Stompbox Innovators | Josh Scott | JHS Pedals

Josh Scott and Eilon Paz are the classic trope of unlikely friends. At the same time, if you know their histories, you realize it’s not that unlikely. Both Eilon and Josh grew up in the sticks (the main difference is that Josh grew up in Mississippi and Eilon grew up in rural Israel), they both loved music from an early age and they both have fairly obsessive personalities. The main difference is that Josh has been collecting guitar pedals for the better part of two decades, and Eilon only fell down the rabbit hole of guitar pedal history a few years ago. When Josh was invited to collaborate with Eilon on his books Stompbox: 100 Pedals of the World’s Greatest Guitarists and Vintage & Rarities: 333 Cool, Crazy and Hard to Find Guitar Pedals, he also invited Eilon out to visit the JHS Headquarters, to photograph his massive guitar pedal collection in person and to participate in a live episode of The JHS Show (Josh’s popular YouTube series) plugging the new book.

When Eilon described this visit, I immediately thought of Willy Wonka. For him, stepping onto the JHS Pedals production floor produced the same kind of feeling that the kids in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory felt when they stepped into the Chocolate Room for the first time. They’d been picturing the inside of this magical factory for years. Would the genuine article actually live up to their imaginations?

In both cases, the answer is a resounding yes. And if JHS Pedals is the musical equivalent of a chocolate factory, then Josh Scott is its Willy Wonka. 

“The highlight of the tour isn’t what you’d expect. It’s a beat-up drawer–the JHS equivalent of that one junk drawer in the kitchen where all the dried out pens and thermometers end up.”

Founded as a pedal-modding business in 2007 and officially launched in 2008, JHS Pedals has created a company where the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. Based out of Kansas City, MO, JHS headquarters is an oddball mix of aesthetics, equal parts neo-modern conservative and Saturday morning cartoon. Not surprising considering that the company’s best-selling pedals have names like the Whitey Tighty Compressor, the Charlie Brown Overdrive and the Space Commander Boost/Chorus/Reverb. 

It makes perfect sense to find a plastic figure of Dot Warner (the Warner sister of Animaniacs fame) on a shelf alongside a guitar pedal worth thousands of dollars. And what’s really funny is that this isn’t meant to be ironic. Josh Scott–founder and CEO of JHS Pedals and a self-confessed pedal fanatic–sees them as equally valuable.

There’s also a way-too-enjoyable-to-fake feeling of camaraderie on the production floor. Although Josh Scott technically towers above his employees (as shown in the photo below, the man is roughly 6 ½ feet tall), he always has time to get down on their level and discuss a detailed issue about shipping parts, building pedals– or just to chew the fat about the latest album from Tame Impala. It’s not unusual for coworkers to pile into a car and go straight from work to a Madison Cunningham concert. It’s the kind of enjoyable, laid-back but active work environment that every startup strives for, but few actually achieve. It’s taken the better part of two decades– including lengthy experiments to determine whether a four or five-day workweek suited them better –but by now the JHS team has pedal-building down to a science.

The highlight of the tour isn’t what you’d expect. It’s a beat-up drawer–the JHS equivalent of that one junk drawer in the kitchen where all the dried out pens and thermometers end up. The contents are dumped onto a table, and Josh explains that these are the rejects, the one-offs, the prototypes that they experimented with but ultimately never made it past R&D.

The Autowa Auto-Wah is a prototype auto-wah that never made it to production.

The Count Wacula (the name is a play on the cereal brand “Count Chocula”) Wah was meant to be a wah-wah pedal fixed without the treadle. Instead of using your foot on the treadle, you would turn the knob and it fixes on the frequency and stays there.

The Dino Drive is a Franken-RAT circuit that has actually been featured on the JHS Show before, but thus far this prototype is the only version in existence. 

The Six Knob Overdrive Prototype is an alternate Morning Glory. It actually has nothing to do with the Morning Glory circuit-wise, but it’s another interpretation of a low-gain overdrive.

The Pax Prix was meant to be a super simple preamp. Josh created this in collaboration with an artist who wanted to take the preamp section out of his tape echo and put that specific effect in its own box. Josh reverse-engineered the preamp section of his actual tape delay pedal and, thus, the Pax Prix (pronounced packs-pree) was born. 

Unnamed Overdrive Prototype. Josh knew that this was an Unnamed Overdrive Prototype (Car Stamp), but other than that we have no details on this pedal whatsoever. Because that’s how pedal history is sometimes, guys: even the inventors have no clue what they invented.

JHS Pedals has cycled through a few different mottos over the years (including the call to “just try stuff,” the truth bomb that “if it sounds good, it is good,” and the self-deprecating but sincere admonition that “JHS Pedals suck”) –but this slogan may sum up the strange, enjoyable, unique atmosphere of this pedal-building team the best: “Companies don’t make pedals, people do.” A pedal crafted at JHS isn’t merely slapped together on a production line. It’s tested, soldered, programmed and boxed by a team of builders who take pride in the work they do, and a large part of that comes from working for a company–and a boss–who actually respects them. 

Safe to say, Josh is too freakishly tall to pull off any sort of Undercover Boss-style caper, but if he did we have a pretty good idea what his employees would say: “JHS Pedals rocks.”