I recently sold a modded Marshall Blues breaker 2 pedal to a Trademe member in Shannon. Details on the mod can be found here, his feedback is here. He sent me an email that I was so pleased to get because this guy got exactly why I mod pedals.
Here is the email:
Hi Dave,
I have received the blues breaker pedal and I have had a few days to try it out. It’s great. I am happy with the condition of it and the sound is really nice. It is very versatile. I can use it over all the channels of my favourite amplifier and in both boost and distortion modes it enhances the sound nicely. I am sure you have heard all the details before so I won’t go into them.
The modified Blues Breaker leaves all my other unmodified overdrive and distortion pedals (Boss Ibanez and DOD) for dead in versatility and sound quality. I can’t see me using the others again unless I can get you to modify them. I am considering buying another modified Blues Breaker, just in case something happens to this one. I wouldn’t be happy playing without it now. I had given up using overdrive and distortion pedals because I was never really happy with the sound quality, they could sound OK with a band or in a recording but even then I was constantly tweaking them because there was always something missing or something that bugged me. When practising alone by myself they had a time limit on how long they could be inspiring and became tiring. I was happy just using the different channels on the amp instead and I had put my overdrive and distortion pedals away, one of them I still can’t find, I don’t know where I have put it. Compared to the modified Blues Breaker my other pedals don’t sound real. It enhances the sound quality of the amp where the others take away from it. With the other pedals I usually could find only one combination of settings on the pedal that would work for me and as I said I was always tweaking them moving a knob half a millimeter or less here or there to try and improve it. With this pedal so far have found a variety of sounds that I am happy with and I have only just started with it. The other great thing about it is the lack of unwanted noise. The amp is very clean in that way even when dirty and the other pedals dirtied it up with the wrong kind of dirt.
After having given up on using overdrive and distortion pedals preferring to get my overdrive and distortion from the amplifier (at least it sounded real and was of good quality, though the potential for variety was less) I saw your on auctions on Trademe and went on checkout your website. I realised that it wasn’t me being to fussy and expecting the impossible from overdrive and distortion pedals but others had seen or heard it as well. You described problems with pedals that I had been struggling with, it all rang very true. That was what gave me the incentive to give them another try and I am very glad that I have done so. I will be wanting more as the finances allow.
I was planning to send my TS 10 to you for the mod the middle of next week. Will it be OK to do that?
Thanks Dave for the great service.
Regards,
Tony.
Here’s my emailed reply to Tony.
Hi Tony,
What a great email to recieve. Today I had two emails chasing up slow deliveries from NZ Post, one was for a pedal that I only sent 2 days ago. Some people are hard to please 🙂
Really thrilled with your comments and they endorse why I do this, stock pedals are unfortunately designed well and manufactured at the lowest cost possible so many shortcuts are taken which result ion the pedal design being compromised to a point where it no longer functions as it was designed to. A few cents on a few critical components virtually destroys a good design. The wah pedals are probably the best examples of this, but also most ‘dirt’ pedals.
What I am doing isn’t rocket science, it’s not even hard, it’s bloody simple in fact. It’s just a case of one of my life mantras being true – sometimes a little can achieve a lot.
I’ll never make a living from it, and I don’t want to, I have a decent income totally independent of the music biz. What I want to do is reach people who care about their tone and making it as good as it can be.
When you find people like that, it makes it all worthwhile, because while I sell and do make a few dollars from this, the real incentive for me making people happy and appreciating what I can do for them.
Another life mantra of mine is “Getting people to pay you for work is easy, getting satisfaction from your work is much harder, but worth looking for”
I sign off every email and answer to a question with the phrase “All the best”. There’s a reason for that. I think you’ve found that out. Awesome.
All the best,
Dave Stewart.