Premier guitar Bill Finnegan article

[Jmilla]

I'm just curious what everyone thinks about the new article? http://www.premierguitar.com/articles/20210-builder-profile-klons-bill-finnegan

[madbean]

Learned a little more about the history of the Klon than I knew, so that's cool. But seriously...the last couple of paragraphs 

[Jmilla]

Lol my thoughts exactly

[madbean]

He started making the Klon in 94 and produced it for almost 15 years before the first clone showed up. And, the plethora of clones out there now are a direct consequence to the absence of the Klon from the pedal market for most of the last 4 years now. Not because it was reverse engineered. The KTR was in production for what...6 months? If anything, the demand for clones shows that the KTR would continue to be successful if he would just get his act together. Or, if he went back to making the original Klon he would make a killing. Charge $450 for a new run of gold horsies. People will buy it. Get over yourself and GBTW.

Not that I have strong feelings about it.

[Cortexturizer]

Very interesting article, I loved it.
Although yeah, the last few paragraphs sound a bit to bitter to me...

[jubal81]

He could probably make more than $1,000 per pedal for the rest of his life and he's complaining that his work has become iconic.

At least that's the way I'm reading it ...

I think if I invented the next Big Muff or Tube Screamer I'd be pretty happy about it.

[culturejam]

The market really does abhor a vacuum.

And I since Mr. Finnegan deems cloners to be "unscrupulous", I wonder what he has to say about Analogman? Most of his products are clones of things no longer in production (or that went out of production for a time). I personally think it's great that AM is offering once-defunct circuits to the people that want them.

Not that I have strong feelings about it.

[neve1272]

liked the read never heard a klon in person just clones ....and i dont think it sounds like a twin ive recorded twins..good pedal just saying

but great read thanks for posting

[madbean]

I dunno why but this got me pretty riled up. The guy invents a great product, it's a cash cow and was produced in secrecy for about as long as a patent would last, and now he is a victim? Just as an analogy: pharmaceutical companies spend millions on R&D, and then have a window of what, 10-15 years on a patented product before it goes generic? Does GlaxoSmithKline go out of business after they create and produce a successful drug? No. They build on that success. They make better products, or new ones at least. Or even closer to home: how many billions of Muff clones are there? I hear EHX is doing pretty well.

He has all the advantages before him: the name, the product, the desire on the part of the consumer. The guy is clearly his own worst enemy. If he can't find someone to fab his circuit for him, unlike the rest of the world of electronics, then go back to through hole production. Hire a couple talented builders to stuff the boards, he does the final assembly, done. He doesn't even need a distributor. Direct sales on a $450 pedal means a whole lot of profit. Dang, I would design him a 1590BB though-hole Klon PCB gratis, NDA and everything, if he would just SOGOTP (edit: okay maybe I'm going too far, haha).

Okay...now I'm spent. I got a bit of KDS. Klon Derangement Syndrome. I honestly want the guy to succeed. He deserves it. But really....I mean...c'mon man!

[juansolo]

EDIT: I started typing this before 'beans post above We seem to have the same opinion and get equally as riled up by the whole fiasco.

I still stand by that the man is his own worst enemy. Countless times he's had opportunities to make a killing on his* design and he's made a balls up of it. Most of it's just common sense. He's had, for years, a baying market out there wanting him to make the pedal and yet he doesn't. The Klone market ONLY exists because the pedal became unobtainable either because it was OOP and stupidly expensive on the 2nd hand market. Yet still, people would pay him shitload for a pedal made by him and what's he doing? Nothing, not a f**king thing. But he'll bitch about it. He'll bitch about people making money from his design. Mate, YOU could make money from your design. Why the f**k aren't you?!

*to this day I don't believe he had much to do with the design of the circuit... If he did, would he need Paul C to design a switchable buffer or the two MIT guys to 'collaborate' and help design it. Likewise two years to do a layout for the KTR.

[culturejam]

The guy invents a great product, it's a cash cow and was produced in secrecy for about as long as a patent would last, and now he is a victim?

I don't know why some guys think that ONE CIRCUIT is going to pay the bills for a decade or more. Electronics of any kind is a fast-paced business. If you're standing still, you're dead.

[midwayfair]

Well, I'll have some sympathy for the guy if no one else will.

Imagine building the same pedal, and only that pedal, every day for the rest of your life. You don't have time to build anything else, or experiment, because so many people want to buy your thing. And because you spent so much time getting it right, you're convinced no one else can duplicate your work. You don't have time to release anything else because you don't have the time to dedicate to new projects that you had to devote to your old project. Eventually someone reverse engineers your work ... you've been careful about who you sell to because you have a reputation to protect, but other people aren't, so opinions start to pop up that aren't glowing reviews of the pedal. You see the writing on the wall and you're sick of doing the same thing over and over again, so you give it a rest, and then even more of the clones pop up. Then you go on the forums and everyone's saying absurd things about it and saying really nasty things about you, saying that you're lazy for not continuing to build something that has consumed the last 10-15 years of your life, or saying that you're a ridiculous person who no one should take seriously, and so forth. Why would you go out of your way to make those people happy?

And let's top it all off with you live in a city with a high cost of living, so even a small loss of market share can harm your standard of living, which isn't that good to begin with -- you still live in an apartment, and you're probably not saving much money, either. Even seeing that your pedal has been reverse engineered means that you need to make a decision: Will someone clone my pedal? What if people stop paying my asking price because it's being reproduced much cheaper (say, $62?)? You need to make a decision now -- and you decide that you need to find work without such reliance on a fickle marketplace where you can't compete. So you stop production and start obsessively testing a method of someone else reproducing your product to your specifications. In the time it takes you to do that, everyone and their brother is flooding the market with copies of your circuit, and by the time it takes to actually launch the product, the forum situation has really gotten out of hand and it just seems really stupid. To top it all off, you're not entirely happy with the work the fab house did, so you have to go back to the drawing board.

At what point in that does everyone think it's reasonable for the guy to just go do something else without everyone saying nasty things about them? Or is it just that he gave his opinion in an interview?

Does he have an overinflated opinion of the components in his pedal? Maybe. That could be ignorance -- he's not an engineer, after all. But if he's convinced that the components matter that much, he really does have more experience than anyone else on the planet and certainly has a right to be distressed when other people claim that theirs sounds "exactly the same as" his, when he knows that at least one component is different (whether or not he understands that that component is duplicable).

Even PaulC stopped building the Tim, for some of the same reasons Bill F stopped building his pedal ... and the clone market for Tim-alikes is much, much smaller (even including the Lovepedal nonsense).

[juansolo]

Dang, I would design him a 1590BB though-hole Klon PCB gratis, NDA and everything, if he would just SOGOTP (edit: okay maybe I'm going too far, haha).

You'd have to wait 2 years while he tested it to make sure it sounded the same. Then he'd have to let you use his secret stash of germ diodes...

[alanp]

He really should have outsourced, maybe approached EHX to do some kind of partnership deal or something (M M sounds like a great guy, from what I've heard.)

If you make 8,000 pedals (and only one kind), with one person, in your house, you seriously need to re-examine your processes. Last time that happened on a national scale in the USA was when the USA still had sweatshops run out of apartments, I think.

I will give him props for doing a really, really nice sounding overdrive, though

The whole drama behind the Klon is what made it so popular -- if he had outsourced early in the game, it would be another Riot or something.

[juansolo]

Imagine building the same pedal, and only that pedal, every day for the rest of your life. You don't have time to build anything else, or experiment, because so many people want to buy your thing.

Which is why you do what he did and make it mass produceable (KTR) or you partner with someone who has mass production ability and take a cut from the sales.

The biggest question to me is why did KTR production stop?

And because you spent so much time getting it right, you're convinced no one else can duplicate your work.

Yet he made the KTR which blows that right out of the water.

Let's face it, you can't buy a Klon product at all at the moment. So he isn't making any money. Who's fault is that?

He started making the Klon in 94 and produced it for almost 15 years before the first clone showed up. And, the plethora of clones out there now are a direct consequence to the absence of the Klon from the pedal market for most of the last 4 years now. Not because it was reverse engineered. The KTR was in production for what...6 months? If anything, the demand for clones shows that the KTR would continue to be successful if he would just get his act together. Or, if he went back to making the original Klon he would make a killing. Charge $450 for a new run of gold horsies. People will buy it. Get over yourself and GBTW.

Not that I have strong feelings about it.

One also has to wonder how many klones have actually been sold and whether it's the vast amount that he's alluding to. Most guitarists that I speak to haven't even heard of a Klon and if they have, don't really have a lot of interest in it because they don't live on forums and have managed to avoid the hype train.