JACQUES PEDALS
Vintage
Vault
American Beauties
My site would not have been
complete without an American page. I could not put another Julie Christie picture here so I chose Gene for her stunning beauty.
At
the time of that picture , I would have paid to use her toothbrush. But I am
getting carried away; let us go back to stompboxes.
There are a lot of things I like about Mutron pedals : Nice colors, sturdy cases , full sounds & whacky instructions sheets -see the incredible equation for the phasing- :
I saw one day in Marseilles a Mutron wha for $50 and I did not buy it. I was not in the mood and did not know at that time it was the SHAFT THEME wah. But I eventually found one part of my mad-scientist pedalboard :
Electro-Harmonix
C'est magnifix ! For this
rendition of the famous Electro-Harmonix theme, I chose some hard-to-find boxes.
The poly-chorus & frequency analyzer have been reissued while that deluxe
octave multiplixer with its fuzz switch remains obscure. I really love the EH
stuff because it was ubiquitous in my teen age time and as soon as I got some
money , I bought one. Sometimes it was crap such as the zipper that was so hard
to dial in , you sometimes got stuck with a fixed frequency no matter what you
play. But I will never forgot the first time I heard someone playing through an
electric mistress. Suddenly I was Ulysses listening to the mermaids.
Better known for their guitars
and amps , the Fender factory could not resist the stompbox epidemic . They came
out with these 3 motley beauties that failed to fire brand our sonic memories.
In this process, they stole the idea of a giant pot for the feet to
Mr.Jennings. Admit it, the stompbox world is the only industry where wacky and
unsuccessful finds are served again and again , even if musicians are still
not hungry for them. Some folks like the Blender, but then again every
distortion is a cool distortion.
It is not a secret I love
preamps. Louder is a magic word for me. I remember when I was younger , I used
to turn the volume of my guitar down for PA check, so I can turn it up whenever
I wanted, a nightmare for the engineer . The DOD overdrive/preamp 250 is one of
my favorite and they are still present today with the FET black preamp, whatever
its name is . This also means that DOD is one of the few '70 stompbox company
that is still in the business strong and happy. Good. I particularly liked their
'trend named' pedals like meat box and grunge even if I never tried them. I
also own an old GSP5 I used for only one jazz preset which, maxed ,gives a
monstrous fuzz sound with an indecent noise to level ratio.
Cool.
This was the Rolls-Royce of
stompboxes, the 'haut-de-gamme'. Rare and very expensive in France ( 1 mxr
flanger cost 3 deluxe mistresses ), I consider myself lucky to own this little
collection. I would LOVE to find the MXR DISTORTION II with its 4 pots and 220v
that seemed to be a very serious tube impersonator.
These boxes were the
inspiration of my beloved CORON pedals , not to say rip-off.
The plastic boxes are not bad but I
should loose at least 15 pounds to use them safely on stage. Hard. The big black
metal Dyna-comp is absent from this picture because I like it so much I must
dedicate an entire web page to it. Stay tuned.
You can see an intruder here:
it is the ROSS phaser with its cool recessed pots. I am working in finding a
CHANDLER tube driver. Now all that I have to do is locate a pedal named TRIBIANI
and we are done.
Don't you love untranslatable
jokes? You sweat to find the words and end up with a complete flop saying 'In
Bulgarian , it's so funny'. Well here we are: we have a special famous joke in
French involving Elvis Presley and a forgotten French actress named Gaby
Morlaix. So every time we see a Morley pedal, we think about
the King, while it is uncertain one of his guitarist could have used one. We are
so far from the Less-lie explanation it's painful.
I also own the echo
monster. My repairman is trying to find in secrecy some kind of liquid to fill
the drum which suffered from leakage. 'Please don't ask me what it was'.
Otherwise , I love to use Morley Wha pedals as a manual phaser for slow song.
Try it. Special mention to the cute compact series Wha.
Maestro pedals are so rare in
France, that I think these demoiselles were brought in some guitar tourist
suitcase from a flower power trip in the Bay area.
The old fuzz is so
horrendous you think somebody stole your amp and replaced it with a cheap
Chinese AM radio. Great. The newer one is much better sounding and its stomp
process always amazes me: you have to switch the entire pedal on, like an
alligator jaw. And we are still in front of pots for the feet but in a
milder way. The phaser is more organ than guitar in all the senses but is famous
because Mr.Oberheim invented it. Pots for the feet. I think I just found my next
band name.