My Thought for the Day

Price Point Engineering is the art, the craft and the science that serves marketing by ensuring that no customer buying a product ever gets more than he paid for.

Stuff on eBay

So my buddy sez, "ya gotta put your stuff on eBay."

But I don't like eBay. Not for new products. I dislike the atmosphere. You see more willful ignorance on the part of the sellers than in an entire Gucci of Defense Attorneys. "I don't know much about this so I couldn't test it, but I know these are real collector items." You see old electronics with the power cord cut off, the fuse holder missing, a piece of tape over the power switch with a skull and cross bones drawn in Sharpie over it and the guy goes "it probably just needs a simple repair."

Anyway, that's not fair and just because there's losers and thieves down the road doesn't mean that there isn't plenty of decent stuff and honest sellers. I will still not sell "My" pedals there. But I have got a ton of odds and ends, leftovers, uncollected repairs, oddball parts. It's gotta go somewhere and I'm not interested in cataloging and inventorying everything. So onto eBay they go. There's a link to whatever is current on the left and I'll keep moving stuff until I can make room in the shop and music room.

For today, there's a cute little Green Ringer Clone. It's the tiny little thing you see in my post about rehousings. I made a couple and here's the extra one.

Fancy Cables

This is a fairly hot subject and I've gotten into some ill-advised arguments over it in some forums. The arguing part seems unnecessary and I'm going to try to explain my opinion clearly and in a way that avoids stepping on anybody's toes.

A solid basic guitar cable made of reliable, quiet and relatively low-capacitance cable with reliable, high-quality plugs can be had for about $30 from any number of sources. This is all you need. Look for cable with Mogami or Canare wire and Neutrik or Switchcraft plugs. There are other brands, but these are the standard. And again, this is what you need, quiet, reliable, low-capacitance. Without that basic functionality a cable is not worth considering.

You can pay more and get additional features if you like, pretty jackets that do actually help protect the cable and gold plated ends are both popular and pretty. No reason to not have them if you like. But look at these as optional features that are added to what is essential; quiet, reliable, low-capacitance. If a cable lacks those things there is no added feature that will make up for it.

There are "premium" cables out there that are objectively, measurably, statistically and factually inferior in reliability. Some have terrible failure rates and a few have terrible failure modes.

Quick example that hit my bench, a customer using one "premium" cable had the tip of the plug come off inside the jack of his amp. Being a PCB mounted TRS Cliff jack there was no way to remove the tip without destroying and/or replacing the jack. The customer ended up with a repair because of this inferior cable with inferior plugs that had been sold to him for five times the cost of a cable that would never have had this problem. Sure the "lifetime" warranty of the cable got him a brand new one, just like the old one, but it sure didn't pay his repair bill or make up for the time without his amp.

This is unacceptable.

I don't want to hear the argument that these cables sound better - broke cables do not sound good. This industry has had reliable cables for about 30 years now. If someone presents a cable as being an improvement it must do everything those cables did, plus. Not instead.

That is all. Make sure that you are getting something that will get the job done. Then, if you can afford it and it sounds good to you upgrade however much you like. Just don't get suckered into thinking that because something is more expensive that it is automatically better. It has the potential to be better, but not all of them are.

That $30 cable I was talking about is better than what you heard on your favorite albums of the past. It really, really is good enough. And if someone wants you to pay more insist that he give you everything that you get in the low priced cable plus whatever added features he's advertising. There is no excuse for accepting less.

There are a lot of guys out there building fine cables at all price points. These are good guys selling a legitimate product. I am not criticizing them for offering something better and more expensive. On the other hand there are companies with nothing but a huge endorsement / advertising budget who sell unreliable gold-plated crap. You deserve better than that.

Rehousing Pedals, When I Do It, When I Don't

Almost every pedal builder does this at some point. Take a commercial pedal built in a cheesy, oversized enclosure with poor quality controls and jacks and rebuild it with boutique grade components. Usually smaller, but almost always more robust and reliable. Very often the electronic switching and buffering circuits are bypassed or removed as well and the pedal is recreated in a true bypass version.

I've done a few myself and have developed some opinions on the subject. Imagine that, me, with opinions. My experience has been that for simpler, analog pedals the player is better served to have a reproduction built or buying an original. Here's my breakdown on that. A decent rehouse will cost somewhere upward of $75. That plus the cost of the original pedal will cost very nearly as much as simply having most reproductions built. If we take something simple like the Dano French Toast, the cost of a pedal plus the rehouse is about the same as a clone of the Foxx Tone Machine of which it is a copy. And a Transparent OverDrive rehouse is outright silly (and borderline accessory to intellectual property theft) you can just order a Timmy for that money.

Yes, you can find a hobby guy who is just happy to have someone pay for the parts he experiments with. And that is definitely a good thing. Enjoy this hobby. That's what it is for, having fun. But, if you need a professional build quality, or if that pedal breaks down, as all things will, the pro build is going to be far better.

Some rehouses make more sense. Things like the Dano Chicken Salad, that are more complex give the player an option that he might not otherwise have. While a commercial Univibe clone like the MojoVibe (a personal favorite) would be better, it will be about twice the price of the rehouse. So it does let you get your Vibe on at a lower cost than a boutique clone, and sounds better and runs more reliably than the factory pedal.

Here's an example of not rehousing. A friend and regular customer called and asked about having me rehouse a Green Ringer into a foot-toy format for him. Instead, I suggested a scratch build that included some improvements and a much smaller footprint than could ever be possible with a rehouse.


No indicator LED. Thought about it, but things are a bit tight in there and there's never a question whether this little screamer is on. Oh, and this cost the same as just a rehouse.