It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
The correct answer being:
"Over £200 and has top mounted jacks"
its a thorny issue, but that seems like the definitive answer.
Boutique has become a marketing term more than a definition these days. What matter more is the quality of components and construction. Boss might not be boutique but they are solid pedals with quality that is time tested. Boutique used to mean it’s made by a single person or small team, small batches. AnalogueMan for example, but people attach it to JHS who has a team of like 50 people. I also personally never thought of Strymon as boutique either. Quality yes, but not in the same vein as AnalogueMan or even….Hungry Robot. That guy is truly boutique. I think Fairfield Circuitry too can be in the same vein.
Chase Bliss is boutique….just about, it’s gotten bigger now and their set up has got more professional, Joel has hired more people, more designers like Tom from Cooper FX and Knobs to help develop things so it’s not just him. The stuff they are making though are probably the more niche and unique in a saturated market.
EQD…I dunno, like JHS I think they are almost right up there. If Behringer ad Mooer is at the one end (cheap, made to a price point), Boss and MXR below who are affordable but quality, then I feel EQD, Strymon, CBA, JHS are somewhere in between. At the very opposite end would be your 1 man band like Hungry Robot.
I guess price comes into it, and so is the size of their operation.
Large companies such as MXR/Boss are not at all.
Then you have the middle grounds such as Keeley/JHS who were 'boutique' but have really grown in size and production. They still make things in house (I think) so you could argue they are. However, Keeley are just pushing dsp after dsp, so I'm not sure it fits with the traditional pedal boutique of old.
Companies like Strymon/Source audio might not count in a guitarists eyes, as it is very digital. However I believe Strymon is all made in the USA in house. Feel free to correct me if anyone knows better
Is there an online collab venn diagram thing we could try for fun? (if venn diagrams could be called fun....)
To answer the question - for me boutique is about the personal contact. The fact that you know there’s someone who cares about the product and it’s use. Someone who concentrates more on these than on sales targets and management scorecards.
"What is the definition of a boutique pedal maker?"
"It's impossible to define, but we all know a boutique pedal maker when we see one".
Non-boutique - uses something better.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Boutique+&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CBoutique%3B%2Cc0
No third-party pick-and-place wave-soldered SMD, fer instance.
That opens up another can of worms.
Can a product as complicated as a Chase Bliss product ever be "Boutique"?
They might sell in far fewer numbers than Boss, but the tech and R&D go beyond many of the bulk manufacturers.
Selling 1 pedal a week that was assembled in a shed but needing HAL9000 to do the circuit and logic design is not boutique.
https://soundcertified.com/speaker-ohms-calculator/
(I do not consider ThorpyFX boutique, and not just for the last reason.)
"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
Eqd Speaker Cranker clone
Monte Allums TR-2 Plus mod kit
Trading feedback: http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/60602/
Paul Cochrane's TIM and Timmy were not expensive for what you got, yet he would definitely be "boutique" to my way of thinking.