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Re: Clone pedals taken to another level?

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 6:23 pm
by Single coil
Boss stuffs mean

Re: Clone pedals taken to another level?

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 6:51 pm
by WellyBlues
My philosophy is along the line of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". If I managed to come up with something innovative and was done out of the rewards by copiers I would get nasty, if I could. Bit hard when it's some shitty shed in the back blocks of a very foreign country. Next best thing I can do for now is not support the bastards.

Re: Clone pedals taken to another level?

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 7:40 pm
by kwhelan
they do R & D for war machines, stealth jets etc and to be fair I 'd hardly call USA a good example of straight up fair play and patents. people have been killed, companies destroyed and spying has been around long before the chinese were even producing. legal force has broken many weaker companies and its dog eat dog, survival of the fittest.
Not excusing the chinese as they seem prepared to cheat and have no conscience with people lives with food and medical clones.
Apparently even the good stuff like cameras, when production runs are ordered in china they just run off thousands of more product than the customer ordered and deny it so some of the clones are actually genuine as it were.

Re: Clone pedals taken to another level?

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 7:55 pm
by Terexgeek
handsoffmatt wrote:It may come as no surprise to learn that innovation is expensive. Good ideas rarely pop out of nowhere. Whether it comes from one dude in his garage, or a corporate team of designers.....there is a lot of blood, sweat and tears that go into any original design. There's a lot of time, equipment, materials and just straight-up man hours in designing even something as simple as a new pedal (that's not a thinly-veiled clone).

It's this which makes the "clone culture" a hard pill to swallow for anyone who's spent any time within the industry. It sucks when any designer, at any level, puts months or years of effort into a well-thought out design, then someone else (be it an offshore manufacturer, or a "boutique" pedal builder ) simply clones the circuit, paints a new enclosure and reaps the rewards. There's very little cost in this - they are quite simply profiting from someone else's hard work.

People sometimes love to rag on us (Roland / BOSS) because we're the "big guys"..... but the reality is that there are real humans in our company that are intensely passionate to innovate new products and work long hours over many months at a time to do so. We strive to constantly innovate and create new market segments and it's a glorious feeling when one of our "out of the box" ideas becomes a commercial success.

To then have a company just rip off our design and start undercutting us in the marketplace (since they have no R&D costs to recoup) actually feels like a personal insult sometimes.

But hey....that is the way the world is now. Guess we gotta live with it.
Matt, for what it's worth, the work, the innovation, the value and the quality that Boss/Roland has put into it's products has not gone un-noticed. Boss/Roland has inspired me to purchase a new amp, trained me on tone shaping with my GT-8, taught me about wah and Uni-vibes as well as being my first distortion with the turbo distortion back in the late eighties, did I mention the looping that I prefer the Boss option to the Digitech? Being a Dad/husband first and a guitar nerd second I can't stretch to a three hundred dollar booteek pedal with true tap bypass tempo and a handmade finish, but Boss will have a stomp box that will plug in and sound great straight out of the box that I can buy new without upsetting the significant other. And fuck, once the drummer starts I can't hear booteek from buffered digital. Choice between a Chinese clone and a Boss option? I will buy Boss, unless you don't make it or can't supply it!

Re: Clone pedals taken to another level?

Posted: Tue Feb 05, 2019 8:09 pm
by kwhelan
I guess japanese copied the british especially with early cars and stereo amps ,tv's etc, and most musical instruments, pianos guitars keyboards, , then the koreans copied them, and now its the chinese turn