Electro Harmonix Sold Kits?

☟ 

On the heels of the upcoming Electro Harmonix book, “Made on Earth for Rising Stars”, by my pals Josh Scott, Daniel Danger, and Dan Epstein, I figured I would add my own little “did you know!?” to the story. It’s a part of EHX lore that isn’t talked about often, nor is it as well documented as the background of the Big Muff or who invented the Memory Man. So let’s take a look and see what we can uncover about the enigmatic Electro Harmonix Kits of 1971…

Around 1966/67, with the explosion of Fuzz, a small subcategory opened up right alongside all of the new (and now legendary) pedals being released. For every Fuzzrite, Fuzz Face and Tone Bender, a new article was being written that showed young players how to build their own guitar effects right at home. And the majority of these articles, in addition to inspiring first forays into soldering, were also linked directly to order forms for DIY project kits.

The project kit fuzz could be found throughout newspaper and magazine ads/articles from this point all the way through to the mid 1990s! And in fact, building a fuzz pedal is still often included in the curriculum for students just beginning their electrical engineering journeys. But one aspect that is usually overlooked is the handful of brands that gave customers a cheaper alternative by offering DIY kit versions of their gear.

-----------------------------------------

In 1971 Electro Harmonix adopted this idea and began to sell their entire line in kit form and at a fraction of the price of the “factory built” options. EHX advertisements of the time would double as order forms; showing a list of pedals that you could simply check off which model you wanted and if you would like it pre-built or not. Then you’d cut out the form and mail it in with a personal check (remember checks!), and a month or so later a brand new EHX pedal (or kit) would arrive at your door - let the shredding commence. 🤘

But there’s just one problem with all of this; NO ONE has ever seen an Electro Harmonix kit before!

I have personally been collecting and looking into vintage pedals for over 20 years, and while I don’t keep up with every single sale or listing, I can confidently say that I have never seen an EHX kit, and neither have any of my equally nerdy pedal collector friends. Which makes me wonder, did the kits even exist at all, or are they just so indistinguishable from the regular pedals that you wouldn’t even know if you held one in your hands?

It’s long been a bit of a joke that the early Electro Harmonix pedals were not the best when it came to build quality. Poor soldering, wiring inconsistencies, and chaotic component variances are all hallmarks of that first series EHX released (1970-1973). So would we even notice a difference if we found an original kit built by a 14yr old?

Another idea to consider is that there were a few times where EHX listed models in advertising that (as far as we know) were never actually released! A perfect example can be found on the order form pictured above; the Tape Reverse, which most likely was later released as the Attack/Decay, has never been seen. There are also instances where model numbers just seem to skip one and go on to the next, suggesting they had possibly created a pedal and just couldn’t get it ready enough to release for mass consumption?

So I guess that’s it.

Maybe the Electro Harmonix kits were a classic case of vaporware, advertised for a short period in 1971 but never brought to market?

One night, about a year ago, I was in my usual pedal detective mode, scanning Effects Database when I stumbled across an entry for the EHX Hare-Lip Microphone Echo. It’s a pedal I’ve known about for ages, but because its rather, ummm, underwhelming, I never really paid it much attention. But on this day I decided to give it a click.

And right there, staring back at me in all its glory, was a KIT version of the pedal!!!

I couldn’t believe it, they were real!

And the craziest part was that these photos had just been sitting there on FXDB for over a decade.

Ok, so now we’re getting somewhere.

And yes, it’s not lost on me that the “law of large numbers” has nothing to do with my upcoming assessment, but that said; we now know 100% that the kits did in fact exist, and when built would look nearly identical to the regular factory-assembled product. This means there’s a legitimate chance that if you ever bought a 1971 Triangle Big Muff you could have unknowingly owned a kit version!

Alright, I’ll calm down now. sorry. 🤓

Let’s have a look at what else was inside this mystical box of awesomeness…

So we have a full enclosure, including the rubber grip pad that sticks to the bottom-plate (*sitting under the PCB). We also have a bag of components; with knobs, pots, switches, battery clip, etc. And we have what looks like a single long piece of green wire.

I can assume that when the pedals were being assembled in the EHX factory, whoever was on the line was given a very similar, if not this exact set of parts to work with. Really, the only thing that stands out as different is the single bundle of green wire. Because the majority of “Triangle-era” EHX pedals could feature up to four different colors and even smaller gauges of wiring than what you see above.

When we look closer at this pixelated baggie of parts nothing stands out as odd or unique. It’s basically exactly what we see in that era of EHX effects; D-shaft pots, black “pinch” style knobs, carbon comp resistors, green caps, and a blue battery clip.

So unfortunately everything I’m seeing here just reaffirms that if you own a kit version of an EHX pedal, you might never know for sure. Unless of course you find an unbuilt, in the box example (imaging finding a NOS Triangle Big Muff kit 🤯🤯🤯).

-----------------------------------------

By early 1972 the advertisements mentioning kits were gone, and the little company from New York, Electro Harmonix, would go on to change guitar pedals forever. I assume the build-it-yourself kit idea didn’t generate the kind of sales that would justify keeping them around. And with only a single known example that they even existed, it shows how few were probably ordered.

But, being in the game for a while now, I also know that stuff exactly like this is less rare than it would appear. This is the kind of thing that’s currently sitting in a junk box in someone’s basement. A project never completed, or even started at all; now abandoned and stored away with it’s friends the Nordic Track, the stamp collection, and that 3D puzzle of the Empire State Building. And while these relics are largely forgotten, they DO still exist; just waiting to be exhumed from the dusty embrace of time, and loved again.

So if you happen to have any guitar pedal kits from the 1960s/70s, I would love to hear from you in the comments. But if you have an original 1971 Electro Harmonix pedal kit, I NEED you to track me down and send a direct message via Email, Substack, or Instagram!

alright, thanks for reading,
-ed

The Woman Who (literally) Built Rock & Roll

☟ 

Over the last five years the internet has provided me with endless avenues of dopamine-inducing research tools for learning about the history of guitar pedals. One of which is the invaluable category of website known as the “newspaper database”. They host hundreds of thousands of printed articles going back to the 1800s, and within them I’ve been able to find previously unknown release dates for certain pedals, names and faces of company owners, and even full articles on the initial reception of “Fuzz” as a wild! new! sound in the early 60s.

But one thread that seemed to weave its way through all of these discoveries was that for the most part, women appeared to be responsible for physically building much of the music gear we now covet as classic “vintage grails”.

Electro Harmonix factory workers assembling guitar pedals in 1978.
credit: Rolling Stone

I knew that I could not be the first person to have this revelation, so I kept searching. And while there were plenty of articles written about specific women who influenced tech, and music in general, I was really only able to find this one article that highlighted the integral role women played in taking electronic technology from the grasps of the elite and placing it into (almost) every American home by the 1950s.

And even though I wasn’t able to find much, and this has to have been written about 10,000 times already, I still feel like doing my own guitar pedal-nerd take on the subject. So here we go :)

Elgin Watch factory, 1930. credit: Elgintime

What I learned from the ETHW article linked above, is that around the turn of the century it started to become commonplace to specifically hire women for factory assembly work. And with the proliferation of radio in the 1920s, these women shifted from things like mechanical watch assembly to more electronics-based manufacturing.

As the article states, this was something of a balance (although if we’re being real, it was probably much closer to an 80/20 split) between corporate exploitation, and feminine liberation. On one hand, the companies preferred to hire women because they could pay them significantly less than men for the same output. On the other hand; there is a certain level of freedom associated with getting out of the house and working, and of the equivalent jobs available to women in those days (sewing in sweatshop factories or manual labor), sitting down and soldering circuit boards all day was certainly preferred.

By the time the 1960s rolled around the idea of a factory filled with women working the production line was not only the standard, but every step of the process was designed to keep this machine in place.

Take the want-ads for instance:

credit: The Daily Breeze

Throughout the decade a “Help-Wanted” section divided by Male and Female could be found in the back of any local newspaper. The jobs for men were typically higher in rank/status; designers, salesman, foreman, etc. while the positions for women were relegated to the lower rungs of the workforce; secretaries, seamstresses, and of course electronic assembly workers.

The result of this was a specialized workforce dominated by women, who were responsible for building an extremely wide array of electronics. This would trickle down to nearly every piece of music gear one could purchase at the time. And when I say every piece of music gear, I quite literally mean everything from the transistors to the capacitors, to the footswitches, to the PCB’s.

The lone “boutique” builder phenomena was not yet in fashion, and those who did go into business fully by themselves were fighting a huge uphill battle against giants like Fender, Ampeg, and even smaller brands like Applied Audio (who built the Goya Panther Fuzz, amongst others). Nearly all of it was made in factories by a group of underpaid, but very skilled female engineers (you know what, yeah! they WERE engineers).

Fairchild Semiconductor assembly line, 1960,
credit: Marin Independent Journal

Sprague Electric factory workers test components,
credit: MASS MoCA

While I was able to find “female only” want-ads for nearly every well known electronics manufacturer in the 60s, two of them immediately stood out for playing a part in my favorite vintage fuzzes.

Fairchild Semiconductor was a leader in the production of transistors throughout the decade, and their parts can be found in everything from the Sam Ash Fuzzz Boxx to the Big Muff and countless others. But a company who’s components dominated early fuzz pedals was Massachusetts-based, Sprague Electric. I have seen their capacitors show up in pedals like the Manny’s Fuzz, the Maestro Fuzz Tone, and the ACA Fuzz King. But most famously, Sprague was responsible for the infamous circuit “blob” (precursor to the IC) found in Mosrite Fuzzrites from 1968-69, and later in the Nu-Fuzz by Rosac.

The original caption is already perfect, 1968,
credit: Bakersfield Californian

Speaking of; in an article from 1968 photographer Jack Knight took the reader on a factory tour of Mosrite of California. And in it, was this AMAZING photo above of technician Birdie Lewis hand-assembling Fuzzrites! This has to be one of my favorite images I have ever found in a newspaper database, and the main inspiration for this article.

The other example that was directly related to vintage pedals is below. Trans-Tek Mfg. was mostly known for buying old-stock bulk electronic components from various sources (including the military), and then repackaging and selling them to both manufacturers and direct to customers. Additionally, their factory in South Plainfield, NJ housed Applied Audio (mentioned above), who’s fuzz pedals were almost as ubiquitous throughout the late 1960s as Maestro’s.

Applied Audio also employed a predominantly female staff who not only built guitar pedals and amplifiers, but also the wide variety of electronic gadgets that Trans-Tek offered (like DIY kits, home alarms, and hand-held radios). And workers like Agnes Kowalcheck had the important job of checking the quality and value of each individual component before it was put to use.

credit: The Central New Jersey Home News

Those hourly rates seem insanely low…
credit: The Central New Jersey Home News

This practice, while born in the US, was not confined to it.

Below is a completely ridiculous, and somewhat famous (infamous?) image from Japan’s Sony factory in 1960; showing a line of female workers taking their hourly stretch break, while being overseen by a whistle-blowing manager.

credit: Associated Press

Absurdity aside, I do think it’s important to shine a light on this overlooked/forgotten/unknown piece of Rock & Roll history. And for me personally, it was just a super cool epiphany I was having while digging through the past; and one I had never even considered…

“WHO was sitting down, day after day, actually soldering together all of these stompboxes that I love and have dedicated so much of my time?”

And when it started to become apparent that it was almost exclusively women, I was truly blown away. And mostly because I had never heard anyone tell this story before. 

(quick, someone hit up Ken Burns!)

----------------------------------------------

By the mid 1970s many of these manufacturing companies were moving toward a hiring preference for immigrants and people of color, who’s own struggle against prejudice and discrimination forced them to take whatever jobs they could, and as a result, whatever pay was offered. This move severely undercut the already insultingly low rate women had been getting, and ultimately led to their mass exodus out of the factories and into the same types of jobs men had been afforded for decades. And by the 1990s the majority of these electronic assembly jobs would be gone; sent overseas, where the exploitation of foreign workers still pervades today.

So while the irony of sitting here writing on my laptop, that was almost certainly made somewhere in Asia for pennies, is not lost on me. I truly do wish that those millions of workers also get their due-credit (and a living wage) some day in the near future.

Dolores Hacker assembling amplifiers at the
Sunn Musical Equipment Co. factory, 1967. credit: The Oregon Daily Journal

But for now, I hope at least some of you have gained a new appreciation for the thousands of women; our grandmas, aunts, and mothers, who in the 1960s and 70s constructed everything from amplifiers to microphones to fuzz pedals; the same gear that helped create the guitar tone on your favorite album, the mind-altering synth odyssey on your favorite track, and the unforgettable sonic explosion you experienced at your all-time favorite concert. These forgotten women deserve our recognition and their long-overdo flowers, for quite literally, building Rock & Roll.

thanks for reading,
-ed

I've Joined the Substack Gravy Train!

So a couple weeks ago I decided to take the blog on the road and try out something new (to me, anyways). I created a Substack account with the intention of having another place to post about nerdy pedal history, and hopefully cast a wider net so we can collectively pull in more hidden information about our favorite pedals.

The larger posts, will for the most part, be double posted here and on Substack. But I do like the "Notes" aspect over there, which acts like a mixture of Twitter and Instagram. So those posts will only be found on Substack. Pretty much it will be all of the in-between stuff that you don't typically see in the big finished articles over here.

So if that feels like anything you might be interested in checking out, thanks! Here's the LINK.

have an awesome week,

-ed