Meet NotPedals.com, a marketplace that’s making boutique handmade pedals more accessible than ever
The first time I bought a handmade, boutique pedal was in 2015. I was 19, spurred into expanding my pedalboard by effusive comments on Reddit and a desperate need to try and sound like Uncle Acid And The Deadbeats. The pedal was a Fuzzhugger Algal Bloom. It was more money than I had ever spent on a single pedal ever in my life, and I had absolutely no idea if it would even make it across the Atlantic – I crossed my fingers and, two weeks later, a package arrived at my door.
It was everything I’d hoped it would be – fuzzy, weird and beautiful. And In the decade since, that pedal has rarely left my setup, even when I went down to a mini board in a moment of misguided madness. It remained consistent throughout an ever-changing rig of different drives, fuzzes, amps and guitars. I’ve played more music through it than basically any other piece of equipment, and I owe it all to going out on a limb and ordering something weird and handmade from overseas.
READ MORE: Earthquaker Devices Fuzz Master General review – “the full gamut of vintage-adjacent fuzz tones”
One person who really understands the unique joy of this is Alex Bray, founder of NotPedals.com. A Melbourne-based musician and pedal fanatic, he founded the storefront to stock strange and wonderful small-batch pedals – and to combat what he describes as a “monoculture” within the pedal world.
“I wouldn’t call myself a builder,” Bray says. “A lot of people think I am – I’ve tinkered a bit, you know, I got a Big Muff when I was 16, I played with that and modded it a bit. But I’m not a builder. But my friends are – people I know from all around the world, they’d make something and send it to me, and it would end up on my board. And I always said, ‘this is fucking cool, where are you selling these? How are you getting them into the hands of musicians?’”
The answer, he laments, was always the same. “‘Oh, I built a website’, or ‘I kinda put it on Instagram’, or ‘I put it on Reverb and it got lost amongst a million second-hand Les Pauls’. So they weren’t really finding a place to cut through, there wasn’t one central place where it could just be about pedals. So I built it.”
Alex Gray. Image: Press
Not… pedals??
You can easily see for yourself what Bray has built. NotPedals’ front page is full of pedal brands you almost certainly haven’t heard of, but you probably immediately want to know more about. I mean, an overdrive that has interchangeable little ‘fuses’ for different sounds? A pedal that does, er, something with a “???” switch and a “!!!” knob? A quad-BBD analogue delay with presets and tap-tempo?
It’s rare to see pedals like this all together. Of course, there are a few other places that do collect some rather out-there sounds – Break The Machine is one great example – but these don’t share NotPedal’s sole focus on the purely small-batch, handmade things.
“The really original stuff is harder for people to get into in a lot of ways,” Alex says, “unless you absolutely trawl Instagram, Reddit and Reverb all the time to find these tiny builders. And then shipping can be super expensive, too!” And so one of the things NotPedals aims to do is a good deal of that searching for you. “NotPedals is heavily vetted. I know every builder that is on there, I’ve spoken to and built a relationship with all of them. They’re all making really high-quality stuff that you can’t find anywhere else.”
Shipping and shopping
There are really strong communities surrounding these kinds of boutique pedals – but normally it’s a bit more builder-focused, with makers congregating in DIY-oriented spaces like /r/diypedals and freestompboxes.org. But as a consumer who doesn’t want to debate the virtues of leaded vs unleaded solder, your shopping experience is much more likely to be drawn in by the immense gravitational pull of the major retailers.
One of the most appealing things with the big retailers, over ordering something kitchen-table-assembled, is consistency. You know what you’re going to get in terms of shipping and tracking, and the returns process. NotPedals is aiming to bring that feeling to the small-batch boutique world, too. One of the most striking things about the platform is that shipping is free. Worldwide. For everything. When I receive my NotPedals products for review, they come with great tracking and arrive quickly.
How does it all work? Despite Alex being based in Melbourne, the warehouse where the goods are stocked is in Ohio, bang in the middle of the USA’s shipping corridor. “I didn’t really want to spend $70,000 creating a completely bespoke shipping solution. So I thought it would be better to ship it all from one central place,” Alex explains. “When I bring a new builder onto the platform, after I meet them and get to know them and everything, they’ll ship the first batch to our warehouse in Ohio – everything goes out from there.”
“I’ve had people emailing us, particularly US customers, saying things like ‘I ordered this last night, and I was having dinner tonight, and the guy rocked up with the pedal! The bigger brands have access to this really nice retail experience – smaller builders before NotPedals didn’t really have that. As a buyer and as a musician as well, I want that nice, smooth experience, just as good as buying a Boss pedal – you know that it’ll be fast and there’s going to be proper tracking. I think all the smaller builders deserve that.”
Part of this, obviously, helps the platform feel much more approachable. Regardless of the actual price of an item, no one likes to add something to their cart and then suddenly see £40 of postage slapped on top of things just to get it to you from America – this resonates with both me and Alex, given that we’re based in the UK and Australia respectively. And, in order to expand out the ease of the process to a wider range of customers and also help mitigate the impact of tariffs, there are plans to open an EU warehouse as well.
Culture Shift
Since I bought that Fuzzhugger in 2015, the pedal world has continued to grow. What’s notable is that the makers who were at one time definable as bonafide “boutique” brands – JHS, EQD, Walrus and even Chase Bliss – have become some of the biggest names in pedals, in the space, second only to brands like Boss and EHX.
“The crux of it is, there are five or six dominant brands – they make great stuff. But it’s become a monoculture,” says Alex. “The same stuff is in every post on socials, on Reddit, on anything in the guitar communities. If you go into a guitar shop, which I hate doing now, it’s the same things all over the place. There really isn’t as much originality anymore in that market, in my opinion. As an artist, I think that doesn’t really flow with the originality and creativity that’s meant to be there in music. We’re not selling fucking accounting software!”
Of course, all of these brands make awesome pedals, and it’s especially great that a lot of the more artistically-led brands, ones with cool graphics and out-there effects, have risen up to be part of the mainstream. However, as they grow they inherently change. The kinds of experiences, sonic or otherwise, that you get from a single-person operation are intrinsically different to those offered by a business operation that’s expecting to shift thousands of pedals.
An example: when I receive the Ploverdrive for review, it comes with a Nanoblocks model of a bird, a level of case-candy that’s extremely rare for anything other than limited-edition pedals from larger brands. Sonically, there’s also a lot more room for the totally out-there when you’re expecting to shift tens of units rather than thousands. Some of the pedals on NotPedals will be totally unusable for the vast majority of players – which can make them a great antidote to having to contemplate the creative possibilities of the same identical Instagram board for nth time that day.
The sound of a NotPedal
Bray’s own musical background is in punk, (as he puts it, “lots of Dead Kennedys influence, lots of really questionable band names”), but he was still keen to cater to all sonic tastes with the platform. “I didn’t want to back us into a corner where every pedal on there was wild and full-on. Overdrives and compression and so on all have their place. There are builders all over the world, who range from making subtle, tasteful germanium drives to the most fucking crazy self oscillating tremolo-Fuzz-Face-thing. I connected with a real mix of people.”
Something else Alex notes is that some advances in tech have opened some sonic foors for smaller builders. “People have really broadened out from doing modified TS9s or Blues Drivers into potentially some really high-end sonic territory. I just got a Surreal Audio Echo Sphere – the stuff this pedal does compared to what I thought was a ‘boutique pedal’ even three years ago, is right up there with, I think anything else you can get on the market – it’s an all-analogue delay with preset banks, tap tempo, subdivisions and different LFOs. It’s crazy”.
Coupled with technical advancements, Bray highlights the agility of brands like these. “They’re the jet skis vs the oil tankers. They can turn on a dime and make something fucking weird that maybe won’t sell a lot – which is great. I personally don’t want another Centaur – I want something that is going to be like the Centaur is now but in 15, 20 years.”
For Bray, this forward-looking approach is essential – as that growth continues, we need more builders who fill those niches within the boutique community – and not just the unobtanium niche. “I was speaking to JHS and they’ve been super supportive from the day I emailed them cold!” Bray says. “I just said, I’m launching this thing. You’re a pedal guy, Josh, what do you think?’ – and their point of view is that there’s probably a lot of the new guard of pedals on NotPedals right now. A lot of the brands that no one knows about yet, but in ten years, they could be another JHS.”
A deeper look
Given the variety of sounds to be had from NotPedal’s catalogue, it’s only fair that we actually get our ears around what the storefront can offer. Alex kindly agreed to ship us three NotPedals pedals to check out – the Emerald Ox GLTTR!, the Galahcore FX Ploverdrive and the Monkey Riot Pedals Rippletron. You can check out our review of the Emerald Ox GLTTR! tomoreow – and hold onto your cochleas, as it’s the wildest of the bunch.
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
