vampirate

The DOD FX87 Edge Pedal
Warning: this will probably bore non-muso gearheads.


It also appears to have been sold under the bathetic moniker "FX87 Psycho Acoustic Processor". ("Psychoacoustic Processor," what they intended, is dry and boring, but because they forgot the hyphen when splitting up the word "psychoacoustic", it ended up sounding like something way far out.)

I picked up the Edge pedal a couple of years ago at Music-Go-Round, my favorite music store ever, for two reasons:

1) It was $25. I'll buy pretty much any piece of electronic musical equipment for $25: pedals, rack gear, whatever, especially if it looks like someone has discarded it as useless. This is partly why I like Music-Go-Round so much.
2) There was the vaguest chance that it might have possibly been manufactured with the intention of making you sound like Dave Evans, which would have meant that the people at the D.O.D. Electronics Corporation are way cooler than anything else in Salt Lake City, Utah.

It has one knob, rather dryly labeled "process," and an LED level meter, presumably to reassure you that it's actually doing something. I figured, from its name, it would probably be some sort of upper-range boost to help you "cut through" the rest of the band in a live situation. Upon playing with it at home, that was pretty much what it did: when I clicked it on, my tone got a little more strident - there may have even been some kind of aural exciter-type of effect going on (see footnote 1), and the couple of times that I brought it to band practice, it did indeed help me sear through the sonic soup when I stepped on it. However, at the time, not only did the band I was in practice in a hideously acoustically live basement, but our ostensible "leader" was a patently awful guitar player who was always unnecessarily loud and had a caustically painful tone as well. Nobody needed anything else to "cut" anymore, so I tossed the pedal on the pile of most of the other crap I'd wasted $25 on.

I bought a different used stomp box the other day, and looked up the manual online. I figured that perhaps I could find other manuals online as well, and I did indeed find the manual for the (discontinued) Edge pedal on DOD's website. I was not prepared for what I found. I'm sure this info is copyrighted, but I'm also sure DOD could really care less. Get a load of it:

What the fuck? I've bored more than one person by prattling on about Fourier transforms, phasing effects, multiband compression, the precendece effect, quantization noise, and a host of other technical jargon, but that still made no sense to me, especially the part about "indirect frequency pre-emphasis." Huh?

I mean, I'm still probably not going to use this pedal. I'm definitely not going to use it live, as I am all about a stripped-down pedal set in a live situation. I don't get those guys who have pedal boards crammed with a dozen different things. In 99% of the places you play, the sound isn't good enough to distinguish the difference between your Electro-Harmonix Expensive Vintage Analog Swirl pedal and your Boss Super Chorus. Even where someone in the audience CAN notice the differencd between stepping on your OD-1 and your TS-9, 99% of them can't tell and don't care.

But I digress. I love the FX87 for its utter obscurity, its obscurity of purpose, obscurity of apparent function, its rarity, and now (and not the least!) the obscurity of its documentation. I can't believe I'm going to have a real conclusion to this, but here it comes. In this modern world of megacorporate streamlining in the name of an ever increasing profit margin, the world needs more wacko, experimental, fringe-designed gadgets like this one. Life will be boring if we all end up buying our Arion Distortions at Wal-Mart.

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1. The aural exciter (along with the Remo Powerstroke 3 drum head) is among one of the best-named pieces of equipment ever. My aural exciter, the Aphex-104, also has a bass expander circuit named, and I am not making this up, "Big Bottom."