The Story of the JHS Morning Glory

on today's episode i'm going to walk you through the definitive timeline and history of one of my own pedals the morning glory overdrive as best as i can remember it let's do it [Music] having produced now well over a hundred episodes of the jhs show there is one thing that consistently irritates me and drives me crazy it is when i dig into a company's history or a particular pedal story a lot of information is lost i'll go to great lengths to find this information traveling across the world sitting down interviewing people trying my best to build the story put it in place and preserve history and i've always thought that i've done a really good job at preserving the jhs history that's in place for now over a decade but upon putting this episode together about the morning glory i think i'm part of the problem as well there's something about when you're busy doing the thing you don't remember the thing i don't know what it is but this has been interesting and i'm going to do my best today to show you point a to z how the morning glory happened and all the little nerdy things that some of you want to know so it all starts in 2007 with me modifying boss pedals in jackson mississippi and that was fun sometime about a year later i had really been wondering if i could adjust or modify this classic blues breaker pedal that had been on my board for a while these came out 91 and they're great but i wanted it to be louder i wanted it to be slightly different so i found a diy kit build for this and i modified it constantly tweaking it playing with it seeing what i could come up with and the result was the very first prototypes of the morning glory and this would have been late 2008 i believe but here's the problem i can't find any of them they are gone forever i think there's five to ten of these somewhere in the world they're in an mxr size enclosure and they're hand painted and it's like the sun on a blue sky it looks very interesting i honestly almost can't remember what it looks like it's a missing link and it kind of bothers me it bothers me a little i don't know if i'll be okay [Music] by the summer of 2009 i was selling way more modified pedals than i ever thought i would and people were wanting me to build recreations of classic circuits and things like this modified blues breaker that i had been tinkering around with so i introduced the very first version of the morning glory this is the v1 and this is actually the first one i ever built pretty wild to see it's wild to look inside of it now you're gonna notice something that is really important to jhs history here it is the cosmetic look of this pedal we have a plane enclosure i actually bought these from new sensor which is electro harmonics and they came powder coated and i did not know how to label them i refused to use a sticker because it would have driven me crazy and i have horrible handwriting one day walking through a craft store with my wife i saw these rubber stamps and i bought a ton of them and that's what you see here this is a simple letter kit with circles jhs is a different kit so i literally set and stamp each element and then because that original unit i had messed with a local girl in jackson had hand painted the sun on it on a blue sky i saw a sun stamp and naturally put it on here so these very first v1s probably have a stamp on the heel and they look like this uh around the same time or earlier some of these pedals the pulping pill for instance didn't even have a stamp at all i was using a sticker so this is right in the moment where i discovered stamping right around the same time i released the morning glory v1 here is another v1 number two ever made and yeah you can see that i'm experimenting with what things look like we're gonna play this one and have some [Music] fun [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] um next up comes the version two i have a strange puddle here which is kind of a link between the one and the two and it has a really fantastic story it is the third morning glory like this ever built and this is interesting because i believe and i'm almost certain that i kept building morning glories like this with or without this toggle now to further explain this it gets a little hazy what actually is a v2 i identify a v2 as having the toggle i built this for a friend of mine steve who became the general manager of jhs years later and he's been with me for like a decade but this is an experimental modified morning glory v1 i added the high cut switch which tamed the high end when you turn the drive up and the clipping is led instead of one in four and four h it's a very bizarre middle of the ground custom build i used to build custom stuff for people and some of you may have versions of any of my circuits from these early days that don't really make sense in a timeline and that's part of the fun of this so yeah this is built in august of 09 i believe is what we have here with the date and it's labeled number three ever built but i know for a fact that i continue to build versions without the switch but for the sake of it we're gonna have to go non-linear and just say aversion to you morning glory has a toggle switch and version ones don't that being said version ones and twos were being built at the same time in 2009 now there are some custom color ones that float around again i would customize a circuit i would also do any enclosure you wanted notice the aesthetics here i kept those knobs from the last one this has a totally different knob like the knobs you see on a dr z amp or something and the sunshine icon disappears and we see the introduction of a jhs logo on these v2s this is a more typical v2 in this color some user actually removed the jacks and put them up top but yeah you have this whole thing going on this is pretty cool so version two is the addition of the high cut switch in the big enclosure and at the same exact time another friend who was a friend of steve's is crazy dramatic it's amazing cobweb of information here ask me can you put that morning glory in an enclosure with a tube screamer and i said absolutely i can and this became the proto here the double barrel he was a hunting fishing kind of guy he wanted a gun on the front double barrel double effects this is it is the proto it's crazy inside i'm like experimenting with how i would possibly wire these if i sold them this was 09 as well so you just have this period of 09 and 10 v1s are made v2s are made wild some v1s and you have the introduction of the double barrel we're gonna play this there is a newer version with fancy features and stuff but let's not play that you can see this anytime we're gonna play the weird ugly one [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] now [Music] sometime in the summer of 2010 it's a little maddening how i don't have exact dates and i can't remember things we transitioned from the big box v1 v2 into the small box version 3. now immediately the differences are quite obvious they're different colors they're in a smaller case but they do have the same exact circuit board they sound identical but this is just a true transitional unit where i put the heel logo but i was not satisfied with any ideas or attempts to put a morning glory icon i didn't like the sun thing necessarily i had just used it because of the hand paints and instead of shipping with an icon i didn't like i didn't put one on it that's how ocd i am i am still that way and it's just part of the story and it is what it is but later that fall we came up with this icon it is the roman candle morning glory thing there i liked it looked good this one's kind of worn off but we also moved to a printed circuit board these are made much better and more consistent this is the eighth one ever made in that series yeah i don't know what else to say about it it's the version three and we need to play it [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] for several years starting in 2010 jhs starts growing fairly quickly adding employees new circuits and its bonkers the morning glory is front and center of that but there is a lot of stuff to happen i'm going to cover what i'm going to call some oddball things here first off sometime in 2010 i was experimenting with customer emails asking me if i could make the morning glory high gain so there are a few that say hg it's the original circuit but made for high gain they're incredibly rare if you ever see one buy it mortgage your house do whatever you need to do then there was the idea for a pedal called the patriot this is sometime in 2012 i think it's in the fall it is the all-american which was my rat style pedal uh put together with the morning glory so it's like a rat blues breaker combo it's fantastic this is proto2 nick do you know where proto one is three or four we don't know where anything's at but it exists and somebody out there should make this i don't know if i'll ever get around to it then black friday 2012 we released the state line it is the charlie brown and a morning glory together this is a limited black friday only sell i think we did 130 someone's told me we did 142. i don't really know it's a number and it's above 100 they're really rare really expensive this is the first one ever made uh i do like to share that the stars are the cities where i lived for a while that's mississippi and alabama i'm from muscle shoals jhs started in jackson and continued on into tupelo mississippi there's also this weird christmas limited edition thing it's part of a complete set where you lay all the petals out and it's one image of santa's sleigh some reindeer i don't know when this was i think it's 2013. and you know as a responsible person who owns a pedal company and making lots of pedals at this time you'd think we'd date something but we don't we just write christmas not only do we just write christmas we scratch something out that i can't read above it it's a nightmare in my mind i wish i knew um the details they're horrible i don't know how many we made i feel like we put a bunch of these out to dealers if you've ever seen anything like this let me know i just want to know what year it is that's all anyway then we have the last remaining versions of the well-known version 3 at this point we have this version of the version 3 which is the same sonically but the stamp was redesigned so that it stamped more clearly as i did all of these you notice that original 2010 it's blurry it kind of looks weird because we didn't divide the lines out but yeah we got the line weight on this it looks so much better i am so proud of myself in 2012 for pulling this off i remember sleeping better at night it's beautiful and then the biggest transition cosmetically in our company ever was by 2015 i could no longer stamp all of these petals we were reaching like close to 20 000 petals a year so we bought some printers and we just put on our big boy pants and we scanned the original images printed it all on like you see today and dealers requested that we put the names of the controls instead of letters just better for people we did that and that's kind of where the version 3 held in the same period of time around 2015 our beloved kansas city royals won the world series there's about 35 of these revive 85 there's some different printings they all have a white base they're really really rare and fun especially if you're a royals fan and then i collaborated with my hero robert keely he modified his compressor i modified my morning glory with some of this high gain mod stuff that i'd learned over the years and we put out the steak and eggs really really fun pedal let's go from here and move on to the version four that we have today at winter namm of 2016 i released the version for morning glory with the red remote system but it had actually been about a two year design process while some of these other things you've seen were going on so it really starts at the breadboard level i still have this original breadboard which is awesome at this point we're starting to keep some things and actually write dates on prototypes very useful for videos like this here's a couple prototype units that are fun to see sharpie written all over them the different revisions uh here's a random white circuit board revision but yeah basically it was how do we take a morning glory and revise it for a version four well it started because i love the morning glory i didn't want to mess with it tonally but i did want to add the red remote feature as i added it to some other models it's really simple you take the red remote controller plug it into the jack and instead of a high cut switch you actually have a boost or a gain stage and that high cuts move to a side dip switch when you click this it remotely activates the onboard toggle so you get an overdrive with two gain stages on the fly really excited and was really happy with this release it's been great so far uh we did some hand paint versions through the years as well i've lost almost all of those but this is a cool one uh of an actual v4 there's hand paints as early as the v1 as i've told you and then the last and most current revision that we're gonna jam on here is the new icon on the heel we rebranded and use a different font now for jhs pedals same exact pedal though but you know if you're crazy and want to collect every variation you got to know about that let's listen to this [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] today's record time is brought to you by one of the greatest records ever recorded from 1995. what's the story morning glory think about it morning gore episode what's the story morning glory a lot of people think i named the pedal after this i didn't it was the bottle rockets this is just coincidental because this record is so formative to me as a musician as a writer as a guitarist i mean i wore this out i'll never forget pulling up in my parents driveway in alabama middle of nowhere and hearing champagne supernova on the radio and losing my freaking mind it was amazing it's fantastic every track on this to me is classic if you don't like the circuit i don't know that we can be friends i can like you i can even love you but there's a thing in me that's like i don't trust him i don't trust a guy it's fine and i know already in the comments you're typing your fingers are getting greased up you like blur more i don't care blur is fine we're talking about this record if you've never heard this record you need to listen to it tell me in the comments what you think it's a big deal i want to read one line out of the insert it's important look at these guys they're awesome they hate each other but man the music's good noel's a hero there's a comment there's a line in here i'm gonna read it you ready yeah you're ready coming down off the nova somewhere near the boiled egg that is royal albert hall we watched paul's sun crossed with jon starr and hold ice cream hands gosh this is so good i don't even know what that means i like it though what's the story morning glory thanks so much for watching this episode i hope you enjoyed it half as much as i did the ghs morning glory is a huge pivotal piece of my story it's why this channel exists it's why jhs is successful in any way whatsoever so i'm really thankful to all of you who have supported it over the years as a product i would love to hear in the comments where you first heard of the morning glory or ghs and what it was like the first time you played one and if you have one on your board let's just have a big friendly pow-wow about this pedal and those of you who love it i'd love to hear from you i'm going to give this away there's a link in the description below for a brand new version for with the red remote we're going crazy it's fine just calm down take a breath go down there fill out that thing we're gonna give it away it's okay you have as much of a chance to win it as anybody else in the world i promise you if you liked the episode hit like subscribe to the channel there's a bell icon if you click that you'll get notifications of all future episodes have a wonderful day and enjoy your guitar bye

Channel: JHS Pedals

Views: 239,815

Keywords: JHS, JHS Pedals, The JHS Show, Guitar Pedals, Guitar Effects, Guitar Gear, Guitar Pedal Demo, Music History, JHS Morning Glory, Morning Glory Pedal, overdrive pedal, chorus pedal, distortion pedal, boss pedals, compressor pedal, univibe, delay pedal, octave fuzz, reverb pedal, reverb, eq pedal, boost pedal, behringer, Oasis, What's the story morning glory

Id: 7ZS9SQBEotw

Length: 21min 42sec (1302 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020