12-ish Degrees of Pedal Design Pet Peeves

Very early days I bought all the Mini Xotic Effects pedals available then - the EP Booster, SL Drive and SP Compressor. Then I immediately bought them all again in Alchemy Audio Modded editions - where all those actually essential dip-switches have been externalised. I specifically have the JHS 4-Star Modded version of the Analog.Man King of Tone - as that has the essential internal controls externalised and mounted on the top-surface for practical ease of use. You should never need to screw off the back plate of your pedals to access an essential voicing or tone control - and that certainly includes fuzz bias for me too.

Every Germanium Fuzz pedal of mine has to have a Bias control I can easily access - and internal trimmers just aren't any longer acceptable for that function. Xotic Effects even realised the error of their ways such that their new Super Sweet Booster and Super Clean Buffer have their dip-switches externalised and fully accessible on the right-hand side of the pedal. In fact King Tone also did exactly such an exercise recently with its Duellist, miniFUZZ and Octaland formats - formerly internal plus extra switches now accessible on the pedals' exteriors!

At the absolute worst you can copy how Vemuram do it where those trimmers are accessible on the pedal's exterior - much preferable for me is to have external controls for ease of access and ease of use. You should never need a screwdriver or two!

I really don't understand why some people still support over-sized enclosure formats. The earliest pedals were made from junk off-the-shelf enclosures largely utilised primarily by other industries. E.g. the Mic-Stand bases that became Arbiter Fuzz Face enclosures - the circuit within those is tiny - it's like having a single pea in a can!

Larger enclosures just aren't practical in the slightest - especially for the modern paradigm of cramming as many pedals onto your board as you can. I still get occasionally caught out by over-sized pedal enclosures which has a serious impact - as you just can't properly or easily accommodate those within your existing rig or pedal-chain.

There are far too many unnecessarily out-sized and over-sized enclosures out there - and seriously they're just a waste of space - quite literally!

For me over-sized enclosures are about as logical as wearing shoes 10 sizes too large!

I will make a concession for certain types of Modded pedals - as if you're adding something to an existing /  established format - then the only place you might be able to accommodate said additional control/s is down one of the edges of the pedal - but that typically ruins the whole pedalboard-friendly nature of a pedal - and when you see compact pedals with toggles and knobs down their edges - they might as well have gone with a BB-size enclosure to accommodate those controls properly on the top-surface.

Edge-mounted controls are often very difficult to get to - they're either butting up to other pedals or pedalboard infrastructure - and depending on the type of control and how it's set - you frequently cannot see it's position from your usual vantage point.

Pedals with knobs on their top edge are wholly unergonomic and impractical - and apart from the Beetronics Babee Series whose knobs are slightly angled - I will have nothing to do with those kinds of enclosure and pedal designs!

We've all experience pedals where as we crank up the dials - we get nothing > nothing > nothing > and then all of a sudden EVERYTHING! There are numerous gain pedals that suffer from this - where Volume and Tone pots can be equally guilty of this sin - but it's usually the Gain pots.

There are all manner of different irregularities - and some pedals are so sensitive that you almost need a computer-controlled robot to adjust those dials by nano-mm / micrometre increments.

In contrast dialling something in where you have beautifully even and predictable tapers - is a real joy - whether linear or logarithmic. There's too many pedals out there that just aren't well enough calibrated and are unnecessarily tricky to handle as a result!

This is kind of related to but actually sort of different to the previous point and just largely concerns a pedal's Tone Stack and overall Tone-Shaping prowess. It's not too common a problem, but there are though quite a few pedals that have poor tone stacks - often the controls are too subtle, sometimes they're too extreme. But mostly they are just imprecise and unpredictable - and require your full concentration when attempting to dial in sweet spots.

Much like with Irregular Tapers on Controls - Feeble Tone Stacks can be experienced in a similar manner. Sometime the tone stack is just unsuitable for that circuit - instead of a treble roll-off there should have been a variable mids control or progressive bass-cut etc..

It's a real skill for a pedal builder to identify the key frequency clusters for a particular effect type - and be able to prescribe the exact tone stack that will give you the maximum impact and ease of use / easy dial-in for said circuit. Thorpy is one such genius who always seems to pick the perfect Tone Stack for each of his circuits.

This happens on all too many of my pedals and far too few pedal builders have proper solutions for this or even attempt to give you level-matched output. Jackson Audio have a really smart 'Level-Matching Circuit' which allows you to flip between 4 different clipping options where the output level is maintained at unity throughout. And my good friend 'Rikk' Ricardo Cabecas has come to a slightly different solution via simply super smart clipping diode selection - you can barely discern changes in output on his Animalizzer Multi-Muff's clipping options.

I though have dozens of pedals with wholy uneven clipping options where volume is halved and doubled from one setting to the next. 

Ideally more pedals in the future will have footswitch-scrollable clipping options that are entirely level-matched for constant and consistent output!

Again - I have quite a few pedals where I regularly have to consult a manual to remind me of that the Secondary and Alternative functions are on some of those controls. Meris in the past has been particularly guilty of this, Strymon too until recently, but they are not alone in this.

There's two aspects here really - having to remember what all those Alt and Secret settings are, and the fact that you have to dial the knobs up and back to restore the Alpha Control values. Pigtronix and DigiTech have made great use of dual-concentric pots - as has Boss of course - that is surely the way to go versus having to remember and recall and restore different setting on several different knobs!

This is particularly applicable to Octave Fuzz pedals - any new Octave Fuzz that still engages and disables the Octave effect via toggle-switch is largely immediately dismissed by me. That function for sure should be on a second footswitch - there can be no argument for preferring a toggle over a footswitch - albeit I've become quite dextrous with my toes over the years to effects exactly such changes - but I would much rather have a Footswitch so I can easily just stomp that element in and out with ease.

Beetronics is guilty of this faux-pas with their Octahive - where they recognise the issue themselves - as their custom editions tend to have dual footswitches - while the standard edition still has the side-mounted toggle - it's just unergonomic and inefficient! Every week or two I see a new octave fuzz that is missing a second Octave On/Off footswitch - come on guys - the standard has been set - don't be delivering below par!

Unusual Power Requirements are a real bugbear - not necessarily because of the petty annoyance of having to find adapters or set up different supply values - but rather how easy it is to cause damage to other pedals if you're not too careful when switching those around.

In fact even though I have power supplies with 9V / 12V / 15V / 18V option outputs - I've taken to using Xotic Effects Voltage Doubler Dongles (15V / 18V) as they are a more visible reminder that different values are being applied - and if you swap pedals around as much as I do - it's all to easy to plug in the wrong supply inadvertently (boom!) - but I mark each of my 18V pedals with a red dot and I can clearly see those and the Xotic dongles when making a swap - so much less chance of a major inconvenience. I only fried the one pedal once - before I had that system in place!

A few of my Fuzz Faces have reverse polarity requirements - where I deploy bright orange adapter leads for that function - again highly visible and I'm unlikely to make mistakes with them.

Yet all of these things are just no longer necessary today - there are all kinds of circuit hacks you can do to flip polarity and double or triple the voltage within the pedal via Charge Pump - some pedals are boosted up to as much as 35V internally. So there should be no need to be playing around with different power supply lines and leads.

We're in the practical age now - where USB-C has become the International connectivity standard - about time we did the same with pedal power supplies - and standardised everything to 9V DC [-]!

I'm not so fixated on the position of Jacks on compact pedals - of course I would prefer them on top - but that's not always a possibility for a variety of reasons. While say for the new large format recent Spaceman Equinox pedal - why would the jacks be side-mounted on that? - it's already losing practicality points for its over-sized enclosure - but then you take up an even bigger lateral footprint with side-mounted jacks in addition. 

For me it's fine for Minis and Compacts to have side-mounted jacks - while everything else should really be top-mounted by now!

I have a few pedals where the Knob Indicators are either indistinct or entirely invisible. This is particularly prevalent for Mini Knobs which are all too seldom configured with the white indicator lines that make the visibly useful. The majority of mini knobs seem to be missing those white markers - which is really just not acceptable any more.

Certain designs of knobs also don't have particularly clear markers - especially in different lighting conditions - which is most definitely an ergonomic flaw - as the whole advantage of Analog pedals should be that you are always aware of what you have dialled in - while if the markers are invisible or indistinct - those dials no longer properly serve their purpose.

For me I if the pedal is great in every other aspect - then I can for sure usually tolerate a sub-optimal aesthetic.

While it's quite apparent that a lot of pedal builders haven't been to art college - and their choice of graphics, fonts, clashing colours and other idiosyncratic design touches are often not wholly up to scratch.

Artwork Pixelation and Density / line / font clarity are often factors in whether a design looks clean and balanced.

I also have a real pet peeve when there is a creature in the artwork - and the LED is then not placed as one or both of that creature's eyeballs. As an example the All-Pedal Slamurai has a really beautiful dragon artwork - but instead of the indicator LED being the eye of the dragon as it most definitely should be - it appears on its neck! I love the new limited edition artwork in particular - but the inappropriate placement of LED is seriously messing with my OCD!

This for me is really about attention to detail and the quality aspect of the pedal build - and there is no shortage of pedals out there that have confusing artworks or illegible logos and legends. Often a designer is involved - while the patron is not sufficiently versed with the school of design to make the right design choices! After all it's both and Art and a Science - as is most other Applied Art!

It will certainly be interesting to hear which of these Peeves you share with me or perhaps don't consider an issue - and whether there are some that you think I've left out?