're doing stuff a little bit of a little bit of both you're doing things there's me and then there's nick a lot of you're familiar with nick nick is over on the drums and uh yeah it's it's a hangout here in the studio we have pedalbot 5000 running the camera switcher uh i think that's that's where we're at you guys feel good about this feel good feels super good yeah uh i want to start by talking about how awesome sweetwater is um years and years ago um i don't know how many years it feels like decades ago it was not decades but i took a pedalboard to sweetwater showed up and demoed and they took us on as a company and have been a massive part of jhs growing and becoming a better company so i'm a huge sweetwater fan i think it was 2014 and uh it's a fantastic company i go all the time i actually leave on sunday to go up uh to do some stuff um this year has been funky because 2020 is funky not a lot of traveling but i like sweetwater how about you guys anything addison you got us what about a sweet story let's let's share sweet stories sweet story my one of my favorite things about sweetwater uh other than the cool gear that they send me when i buy it is cool gear is nice cool gear is great uh is the little packets of candy but not every piece of candy in the little packets my favorite is the tiny little fireballs that come in the packets you're a fireball person i am and one of the other employees here in the building was making fun of me for that yesterday and then we had to talk about it and it's all good now we're on the same page but i love the uh i don't i don't get those anywhere else so thank you sweetwater for that wonderful uh fiery cinnamony treat that you send me with gear that's a pretty sweet story isn't it yeah nick do you have a sweet story um you know i just want to give a shout out to brendan for just the countless hours i can't remember because i blocked it out of my memory and uh but brandon he was my he was my uh he was my gandalf through that dark cavern of pro tools yeah brynden is he's a sales guy and brendan is uh he goes way back with us and i think when you have a sales guy like sweetwater sells people in general but but brendan's special he's been my sales guy for almost a decade probably 10 years too yeah he's like a family member would you would you invite brendan over to dinner absolutely okay absolutely i haven't i haven't met yeah brendan brennan i haven't met him yeah well he's a he's a treasure he's a national treasure thank you sweetwater that was a sweet story i'm sure that you all have sweet stories as well let's get to the bottom line here why people are here um it's all about these pedals we're really excited we dropped these on friday really really fun thing to do a 99 pedal line made by us here in kansas city fully assembled fully engineered in the u.s everything 99 bucks and uh i'm really really proud of them i think that all of us in this room are end in this building it's been really exciting so circuit secrets let's get into that the lead engineer designer on these circuits is a jhs employee his name is josh he's another josh we have three josh's three three um he knocked these out of the park they were it's you know i'm involved in every design so i started where these would start um what they would be based around within modifications early boarding stuff like that and then he took it and ran with it all the dsp code is original written by him stuff like that we'll get into more detail there but huge props to josh a lot of you saw our employee video and it's always just fun to talk about who actually does stuff because believe it or not i don't do everything people think i do everything you don't i don't do everything there's 35ish employees here we're actually hiring right now we're hiring a builder if you want to email in probably shouldn't have said that over here that's fine there'll be a lot of emails sorry bell um you're going to get a lot of emails but yeah let's start with circuit secrets and let's start with the overdrive so looking down at the board here is the overdrive um volume body drive and again toggle now this is essentially a very familiar layout body is a little strange um and i'll i'll show you why i actually have schematics here because i'm insane so here's the schematic to this pedal you can screenshot it make it yourself we do not care um this is a soft clipping overdrive that is in the family of soft clippers now it is not a direct clone of any vintage thing you are exactly familiar with so a lot of people will be like oh it's a tube screamer it's a blues breaker no it's not um it is quite quite different but it shares characteristics um with things like the morning glory because it's a soft clipper or a tube screamer or a timmy any of these pedals share similar feel when you play them meaning they are a softer clipping they aren't abrasive or really harsh they're smooth and symmetrical now um they've told me i have to stay on the mic here i'm trying to do a good job now the things that i think people can get in their head about this is a ts10 um a ts-10 is a tube screamer and it has a little bit different low frequency response and things so it falls into that category in my opinion if you're gonna pick a tube screamer let's say ts10 but the real uh origin of this pedal is the hao rumble the ods this is a pedal that goes for upwards of 300 bucks and i am really good friends with the designer of all these pedals it's a really exciting circuit he's become a really good friend uh he's a japanese guy is a brilliant engineer has had his hand in a lot of things and um that was kind of fun to be able to do that like use a friend circuit in that way and bring something back to life so i'm thinking i got a question about it yeah yeah is he still building that pedal or he's not yeah he has he that okay that line uh is no more got it um he has worked for all kinds of companies the most current thing he's involved in is the japanese manufacturing of some limited run diatom stuff nice okay yeah but he's a guitar designer he just invented a drumstick wow crazy he's brilliant he worked for takamine he worked for all kinds of really important companies so yeah nice that's the secret's out of the bag it feels good you know what i'm saying the rumble the rumble um yeah the ods stands for overdraft supreme so it's a dumble-ish did i just say [Music] okay let's uh let's talk about the body the body is the most confusing aspect of this pedal i think because when you pick it up it's not a tone control i'm going to turn the pedal on here and i'll put the gain up a little high i'm going to roll the body and you're going to see yeah it's darker like a tone control would be off so i'm gonna roll it up halfway but it became clearer while changing the distortion as well then if i brighten it all the way up see there's like that's not a typical tone thing it's it's actually changing the brightness the structure of the eq of the end of the pedal alongside the structure of the gain of how it clips [Music] so is it changing like the value of like a capacitor or something yeah it is essentially if we look back at this schematic um the tone control is in between the two triangles the two op amps it is a pass filter in a very strange position that probably does no good for you can't see the screen but it's fine yeah it is um it's just not a typical tone control that's what i need to say cool it's weird um and i love that because everyone wanted this so badly just to be a 99 tube screamer but no it's it's a really original soft clipping circuit that um yeah a friend made so that's rad yeah very cool let's do a jam yeah now as i mentioned earlier this is a living room setting you know this is a this is a deep cut if you're wanting quick cohesive uh discussion this is more like joe rogan of pedal demos today yeah yeah yeah so i don't know what we're doing we haven't practiced but i think we start in uh in g hey yeah let's do let's do some jam here i'm gonna turn on effects and play with them i'm going to have some verb on let's get a verb setting i will go through each petal so don't worry about that if i use an effect and i haven't talked about it i will get to it let's do something uh let's try this i'll play a progression so [Music] let's hang right there yeah [Music] [Music] [Music] i'm gonna add some delay [Music] so [Music] bring it back down [Music] one two three four man we're uh we're available for uh parties things like that what's our rate what did we change it to nick was it uh i think we're dealing in trades really trades cryptocurrencies cryptocurrencies sweaters uh yeah yeah pretty solid so fancy yeah the toggle switch is switching between two different types of clipping diodes so in one position it's led one position is a silicon diode yeah it's a little bit different gain structures uh and it is always a symmetrical clipping and that's important to some people some of you wanted to know that can you define symmetrical versus asymmetrical yeah so uh i should have preloaded something but i didn't it's fine so picture a waveform uh like if you've ever recorded in garageband or logic or pro tools and you see the waveform and there's always a line in the middle okay so symmetrical means it's clipping equally the top and bottom of the waveform okay asymmetrical means maybe just one one side's being oh it's asymmetrical which tends to sound in a lot of ways more like an uh asymmetrical clippings really good for gnarlier overdrives that to me feel like an amp is being really pushed and getting crazy like a tweed or something and then this is more of a predictable safe soft clipper where it's even crisp you think of symmetrical drives usually as leave them on all the time a morning glory symmetric what's the like dod 250 it's symmetrical but it's a hard clipper oh yeah see i'm learning so much yeah that's a that would be more what our distortion is okay let's remember that all right okay yeah so any you guys have any questions here like uh what are some thoughts on or do we have any live questions about the overdrive no live questions about the overdrive because this is a living room that's where we're hanging out yeah i said y'all ask questions so ask plenty of questions for us over the next hour i have a pin yep i have a piece of paper i'm doing stuff there's like we're working look at this yeah no questions that's fine nothing right now nothing specific to overdrive i love this pedal i really like it i tell you what because it is overdrive let's uh that was a lighter gain offering that was yeah that was a higher gain yeah because we can do anything we can do whatever we want sweetwater gave us a stream key and we can use it up to 10 hours 10 hour stream man yeah has that been done is that the math is that the i don't know the legal limit of stream yeah okay all right so i'm going to crank the drive what do we want to do here nick what kind of uh i mean produce this song i'm thinking [Music] like driving a truck on the freeway through the middle of the desert and you know you're watching the sunset what's the tempo give me some hat beat there i mean this is actually how we do this on our show you just don't see this part give me a key josh hey okay all right [Music] there we go that's core all right back to that [Music] i'm gonna go half time half time good [Music] so again if you have a birthday party bar mitzvah are we doing weddings we're doing some weddings limited capacity weddings um elopements got it we specialize in elopements that song was actually called we're ready on moments notice hey uh also if anyone has uh names for these tunes feel free to drop them in the comments because yeah well how do we feel about a name for that one i think that was like you know that was i don't know i don't know what about um oasis hey oasis nightmare oasis nightmare but not like the band oasis see that's the first thing my my uh brain went to that's true you can't throw me for that hey there you go [Music] sorry josh i got a couple questions yeah unless we want to name this nick do you got any ideas we can name it after this okay we'll name it and this is remember okay i'm gonna say it say it we're hanging we're hanging there's no there's no place to be right then here yeah this is the place to be people are joining by the minute this will be up forever forever the shelf life is unlimited here so we're talking to people in the future yeah this stream is like a good can of beans all right questions oh my goodness um some person named austin edmund wants to know who your favorite employee at jhs is i know austin sort of i think austin i think i know you i think we've met or you've just been a fan and i see your name all the time and i subliminally think i know you because that happens over social media um either way thanks for the question uh my favorite employee at jhs it's me wow i love all my employees equally um they are all very special and unique people they're all all stars yeah i can't pick i can't pick what about someone by the name of austin that works for jh yes i don't know i don't know no is that everyone i don't know i feel like i know austin but i'm not sure that's fair okay we can move on to the next question if you're uncomfortable talking about your favorite spot we all know it's me anyways uh i will say one of my favorite employees you know yes it's this guy okay he's his name you know it's it's it's a city in texas oh got it gotta go but uh i'm not real sure yeah anyway i love tyler as well he's great um brian bernie shout out to you he asks differences or similarities uh with this pedal in the morning glory with the overdrive and the morning glory they this is the other petal everyone wants this to be everyone wants it to be a 99 morning glory it is not but it has some similar low gain flavor nice you can leave this pedal on it's definitely an enhancing style of overdrive when you have the drive down low so the characteristics are shared in the fact that if i've made a and i do this a lot on the show if i made a bucket and said these types of overdrives well this would be low gain soft clippers morning glory timmy the 3 series overdrive the barber direct drive um yeah that's what i would i would say it is in the family but it it's not a morning glory you might like it more hey believe it or not not everybody likes the morning glory what i know they're wrong but it's true yeah it's my favorite circle i think that is an interesting point i think there is an element of like the morning glory has been around so long that like maybe maybe you might like this more that's a possibility i've wanted to do a mini morning glory maybe i don't like mini pedals i just have to throw that out there i have size 14 shoes so i'm really glad that these weren't mini i like the smaller enclosure than our normal line of stuff but the fact that they're not the mini thing yeah i like that i like that we have opinions here yes and they're all different and we get along yeah this is beautiful it's lovely we want to move on to that i think we should move on to the next petal all right let's uh pedalboard shot here we're gonna go over here there's no order to this it bothers me a little uh from my script now the order is beautiful addison built this board uh but we're gonna jump over here to the fuzz the fuzz is really fun and i'm really proud of how this turned out so volume bias fuzz and a fat toggle right there now it is a two transistor mid 1960s topology so i have some examples here of the inspiration for this now in 1965 in a vox jennings catalog from charring crossroad in london we see the distortion booster v816 which 816 is our area code coincidence i think now that that's kansas city area code so this was first then in the fall of 66 summer fall there's an argument there not going to get into that we see the tone bender mark 1.5 this was an unknown version of the tone bender mainly because everyone just thought it was a mark ii as in a different enclosure than the normal sharper cheese wedge gold one and a guy named dennis johansson in the 90s a collector with a sickness equal to minor greater opened it up and discovered there's only two transistors in this and a tone bender should have three and this was forever called the tome bender 1.5 so it's this strange version this is an og really hard to find this um this was made for a couple months in 66 and then down the street ivor arbiter and his wonderful catalog company was missing out on the fuzz game and he wanted to get into the fuzz game because the fuzz game was strong he saw a microphone stand and put that exact circuit into the fuzz face and a few weeks after he does such jimi hendrix arrives in london on a plane picks this up that's where we are and that's what the three series fuzz is that was a little too much history for this but it felt good felt good that was good history for me yeah talk about it in your in the jhs show episode yeah you say uh-oh that the bias is controlling the q2 transistor which reminded me of a video where you mod a fuzz face yes and you add a pot to the transistor yes am i wrong in thinking that that is what this pedal is doing it's exactly what it's doing it's one of my favorite fuzz face mods so that mod that i taught people how to do on the show is incorporated into this pedal so you you like a couple of the mods really foreshadowed this pedal it was a a prophetic pedal moment that spoke through time and space petal profit that that would be a funny shirt um yeah i think this to me uh obviously we released the legends of fuzz and there's a killer fuzz in that line um it is very authentic to a 70s silicon so it's its purpose is to straight up clone uh a 70s this is a 68 but like 7273 that i have in here we cloned it and that is the legends effects now this is like this is josh's favorite fuzz things in a pedal for 90 dollars so that's what's going on here so to me as much as i love fuzz face this will actually go on one of my newer boards like it's the fuzz face i like and i've hacked in the fuzz faces for years and then the other josh um he he did some cool things too so it's like this beautiful modified to death yes face that fits 20 20. yeah no it's great the range of that bias knob is really really fun yeah so look back here at the board the bias control is the actual voltage that comes in is 9 volts and then the transistors if we pull the schematic which i conveniently have here it's amazing um can i screenshot that schematic right now yeah you can build this pedal if you want we don't care so yeah unheard of craziness madness you see q1 and q2 at the center of your screen q2 has voltage coming in from your power supply so in my case a pedal power 2 it's coming down you see a bias control essentially the nine volts passes through the bias pot and the bias pot drains or takes away or alters the amount of voltage getting to the collector of q2 and that acts as a beautiful control that ends up being a noise gate that's causing it is that a very similar thing to like when a battery dies in a pedal is that it's close it's close to do that you need to actually put the pot right where it comes in okay and that does both transistors that gets even crazier okay that turns into like a mirrored spook house wow sonic spook house sonic spook house that's the name of the gym we're gonna do hey yeah so we've had some questions i'm gonna go through the burning things that i know people want to know because you're inquisitive your minds are inquisitive a lot of you people are smart and i'm gonna talk to you like you're smart um there's a bunch of questions on the chat about it too yeah that's great let's see what you know let's see what i cover here because this this pedal is shockingly selling well like fuzz is always who knows and there's a a lot of people are really loving that we did this with the mods and it's updated for 2020 kind of thing so we're not using germanium you do not want to use germanium devices in products like this i mean our first batch of these it's over ten thousand pedals shipped immediately before you knew they existed we built that many their cell we've already got reorder so you can't do that with geranium devices so what you do is you have to first find the balance which we've done really well over the years how important is the germanium device well you can take a crap circuit and insert germanium in the circuit it's still a bad circuit but what if you take a good circuit design it tweak the fuzz face for silicon you can make it sound just like germanium and so that's what we've done here we've gotten this pedal into the place where silicon is really usable and really great if you build the circuit around it you can't just pop in germanium and use that buzzword for a fix-all it's cause doesn't it because germaniums are are fickle they're like very fickle like i used to measure germanium transistors when i was on the line and it would be like you'd measure it and then if you touched it for too long it would change the value of it and then we couldn't use it yeah absolutely and you can't manufacture that way for 99 if you want germanium yes germaniums have a thing they're not better but they have a thing and i love them so go buy an analog man pedal you know buy a buy something else that that they're going to cost a lot more you're going to pay 3 400 bucks for a good one but this is uh bc 848 a's they're a lower gain transistor we use the same ones in the legends of fuzz so this is 99 dollar pedal is the same transistor in the legend of fuzz so that's cool um i want to just say the legends of fuzz has a niche to it it is very cool the enclosure the mod control is unique it's a different pedal than this but i'm going to be completely honest i actually make more money on the legends of fuzz but this is the better fuzz face i don't mind saying what from a sonic point of a circuit and options i would rather have this because of the bias control and the fat toggle the way it is but the legends has this other thing that it's tweaked a certain way and if you love fuzz faces you probably have 20 and you want them all but i just want to say if you're out there wondering i actually prefer the 99 dollar one over the more expensive one we make and i don't make as much money on this i'm just being real i want to be honest about how good this really is the fuzz control is actually the input level so the traditional fuzz control of the fuzz face is turned all the way up and removed in the circuit you don't have the traditional fuzz control this buzz control is the input meaning it's essentially the knob of your guitar when i turn the fuzz control on the 3 series i'm turning the knob of my guitar down that's how that actually works um that's how it cleans up bias at q2 the fat switch uh changes a decoupling capacitor on the input just adds more low end it just changes the cap a little bit fantastic for bass like the fat switch on bass it already is fine fuzz faces have been used on bass since cream like hendrix nol redding used um yeah like it's insane how good they are already but the fat switch is really really nice and one other thing about this fuzz that's really special is it actually has a third transistor that isn't adding anything to the fuzz so it's a two transistor classic fuzz but at the very end you see a q3 q3 is simply a transistor clean boost that replaces the original fuzz face volume pot and makes this pedal stinking loud if you want it to be because fuzz faces are always too quiet so you can hit the front of an amp with it yeah it's really hard good this is like awesome it's super deep deep cut here let's first face questions should we jam or jam what's the name of this jam nick oh i forget it was a haunting something it was uh spooky spooky something spooky i can't remember we'll let we'll let the people decide what the name of this jam is gonna be perfect put it in the put it in the chat let's start a riff that's gated and then in the middle of the riff i'll come over and i will roll it back into more more normal [Music] so it's going to have to be like rage against the machine meets black keys meets uh duran duran okay [Music] let's see [Music] all right all right uh let's do e yep um let's go slow let's go slow yeah let's [Music] see [Music] [Music] so [Music] foreign [Music] hmm [Music] um [Music] that was yeah that had some swank to it yeah i feel like foxy needs to be in the name of that yeah or well i was thinking um zombies hey so that's z-o-m hyphen b-e-e-s sorry b-e-e-z there it is there's zombies yeah because oh man [Music] that's all i know of that i want to leave it there to make it sound like i'm a good guitar player questions questions questions all right um i'm going to rapid fire through these hopefully we won't we won't hit a couple of them uh this one we've got all day oh we have all day a few people want to know how it cleans up with the guitar's volume knob yeah josh i'll show you come on now remember the actual fuzz knob is an alternate guitar knob that's how the fuzz structure works yeah so here we go i'll turn the bias to the full voltage so a traditional fest face sound let's do that first so now if i turn the control back it is the volume knob of my guitar but let's let's use the vodka guitar that's what they're asking that's what they're asking [Music] let's do the strap pick up here which should be nice [Music] cleans up pretty nice [Music] yeah nice cool like it okay uh stephen manley uh which steven actually uh was the previous owner of that fancy fuzz face that you now have that brought it to us here in town so shout out to you stephen thank you um he asks if there's a proper setting on the bias knob that's like actually properly biased so to speak yeah so properly biased would be 4.5 volts for all of you so nerd nerd um parts tolerance is tough there because every pot is different um i can usually just hear it [Music] it's going to be really close to all the way left nice okay yeah awesome what you're doing is you're [Music] you're severely unbiasing it as you go from off got it that's how you got that's the best way to think about it nice um okay cool uh does the fuzz pedal need to go first in the chain yes the age-old question yes okay it is it is still a fuss face very cool there's no fancy modern surroundings it needed to be left alone so it can breathe and live so it can do itself and have a life worth living very cool i put it at the end of my chain the other day i put it after my delay how was it i put it after my delay with the bias all the way up so that the repeats were like crunchy that's cool it was actually kind of sick yeah so so what you're saying is what it can do put it in front but try to put it in the front but yeah just try stuff nick is always willing to break the system i'm going to catch a freaking rebel um josh is there a fuzz pedal that you wish you owned but you don't this is a more of a general question i mean i have i have everything i want i think what i don't have is variation no i mean he asked i mean it's not what i admit i just admit like there's almost four thousand pedals in the room i don't have an original mark one tone bender oh okay and the wooden the wooden prototype mender is unattainable got it like you know that's that's a hundred thousand dollar pedal the mark one is a ten thousand dollar pedal and i've just i've seen one in my life and the guy wouldn't sell it and i don't know that i'd ever that that gets into the question your life choices like do you really wanna own no like a pedal because i can build it but it's a historical thing for me yeah i mean i don't really like pedals as much as some people think i do i love the history story in the story yeah that's fair i probably offended a bunch of people there whatever that's okay hey is there any overlap between the muffaletta and this fuzz no nothing at all nice buffaletta's a four stage 1969 fuzz big muff style very very different yeah fantastic cool um we might be able to move on to the next yep let's move on moving on is everybody having a good time everybody having a good time i'm having a good time having a good time such a good time how about you audience let us know in the comments good time pedalbot 5000 give a thumbs up compression compressor here we go volume attack sustain bright this is very very much based around a pedal i did not pull off the wall would you like me to get it for you it's not necessary yes it is yes it's the ross gray compressor okay there was tons of chatter about i'll go get it i'll be right back it's it's over there in the i call it the z section of the room okay i'll be right back okay uh nick will be right back everyone in case you're worried so based around that means it is a dynacop typology now this is a classic uh you know it's an ota compressor so the original chipset was the ca 8030 those are out of production but there's equally solid parts and replacements for that look at this the one without recess knobs yeah we don't want to yeah okay and then you have the ross compressor here which came after this this is a modified version of this and then we see ibanez cloning it as well things like the cp-10 the cp9 that looks like a tube screamer except it's red it's a it's a ross dynacomp as well so it's the most famous compressor topology and the reason we chose this is because we have never used this topology in our line ever the topology of a jhs compressor has always been the orange squeezer the pulp and peel is a modified orange squeezer and the whitey tidy is a modified pulp and peel they are both fet detector circuits nerd talk these are ota so this is a very different approach there uh that would take a whole class to explain exactly how that works but here's the schematic this is fun just dropping schematics on here so i can build this one too yeah you can build it okay do whatever you want um yeah it uses the lm 3700 it's a good drop in replacement for the ca 80 30. the toggle switch if you notice kinda right right justified off the center line of the screen you'll see uh it says treble you're choosing between two different capacitors it's the c7 position 100 nf or 100 pf and what that switch does is it changes the high end response to the pedal and then if you look at the end of the circuit kinda at the end maybe in the rule of thirds right side there the attack control uh is an addition that people have done you know this isn't ground breaking engineering here this is like classic mods to a raw circuit um yeah it's a good compressor yeah it's solid it's uh it is it is like solid hard to find a bad sound something we never had in our line and i think it complements a lot of players better than my favorite compressor which is the orange squeezer topology i love the dynacomp but it tends to lean itself to a more dramatic compression where i like subtle compression and i think this is a really good fit for a lot of people that haven't enjoyed the pulp and peel that was that's why we did it that was a big question like over on the gear page and um yeah with some patrons as well they said how do i give a big shout out to the gear page i've been living on that thread it's been fantastic we're up to like 22 pages yep civil super civil people are hugging each other wow on the gear pace gifts are being given that's love there are people smiling i i mean i hear there's a picnic happening next summer yep uh like get together correct yeah i mean just for the three series awesome questions i've tried to go through and filled those and i just want to give a big shout out to the very cool gear page vibes going on right now super good it's great yeah super good sorry i interrupted you back yeah it's fine that's i'm i'm just as excited about the gear page of you you text me the other night i did you said have you seen this i was excited they're excited i love the gear they love gear they do that's what it's all about so the question was you know why did this one come about to be with the whitey titan pulping peel but your answer is because it's so different yeah there are basically it's there are two types of pedal compressors i mean there are a few fringe side ones but the mass market historically and currently you're getting an orange squeezer or you're getting a dynacomp ross that is i mean the percentage doesn't lie if you go google if you go to sweetwater right now type in compressors you're gonna see that people modify one or the other there are some exceptions there's some exceptionally original things out now but as a whole we didn't have that second offering and i think that this is a really nice service to people who love that style i think country players enjoy this more uh more intricate playing enjoys this more um i you know the orange squeezer to me is more of a leave it on forget it set it walk away thing there are exceptions you know steely dan records with the orange tweezer intricate work or mark noffler using it on you know crazy intricate finger-picking things but generally that's kind of how i've always seen them in my mind and this is why we did that it's awesome where's the boss cs2 fit into the orange squeezer and the ross kind of thing it it is freakishly similar to both in a few ways okay that would be another that's a good question yeah maybe i should do an episode on breaking down compressor topologies because that would be there's some really fun like you look at the slide rig and stuff and those pedals there's some origin effects have done cool things yeah should we jam is there another question um let's see here uh nope not right now let's jam now nick talk about our issue with compression jams well come in in the in the many years that we've tried to make content almost 10 years of demoing compressors compressors are always the most difficult because it's a a effect that is can be used as an effect or can also be used just as a very subtle dynamic thing and trying to explain that in demo it can be extremely boring so either we end up doing like country a lot of times like chicken picking country but and let's be honest you and i are these would we're not great country players i mean yeah i mean you got a solid chicken beat we can do it you know and i can yeah but it gets old so sorry uh uh but yeah i will say though that th this compressor is that to me takes your your your boring dumb dry crusty old clean tone and makes it shiny and it takes your tatino's 99-cent pizza and turns it into it turns it into digiorno sure turns it into a slightly better frozen pizza but yeah it's great i think like even for like the tame impala kind of stuff which is like my kind of my kind of stuff some of that clean guitar is not that overdriven and putting a compressor on with the bright switch up with like some modulation after it you know okay that's the ticket maybe some uh daf punkish yeah vibes should we do that hey let's see do you want me to let me set up i mean let's hear the compression compressor i have consistently said compressor for about a year we've had some hard work to say so is the jhs show it's very hard to say there you go that is let's see i might kick the chorus on later okay but do i mean you started you start a beat okay kind of in that mode of jingle jingle a minor pentatonic funky soul jazz rock alternative space jams okay okay i'll do i'll do like a disco e thing okay [Music] do [Music] [Music] yeah it's just super squishy it's like really squishy so i have it maxed out here let's take the bright off on back off let's put some overdrive on it a little bit of delay [Music] so [Music] one two three four [Music] um yeah we've just added family reunions to our event uh bookings there's a tab at the top of no screen ever where you can book us our prices are going up as the viewership probably dwindles um you are correct yeah any compression compression questions any compressor questions okay uh let's see here how is this compressor from a noise standpoint i know all comps you know inherently make some noise but i found other raw style uh pedals to be worse previously thanks yeah solid question every compressor the point of a compressor is to take quiet things and loud things and smoosh them into a level playing field if your rig is noisy single coils bad power supply is the biggest problem like most everyone watching if you've had noisy compressors you need a better power supply one spots and things don't cut it a lot of so-called isolated support supplies that you buy on amazon and all these places they're not good um so you're actually have a noise floor that's being compressed up to the level of your guitar and that's really gnarly so on a level of how quiet this as this is as quiet as any other dynacomp ross out there high quality parts pcbs engineered in a really great way uh yeah it's as quiet as it gets for that which is really quiet i think generally over the years when people ask those questions it's eighty percent of the time a bad power supply causing hum in another pedal or something and it's being compressed upward and yeah great question yep very good that was it for uh compressor for now anyways okay cool how you feel nick you feel good about all this i feel good all right we're we're getting into some territory here towards the uh last of our non-digital hey this is the these have all been fully analog so far let's talk about the distortion pedal so the distortion right here volume filter is a big hint it was put on there on purpose for people who love a certain pedal um and distort and then you have a gain toggle so here you go it is in fact it it's a really solid amazing round circuit so we had the all-american years ago people have hounded us to death i still have mine you do it's a it's a faithful user yeah it's a prototype it's like number three prototype i don't know how i got that there's a link at the top of no page ever where you can message nick and make offers on his prototype all-american i'm not taking less than five thousand yeah i wouldn't go below 30. i think you're selling yourself short you got to see yourself in the future to understand that you now whoa okay that is some deep like tony robbins level so right here this is a classic 1985 rat white face rat so that's what we have going on there here's the schematic it's honestly really straight up classic rat it has some modifications but there's nothing really dramatic because the rat is fantastic so a 99 dollar basically this is a 99 all-american wow what are the mods the mods uh it gets into how it clips it gets into very small things that a lot of people won't notice it's just how it feels on the edges and how it always sounds good were these things that you decided to mod because like you always wish the rat would do it or were you just having some more options yeah it's really more options i actually love everything about the rat totally the rattus everyone should own the stock rat even the newer one like it's they're great pedals yeah you know and there's just so much mojo over these vintage ones and all these opinions and then we did the all-american with our takes you know the game toggle and all that and this is simply like hey here's the all-american for 99 bucks okay is it is it similar in the in the sense that like you know on the uh the fuzz there's like sort of like the classic correctly biased fuzz face is there like what what controls on the distortion are changing the wrap yes quality the gain toggle is a huge piece of it okay yeah well and then the other flavors i would say this if you if you're a fan of like this circuit this is another hard clipper [Music] hard clipping there's an episode called history of 1970s distortion go watch that because it's really informative about hard clipping in this subject it came about in the 70s 1974 75 mxr releases this dod releases the dod 250 preamp overdrive exact same circuit and then the ds1 comes along uh in 78 late 70s hard clipper as well so it's the flavor of 70s distortion okay which freakishly is still the flavor of tons of distortion we love like the rat the rat has lived through so many genres it was the pedal of grunge but it was also the pedal of the 70s it's the pedal of like right now there's like huge alternate like coldplay's first records are rats got it it's a very across the board thing so it's like if the rat is a vanilla ice cream yeah this is vanilla are you ready oh the jhs3 series is like vanilla ice cream with some cookie crumbles on it you wouldn't say that it's not vanilla ice cream anymore nick dropping bombs that's good that's solid solid analogy just some just the kind of things i think about it's beautiful um i have a question yeah where where does this fit in terms of like would you consider this close to as good as a wood cutter rat josh uh yeah absolutely cool that's another episode cool i just i was just curious that's woodcutter is a certain builder that worked at proco and supposedly the pedals he built are better than everyone else's i won't go on my soapbox about that right now drama there's a lot of juicy drama that will it one day be covered in full length hallelujah yeah come on uh we use the op07 operational amplifier because the lm308 is discontinued and this op-amp we use sounds fantastic it's lower noise has the same slewy characteristics louis is a word i would use the way that it sluggishly distorts is a characteristic of how the rat works slew rate is the operational is that a technical term it is the technical term for how the operational amplifier okay distorts the speed at which it clips is a slew rate oh yeah you're being serious yeah that's a goofy word that is very slew rate s-l-e-w cool i love that y'all you know me well enough you're not like well yeah cause i'm like this sound this could be a josh joke or it's not it could be real so back here to the board uh down is a very stock type of rat clipping one and four one four eight silicon diodes when you go up you have crunchy led clipping so the voltage it takes to clip has to be a little more and you could say that up is more touch sensitive meaning if i slam down into the strings it will clip the top pretty hard but if i'm playing softly it may not clip much so you have that dynamic of a cranked ant backing off playing quieter doesn't the the is it the twin 12 that does 2012 has a lot of that feeling yeah very different circuit difference it's very touch sensitive yeah that's cool i like that we got any uh distortion questions no uh distortion specific questions but just a time check for you we're at about 65 minutes i love it rolling we have maybe 20 30 left okay we'll fly through the next part the next part's a breeze yes they told us 10 hours well yeah now we're you know it's questionable now you want to jam let's jam let's do what's the name of this song asin oh man uh come back to me huh come back to me all right i don't know no that's the name of the song come back that's what i meant let's see oh you meant like ask me later no i meant come back okay let's do uh let's see [Music] come back to me [Music] so [Music] so [Music] hmm [Music] so [Music] one two three four come back to me that was full of longing so good a little bit of hope but not too much hope not too much hope every good song has a little bit of hope but if you go above too much hope it's cheesy way too cheesy all right let's move on to the digital petals the reverb delay in chorus all up top um are based around the fv1 spin chipset created by the brilliant keith barr who was the founder of mxr he went on to make alyssus um such famous units as the midi verb such and this is a massively popular digital chipset used by tons of our friends robert keeley is the master of it jamie stillman earthquaker they were the first to like use the crap out of this they've done such a good job with this chipset and uh every single one of these three pedals um uses the same exact pcb and that was one of the cost savings things here then we'd load in a different original code into each one and that's very good that's part of how those happen as well yeah so yeah the little details here that i know people want to know these are full signal path converted so there's a d to a converter your dry your dry signal and affected signal or totally converted that's how the chipset works the dry wet mixes take place inside of the processor um like i said using the same exact pcbs and then loading in the according firmware makes it affordable you see this is you see it on a lot of units but like particularly line 699 they drop the do4 mm4 fm4 it's all the same circuit boards very similar process of how we thought through these digitals um we were gonna do a hidden easter egg in these that did not work out so i'm telling you about an easter egg that didn't exist or doesn't exist but could have existed just so you can know about it like if you'd put the knobs in a certain place a setting would have come out of nowhere that was not available kind of like a hidden code in nba jam where you turn into bill clinton it would have been something like that but it didn't work out wouldn't that have been fun it would actually have been it would have been really fun well we can't get everything we want yeah that's fine uh 800 uh milliseconds max from 80 milliseconds uh now the inspirational circuits to me for a good digital delay the filtering the sound of this and josh knocked it out of the park not me there's three josh's um the d7 which is now sacred um this thing sounds like a million echoes of future past glory wow yeah my favorite digital delay ever made the ibanez ddl um yeah early digital's the theme here this is made in 2020 but it's thrown back to early digital and uh the echo machine go look this up on reverb and then you know be very unhappy about how expensive they've gotten this thing's like 350 bucks now made out of plastic that's insane not that there's anything wrong with that but that's crazy there is something wrong with that it should never cost that much but yeah the delay the delays based around that kind of sound uh the analog mode if we look at the board the type uh we have analog when the switch is down here and that's based around the filtering and the feel of a deluxe memory man with tap tempo the eleven hundred addison didn't know that and he's really oh man you just made my ears perfect so that's the feeling of a deluxe memory man tap tempo 1100 with the mn305s just to throw that in for cool points i know what that then when you go up it is the pristine digital um this was one of the harder modes to get spot on that analog mode so we're gonna play that and uh we'll continue out of this that sound good to you guys sounds great oh yeah let's uh gonna play in the key of youtube i'm gonna add some overdrive that's also key of i the tiger hold on let's see get that tempo [Music] we should do our asmr vocals here really i mean we could try it [Music] g four yeah six [Music] [Applause] [Music] five on the beautiful flat seven [Music] i'll go up to the digital settings [Music] move the baseline yeah [Music] that was very my job easy i think we sounded as good as you too i think so far less political we got some good comments let's i i think we should challenge you too to uh uh you two if you're watching this we challenge you at a local bar mitzvah to challenge us by playing your own songs but you have to use the three series which are 99 dollars a piece and available right now in sweetwater okay reverb reverb same same kind of digital goodness there when i think about reverbs i love that are weird and digital that was the inspiration here nothing normal we didn't want anything super normal if there's anything normal about this it's a plate sound and then the plate goes crazy i love this pedal uh this r pedal is nothing like this pedal but it has this similar attitude of this pedal this is one of my favorite delay reverbs ever and then the verb zilla i went there great name verb zilla come on yes love that let's do some uh big ol spacey emotional stuff we're good at that decay verb darken it up is this one also in the key of youtube let's do key of e minor [Music] go to the c [Music] yeah back and forth [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah big massive ambient sound is what we want we've never had that in the jhs line so that is the inspiration we've only had a spring sound so this is outer space this is our pluto reverb pluto this is basically multiple delays and multiple all-pass filters looped in an algorithm interesting yeah the lfo is modulating the delay the delay the lfo is modulating the length of the delay so there's movement and space very ethereal it's really complex it uses pretty much all the memory of this chipset wow it's it's maxing it out flip that up pre-delay yeah that's a really cool feature so pre-delay is a delay into the it is what it says [Music] for 99 bucks you can get your space on for sure one question maybe um maybe more i can rapid fire some jokes yeah rapid fire okay sounds good um on the subject of all of them they buffered are true bypassed bypass very cool uh do any of them have battery snaps no no no none at all that would cost 10 cents and we're at 99. got it um okay uh how about these these on base fantastic specifically yeah have you tested a few actually i did yesterday two days ago you're a picky bass player right very picky bass player you you watch entire episodes of that pedal show like three hours uninterrupted with snacks how do you feel about i feel like specifically the chorus on bass is fantastic cool amazing okay that's how i feel about it um let's see uh we'll get to the other ones one more thing on the verb the sound that we ended up is actually broken code that we decided not to fix a broken line of code that made it a little crazier and we left it and it's fantastic that's our new band name broken code broken code all right chorus yep let's go flying through this the chorus is inspired by vintage digital this is one of my favorites uh and then the old twin spin which has the very rotary type sounds it was important to me that it did a good rotary sound it'll do classic like this stuff i'm gonna leave some verb on because it's it's like salt you know on your dish [Music] it had to do this stuff boss style courses but i wanted to make sure that that's what i wanted for sure i think it is absolutely one of the best rotary choruses for this amount of money i've ever played and i'm not just saying that because we made it but i think it i think it just has a fantastic rotary element even if i slow it down if you're savvy you might want to mod it and void the warranty but that's up to you all right uh yeah let's do a little jam let's let's act like we know how to play uh really complicated funky jazz hey is the chorus uh triangle wave sine wave what kind of wave josh do you know it's going to live in between that sign yeah somewhere in there yep sign in get [Music] that's a good baseline thanks [Music] [Music] [Music] uh [Music] one two three four [Music] that was acid funk all right that's all the petals um you want to fire through some questions i do indeed uh lots of questions about other effects that you're thinking about adding to this line in the future oh yeah phasers envelope filters flangers requests for me what's your request harmonic trim please yes okay please and thank you do it that's solid 99 harmonic trim would be cool that'd be amazing another drive i think another delay or three another delay or a reverb or three hello i could see some bass specific models just because people want them yep how hard would it be to mod the delay for tap tempo josh not even possible i wouldn't try i wouldn't try to buy a dd-3t from sweetwater right now call brendan hey call brendan that's awesome what about like an octave thingy octave could be really easily done in this line yeah it's endless any effects that you don't think would work because of cost any crazy like you can't really tap tempo things you can't get into well that's really one of the only modern everyone wants to have temporary midi got it no midi it's not going to happen that's not but yeah we can pretty much do anything we want in this format that's great yeah um very cool a lot one last question here why'd you hire your current staff what qualifies the what qual of qualities did they represent that made you take a chance on them i think they're talking to about the employee video that we asked no the employee video is so fun and we're we have big plans to expand on that and like show our company's awesome like i'm so proud of there's just a great group of people here we're now around 35 employees we're still growing we've grown rapidly and big time this year um in the face of all the madness we've kept things rolling to the best of our abilities and i'm just proud of our team like when we're hiring uh we have open public interviews you apply come in and we interview a lot of people and we look for work ethic first we look for we don't look for experience in the pedal industry i prefer people not know anything about building one of the one of the warning signs to me is when someone comes in and says i've been building pedals forever i can make you awesome that's like we're not interested in that we're interested in we have a system that we've developed over a decade how we do things how we build things how we work as a company as a team we're pretty big here on no one's more important than anyone else like i am not more important than someone right now downstairs filling the packages with manuals like we're all doing it together we look for team players um yeah we want to see people not like ourselves included in the team because that makes life fun yeah that's a little bit of how that works yep all right last question for you that i have uh how many minutes do we have uh we we're we're we're done so okay this is it this might be the last maybe they let me say one more thing i think that they totally would like your thing yes uh you have my approval if you could only have one of these pedals josh which would it be for your pedal word your own personal pedal board the verb i think it's super unique nice i mean i think a few of these are they're all unique um in some sense some are more normal some are not some are not rewriting history or anything they're just they're unique in their price point and features but the reverb uh the chorus the fuzz like they're some of these feel like wow they're actually so unique i could have sold several of these for 200 all day and they would have sold really well the reverb is one of those i could have put it out in a slightly bigger enclosure an icon a different name done a video and we could have made almost triple the profit possibly because that's why we didn't proud that's how good they are yeah that's awesome so that reverb is really cool and unique and versatile and i love big spacey verbs so i'm a sucker for that same yeah uh i want to just say at the end of this here again thanks to sweetwater um one of the big questions we've had i want to cover it briefly briefly man my words today so how are these so affordable i want to like go through that i've seen a lot of comments um you know how in the world is this affordable versus something else that we make for 200 bucks so that's a fantastic question and just a few notes to simplify that process of thinking these are made in a more mass production format so everything here we're in a building right now in kansas city it's 5 000 square feet and then we have another building across the parking lot where we print our enclosures we're out of space in this wedding but everything here is made the same way we make these just like we make a morning glory or a color box or whatever but the production r d assembly process and the process of ordering parts and all that is very much on a more mass scale so we don't make as much money on these like it's questionable the profit on them by the time dealers get a cut and things but when we sell a lot of this we make money so that's that's a different method for us we've always sold fewer pedals at a little bit better margins so our employees can get living wage and we can do things in that manner these are just done in a different way some techniques that we used are same-sided pcb assembly when possible that means they're quicker and time is money they're a surface mount like everything else we make but that definitely helps the same in and out pcb meaning the foot switch and all those things everything's shared so we get to order a ton of the same pcb and implement daughter pcbs into the assembly cutting cost again the same white chassis same drill plots it's massively helpful no side printing just a top print saves dollars same drill plot seems i mean so much money saved by streamlining a uniform line like this economy of scale as i've already said uh and everything started from the very beginning optimizing costs without sacrificing any quality these are designed by us on our breadboards with our intentions of what they should be and we're really proud of them and yeah it's just a different technique for us um yeah i don't know what else to say um yeah i think we're good here i do want to say it is a bummer that we lost eddie van halen yesterday uh just to close out on that so go listen to some van halen yeah we had some talks downstairs uh from the guitar historical perspective of me uh it's just such a bummer i i would love to have interviewed him one day in my processes of study i think when i look at guitar history just a big tribute to him at this moment is like there were really two or three innovators of what the guitar could do one of those is definitely hendrix and the second is van halen like i will never forget riding in a car with paul gilbert for like three hours and him explaining how van halen changed his life and everyone else in the 80s he reinvented the instrument so as guitar players just a huge tribute out to him and go listen to some van halen i rode my bike yesterday and i listened to van halen one and two it was exciting nice very exciting yeah it's a sad moment um anyway just wanted to recognize that i know there's a ton of van halen fans and a lot of us a lot of you out there play guitar because of him so wanted to acknowledge that it's a real real bummer of a thing but we have a lot of great music to listen to my advice is go find a cool biography of him learn more about him because there's so much stuff to learn even from our heroes that we think we know this has been really fun thanks again sweetwater thanks nick yep um any signing off words nick anything you want to say you know i just this has just been fantastic i've cherished every moment i've cherished every moment that you've cherished oh thanks addison anything you want to say uh come back to me okay come back to you all right i think we're out on this right we're out we're out that's it thank you thanks for watching thank you sweetwater bye-bye [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Sweetwater

Views: 39,259

Keywords: Sweetwater, jhs pedals, jhs 3 series, guitar pedals, josh scott, the jhs show, guitar pedals explained, guitar effects, jhs show

Id: 4jtfHNw4GRo

Length: 86min 43sec (5203 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020