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It always amazes me the amount of different pedals and other gizmos people buy, and then end up selling a few weeks/months later cos they've found the next greatest overdrive/fuzz/chorus etc on the road to the perfect tone...
Not sure about the helix killing the market. As a helix owner I always use my pedals over the fx on the helix. YMMV and all that jazz
We hit "Peak pedal" ages ago. Since then guitar music has been declining, the drop in value of the pound means fewer rare pedals from the US are coming over, and the churn through overdrive pedals is much reduced. When the online world meant people like me could find pedals they'd never imagined before, it was this whole new world. For the younger generations who have grown up with the internet, it's passe.
You also have to factor in tightening budgets for the consumer and I'd say a bit of awareness that you don't need a £200 analog chorus for the one song you have in your pub set that needs some warble. From my observations, you've got a drop in price on the secondhand pedal market for a number of the usual boutique names but the old faithful like Boss are either level or increased. Undoubtedly though the Mooer stuff have had an effect as well as the digital options for modulation and delay etc, not so much for overdrive.
One last thing: I'd also suggest that the US market has lost a bit of its lustre now we have some excellent builders over here. You don't need to pay those import duties for US pedals now you have the like of Thorpy doing his work.
That’s the practical stuff - but I also really dislike the Emperor’s New Clothes approach of a lot of (although not all) smaller builders, and the now established cliché of the generic pedalboard with some variation on the same collection of must-have pedals irritates me for some reason. It’s become formulaic and boring.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Pedals are fun, but not nearly as fun as music.
My current music making is all about pedals, but I can only afford so many
I like soft-switches and would rather have flat cases because my feet rarely get near them, so the knobs are in no danger.
Funnily, I get some of my sounds from a fairly old Vox Tonelab ST as well as the more expensive and other-worldly things I love to buy, and I'm quite happy to buy something second-hand and cheap rather than brand new and pricey.
There's also definitely a trend of people being prepared to pay more for single stomp boxes than ever. When the market started to really take off a few years back it was people with mainly Boss, maybe a Keeley modded TS, maybe an MXR or something but you'd be looking at about 80 quid new and 50/60 quid second hand. People are now seemingly happy to pay 200+ for a TS or Muff clone. You look at a board now with Strymon, Chase Bliss, Eventide, JHS, Wampler, Xotic and these guys have dropped like 2/3k on pedals.
I've got an AX8 which can probably cover 95% of what my collection of pedals can but there's something so alluring about those shiny little boxes of joy that I can't get away from.
Been through enough pedals to realise that a vast amount are subtle variations on decades old designs.
Haven't bought or sold anything since Oct 2017 and no plans to do so.
I own an all Boss board including 2x Boss drives and I'm more content now than I was when I owned £600 worth of OD's on a Pedaltrain Jr.
I keep banging on about this but the Boss stuff is intuitive and it sounds great. I recently played my first gig with my band with a proper stage set up inc monitors mic'd up amps etc. We'd only ever done an open mic type event prior to this and I was really happy with the sound and felt confident with my pedalboard setup.