Yeah, pedals are really the wild west of gear, so much of the market is snake oil and go faster stripes. I had a brief interest in modding some of my Boss lads but I never got round to it - does the Keeley mod really make your SD-1 sound like a vintage tubescreamer? Sounds alright as it is, why sink £30 into a pedal that cost £20 s/h? Blue LEDs innit (lol brexit).
An aside re pedals - there's an interview with Chris Spedding from about 1973, when he was the no1 session man in london, where the interviewer asks him why he gets so much work, and he goes into an incredibly circumspect description of this magic orange box that only he owns that makes the guitar sound like an organ, which producers are prepared to pay him extra to use on sessions. It must be an MXR phase90 he's describing - it reminded me of the Sound On Sound article about Cher's "Believe", where the producers span some bullshit explanation of the vocal sound being achieved with a vocoder and talkbox, because they didn't want to spill the beans about autotune, it being a sort of dirty little secret of the industry at the time. Or my theory that Dave Davies bullshat the story about slashing the speaker cone because they didn't want other groups to copy their guitar sound, probably achieved with an early fuzzbox or rangemaster, and liked the idea of them carving up their costly equipment to no avail. But I fear we've been through this before and it all got quite heated, so I'll stop now bye.
