appropriate maintenance of vintage pedals

[ombudsman]

As I'm going through my stuff and have a couple of minor issues to deal with, I was wondering if there is, or could be if we put our heads together, a consensus/conventional wisdom stance on how to go about maintenance of vintage pedals.

Part of the reason is, I have a guy that works on my gear who is very skilled, but mostly knows pro audio and hi fi gear, and guitar amps. He does play bass and has general good taste in music I would say, but he doesn't specifically know what is good in a fuzz pedal, and I can't currently hang out while he works on my stuff because he has MS and we need to keep the Covid risk to a minimum.

My base assumptions/viewpoints about this are:

1) some of these are scarce and have historical importance, at least to nuts like us. We won't live forever, so we are merely temporary caretakers, you know how that cliche goes.

2) we all have self interest in the value/future salability of the ones we own, which is affected negatively both when a pedal is not working well, and when it has been poorly worked on or modded. So in general there is some middle ground where value is optimized by the right type of servicing (not that people could not disagree about what that is in specific cases).

3) a pedal that a musician owns should work well. We aren't running museums here, and the way they sound is largely the point.

4) when a pedal has been serviced, impact on value relates to the general competence of the repair work, whether it was minimally invasive, and whether the new parts are as vintage correct as makes sense given the type of part and what is available. If there is a mod/tweak involved, typically some negative impact on value is likely, but it's subjective and it's not like you can measure these things or know exactly what you could have gotten without the mod. Also, whether prospective buyers like the mod is a factor. Given #1 above, the fan of vintage pedals should generally tend avoid mods, particularly on the older or more scarce pedals. The same for shotgun approach replacement of all electrolytic caps or carbon resistors. But it seems reasonable that something like a careful replacement of a bad cap or resistor with one of a different value due to user preference (say, more low end or output) would not cause a big hit on originality, since putting the original value component back in would not mean redoing any solder joints that haven't already changed.


These things are debatable of course, this is just a suggestion to see what others think.


Some things I was wondering about specifically are:

1) "vintage noise" ; could we come up with a standard to use as a guide to what is reasonable in a vintage fuzz ? Probably by having the user setting the pedal to subjective optimal settings and then measuring the noise floor of the output ?

2) what kinds of components can be checked without breaking solder joints ?

3) for any components we can individually check, can we identify limits as a guide to when they should be replaced ? (As far as how far they have drifted from the nominal value, or how much leakage or other measurable issues are detected)

4) are there any generally good practices to follow in component selection, such as not using a certain type or brand of cap or resistor ? Can we outline cases where the correct vintage original part should be found if possible ?

cheers