For this projects workshop I am going to work with Taz Sharp and Jack Davies and we are going to be building a killswitch pedal.
Firstly I'll start with the history of pedals and what kind of pedals there are. There are many various forms of effect units due to the different need of musicians throughout the years. The different kind of effect units are as follows: Stompboxes, Built in effects, Rackmounts and Multi effects/tabletop units. Then these following different formats of effects units are broken down into overdrive, distortion, fuzz, chorus, flanger, phaser, delay, tuner, pitch shifter, reverb, looper, compressor and many more which I will go into detail later on.
The first effects unit that was ever made was made in 1940's after Les Paul started to experiment with different recording techniques and started to manipulate reel-to-reel recording tapes. This then had inspired many other musicians and recording/audio engineers. The first ever effects unit, the Trem-trol 800 was first released in 1948 by DeArmond. The effect on this unit was the tremolo which is a modulation effect that changes volume of your signal rhythmically. The Trem-Trol has a small tank filled with conductive fluid. The unit itself was expensive, fragile and heavy therefore it was not ideal to use on stage in a live performance situation.
Then during the 50's brands started to produce amplifiers with built in effects making it efficient for musicians to use in studio as well as live. Some of the first effects that were built into amplifiers were gain, delay and reverb. In the 1960's distortion, overdrive and fuzz pedals got popular due to the demands of musicians and the rise of rock and roll. The Gibson Maestro FZ-1 Fuzztone was released in 1961 and was made famous by Keith Richards from the rolling Stones after he had used it on the track '(I can't get no) Satisfaction'. Since that moment there had been many other variations of distortion based pedals in order to fulfil the markets demands.