The Steel Guitar Forum

hi there, was just wondering if anyone had thoughts about the first effects pedals - when they were first around? i have a 1940 national catalog with a volume pedal, and i know dearmond made a tremolo pedal in the late 40's. how about tape echo/wire echoes like the binson - anything earlier? how about reverb? did the steel players in the 30's and 40's have any access to reverb outside the studio?
any other effects that ive passed over?
thanks!
chris

The earliest "studio" effects was probably what Les Paul did.

Reverb wasn't heard of in early recordings. It's been reported the first time a recording had "reverb" in Nashville was when a recording was made at a hotel and they used the elevator shaft for the reverb delay. Probably in the 50's, as early recording was not done in Nashville. e.g. Eddy Arnold did most of his recording in Chicago according to Little Roy Wiggins.

The effects "pedals" didn't come about until transistor days. I have a Danelectro reverb unit in the mid 60's but it was a large rectangular box with tubes and the reverb sping assembly inside. It wasn't all electronic. The first "pedal" reverbs probably used the old "bucket brigade" IC chip from the 70's.

I'm pretty sure the Maestro (Gibson) FZ-1 fuzz pedal was the first "effect pedal" made, I think it came out in the early 60s.

I don't remember seeing amplifiers with either reverb or tremolo until the late 50's ~ early 60's era either.

The first dedicated reverb devices date to the mid-1930's. Developed by Bell Labs for Laurens Hammond, it stood four feet tall, hardly a "pedal" device. Hammond's engineers developed the significantl;y smaller "necklace reverb" for their smaller tone cabinet enclosures and introduced it in 1959. Development of an even smaller unit, which eventually became the Accutronics Type 4, began in 1960, but this was still not adaptable for a pedal.

The early "Echoplex" and other tape delay devices soon followed, but it was the late 1970's before a unit with both delay AND reverb, the Roland Space Echo 301 came on the market. This was the smallest unit yet but still a tabletop device. Not long afterwards analog "bucket brigade" delay units began to appear, using circuits that could be made small enough to fit into a pedal device, and the race was on with all manner of Phasers, Flangers, Delay and Reverb units popping up like weeds, all utilizing analog signal storage technology.

It is notable that the earliest reverb sounds on recordings came from placing mics and speakers in large enclosed spaces. By the mid-1950's most large recording studios had acquired steel plate reverb units but it was only with the development of digital delay technology the modern era began....

Here is a link that might amuse and edify: http://www.accutronicsreverb.com/

Ecco Fonic tape echo preceeded Echoplex, coming on the market in -58. Ray Butts built a limited run of Echosonic amps with an inbuilt tape echo in the early part of the 50's, made famous by Chet and Scotty Moore. Premier also had a reverb tank available early on, might have been before Fender did. None of these of course weren't pedals.