[cyrano]

Originally Posted by karbomusic

One reason I scaled back building circuits for people was simply not having time but the other reason was having a conscious. I had a pedal I designed and it had a switch that selected between all odd harmonics or odd+even. I used some germanium diodes in a particular config to achieve this (very common trick really). I actually designed it as boost, because it resulted in just about enough extra gain to use it that way...

The thing I found is no matter how I worded things, end users would latch on to and invent things they heard such as "wow, I can really hear the sweetness of those 2nd order harmonics when the germaniums switch in" - except it was actually switching them out and so on. I realized it's not that hard to sell a whole lot of imaginary mojo.

One point there is users are dying for magical mojo to believe in and the marketing and god knows how many companies just milk that need.

THIS!