JHS Pedal owner Josh Scott has found the prototype for the Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail – a legendary reverb pedal made famous by John Frusciante, Jim Root and countless more.
Scott, who is one of the world's foremost effects pedal historians, has been hunting down the OG pedal for some time, all the while being told a prototype didn’t actually exist. That changed when he paid a visit to the Electro-Harmonix archives to research his soon-to-be-published book, Made on Earth for Rising Stars.
Created with illustrator Daniel Danger and six years in the making, the book explores the history and artistic impact of Electro-Harmonix through a series of interviews, musings on creativity, and, as Danger puts it, “the deepest of dives into guitar pedal nerdom.”
It's ironic that a pedal called the Holy Grail would, in fact, become Scott's holy grail. He sees it as the crème de la crème stompbox by what he believes is “one of the greatest companies in American history when it comes to innovation.”
It was during the research process that the prototype – which does exist – was discovered.
“We were digging in the basement at Electro-Harmonix,” Scott, speaking on a YouTube live stream dated January 26, says. “We'd always ask, but we were always met with, ‘Nah, there are no prototypes.’ At some point, you're like, ‘There has to be prototypes.’”
He can’t remember whether it was he or Danger that found it. But find it they did.
“To my memory, we were packing up one day, after interviewing some engineers,” he continues. “Then all of a sudden Owen, who’s Mike's [Matthews, founder and owner] son and works in artist relations, goes, ‘Have you been down to the basement?’
“This building is massive, it's in Queens, and it's like half a city block. The basement is for R&D and tube storage, but he means the basement basement.”
And there it was. With a stainless steel front plate, with “Holy Grail 1, handle with care” scrawled upon it in Sharpie, and “insane” wiring beneath it.
At its heart is a chip that has since revolutionized pedal making.
“In 2000, Mike Matthews goes to this trade show, and he sees this chip set, the Crystal CS4811,” Scott adds. “With it, you can essentially load in their pre-programmed algorithms, and you can mess around with it and tweak it.
“This is a big deal; it's the beginning of simple DSP (Digital Signal Processing) for guitar players. This unit, to my knowledge, is the world's first digital spring reverb unit. Mike Matthews saw the opportunity, had it in the hands of an engineer, and produced a product before anyone else.
“Now, what's funny is that the original units shipped with three reverb sounds on the outside, but some people figured out that you could hack it and have eight total sounds via the dip-switches,” Scott then says.
As he explains, though there were eight dip-switches inside, each unlocking different characters, the pedals had a simple three-way switch on their face.
What happens next, now that Scott has the lost prototype in his magic hands, remains to be seen, but the book is now available for pre-order, and it's being published by Jack White's company, Third Man Books.
Jack White and JHS collaborated on a wacky delay pedal, the Troika Delay, last year. It's well worth checking out.
See Third Man Records for more info on the book.
