The Pedal Movie
reverb.com
reverb.com
The last design I came up with I only made one of, and I use it for myself.. but, it is the best overdrive I’ve ever heard, or at least, after years of fiddling with it there’s nothing left I can do to make it any better. I just don’t want to spend my time doing screen printing, advertising, shipping, drilling, soldering, and so on just make 50 bucks on each unit.
There is a lot of hokum that people believe when it comes to overdrive, but it comes down to a really good signal to noise ratio, and a thousand tiny details, and very close attention to pre/post gain eq.
I think the same is true of the “tube sound” mojo- the tube amps that are most sought after are great because they were a labor of love, and people sweated over the tiny details. Solid state amps are designed to be cheap, so they have worse speakers, and so on. You can get just a good a sound out of transistors, you just have to spend some money and time to do it.
Thanks for the advice!
This seems to be the primary differentiator between most analog pedals these days.
I’ve seen people advocate Vickrey auctions as a price discovery mechanism: https://kevinlynagh.com/notes/pricing-niche-products/
http://www.stratopastor.org.uk/strato/amps/twoseriesfenders/...
First, guitar players in general seem to be somewhat driven by crowd mentality and not entirely open to embrace anything that isn't already tried-and-true. That makes it hard to get anyone to try something that isn't a clone or tweak of an existing design.
Second, like you said, the market is very saturated, and even if you do have a unique design, the aforementioned mentality largely works against you I think.
All that being said, there's a whole world of exploration and discovery out there when it comes to analog circuit design and that alone I think makes it an incredibly rewarding hobby.
Perhaps document it for your own posterity.
I once had to repair my circa-1990 Crate GX160, so I bought its schematics. Most of the passive components went into multiple stage filters on every freaking section. Talk about overkill. I doubt you could even hear the effect of some of those filters, but they definitely played safe and took care of designs back then. Except for a few vendors, now it's all about packing as much they can on the digital side and penny pinching on the hardware.
For the one actually “large/expensive” piece of equipment I sold Craigslist worked much better, though. I was unwilling to ship or insure it.
What would you find reasonable?
If you want something to sell, you usually have to use their "bump" feature to get it to show up at the beginning of any relevant search results. You give an additional percentage of the sale to get it higher in the listings. If you have a more common item, you usually have to give up a higher percentage to get it noticed.
Once you factor in shipping and everything else, I usually sell most of my items at a loss of 10-25% depending on the item. I've never really made a profit from anything I've sold on Reverb.
I assume they take care of the transaction/payment? Normal creditcard transaction fees are at 2% + $0.25, and this is without providing a market(place).
AppStore takes 30%, Uber/Deliveroo etc take about 15%.
I sold the vintage synth on Craigslist because it took too long on reverb. I’m glad I didn’t have to pay their fees, though.
Shoulda bought about 10 more Juno 60s back in 2005 :)