Private Reserve
Six years ago when I started Spiral Electric FX one of my guiding principles was to be irreverent, and use whatever I felt like, and mix whatever I thought looked cool, or sounded interesting. This philosophy led to me using my own stash of parts to make pedals. Some of the early pedals had knobs off of my old guitars, military, Ham, and hi-fi gear. They also had electronic parts that I bought from swap meets and old electronics stores, mixed with cutting-edge tech like the now discontinued Nanolog N2 Molecular Junction.
Eventually my knob stash was depleted, but my electronics stash has only grown. Most of this stash is onsie-twosie parts - not enough to do a full run. These super cool, and in some cases one-of-a-kind parts, need a home. They aren’t doing anyone any good as a piece in a collection.
As a bit of a return to my roots I am making what I call the Private Reserve. I will be using select electronic parts from my personal stash to make “Premium” versions of my circuits. For example the Premium Fuzz uses two 2N167 Germanium transistors in Q1 and Q2. They are the only two in my stash, well now they are in a pedal, your pedal. There will be another Premium Fuzz, but it will contain entirely different transistors, whatever I have in my stash that sounds amazing to me.
The Private Reserve line will feature a consistent Black/Gold look, because well, as I mentioned previously my personal knob stash is all gone. The look is reminiscent of a Les Paul Custom or a Dom Perignon champagne label. Each will come with a signed certificate detailing which parts are inside. Also a laser-etch of my signature will be on the bottom with the date that I built that specific pedal. They will also come in special hardwood versions of our wood box. There will only be very few of these pedals built every year. It really depends upon what I have in my stash that I believe deserves to be turned into sound.
A lot of love and care went into these pedals. But my hope is that players will slap Velcro right over the top of my signature on the back, and head straight to a gig, practice, or studio. Thanks for joining me on this journey, and thanks for making a beautiful ruckus.
For the introduction of the Private Reserve line I have built three pedals. The details of what has gone into each pedal is on their respective pages, as well as included on their individual certificates.
