Shields Blender - Kevin Shields Signature Fender Blender?

[bulrich]

Fender don't benefit from driving secondary market prices up though (unless they kept back 500 of the 700 and used shills to sell them at inflated secondary prices)?

The main benefit I can see for them was they sold the whole batch in a matter of hours, but it's the scalpers who have got the big pay-day here.

Fender benefits massively, it's just in a more longterm sort of way.

They sold a ton of $500 pedals instantly. They probably made a much higher margin on this than anything else they sell - I wouldn't be surprised if each Shields Blender was as profitable for them as selling three or four $500 amps. By creating a hype/buying frenzy where people are now paying insane prices for the thing that was just released, they're trying to establish a FOMO culture the way Gibson has with their Mod Shop. If people are going nuts buying and selling the pedal on the secondary market, it contributes to the mystique of "limited edition Fender pedals", and they will cash in on that with future releases. Maybe the next one is $600 or $700, and people will think, "I gotta get that, even $700 is a deal after what happened with the Shields Blender!"

Fender will benefit more than any scalper. They just unlocked an entirely new revenue stream, collectible gear, with a higher profit margin than any guitar or amp. Whoever proposed this idea at FMIC is probably getting a big promotion after this.

This is good logic on the long term marketing effect (pun).
It is important though to look at the math, $350k for the 700 pedals. R&D, payment to KS, parts, assembly, shipping, packaging, some marketing and likely Reverb got a % as well. Even if this was the long term gains of price creep, viral purchases, they didn’t make a ton of $ here. They would need to a regular trade edition in order to really clean up and most certainly they are off to a better start than the last FB reissue.

Still curious to see details of parts, such as quality of switches, pots, etc. The reissue FB parts and quality were horrible, but luckily easy to replace, repair.

[Embenny]

It is important though to look at the math, $350k for the 700 pedals. R&D, payment to KS, parts, assembly, shipping, packaging, some marketing and likely Reverb got a % as well. Even if this was the long term gains of price creep, viral purchases, they didn’t make a ton of $ here. They would need to a regular trade edition in order to really clean up and most certainly they are off to a better start than the last FB reissue.

That's why I framed it in comparison to selling $500 amps. The parts and labour cost are a fraction of an amp's. The R&D probably amounted to a total of a couple of work weeks for one of their salaried engineers. I mean, they took a Fender Blender and another undisclosed octave fuzz and combined them in one enclosure. It wasn't groundbreaking or backbreaking work. Tweaking component values and getting feedback from Kevin Shields wouldn't have occupied a ton of an engineer's time. Spend a day on it after getting his feedback, send the revision to him and wait to hear back.

It's definitely a higher margin product than anything else they make, especially since they made it a Reverb exclusive. They didn't even have to lose their typical overhead to dealers.

It's not going to represent a huge chunk of Fender's total revenue for the year, but it was probably equivalent to selling a couple thousand $500 amps through their dealer network. That's not by any means an insignificant sales figure, especially with the bonus of paving the way for an entirely new low effort/high margin revenue stream.

[OffYourFace]

I didn't realize how limited edition they were and didn't buy one

a ton more coming in september. If you look at the gut shots, it's a typical mass produced SMT ckt.

Is this actually confirmed or just a rumor/speculation?

direct from a friend at Fender

[cpeck]

Not many shoegazers using marshalls for some reason these days. I've heard a lot of suggestions for AC30s although i don't have a clue where that was from. I've seen him use one, but it was within some live setup of many many amps so i've no idea how the shoegaze/ac30 association started that i have seen.

it's well documented that he used two AC30s on Loveless, especially for the 'lead guitar' on Only Shallow. In interviews in the 90s he said the AC30 didn't add much live and thought it would just be another thing for "the sound man to get wrong".

I wonder how much misdirection/misremembering is happening; in that “tell-all” Japanese Guitar mag from a few years ago here he talked about Only Shallow: “Two amps are playing, one is a British-made Burman from the 60s. The other is a silver panelled Fender amplifier from the late 60s and 70s”. No mention of The Twin either, iirc…

I played with the Shields Blender for an hour this afternoon. Sounds great. A lot of sounds on tap! The Sag feature was not overly intuitive (or at least an immediately obvious sound), but the rest of the pedal was shockingly “good” sounding.

[OffYourFace]

I wonder how much misdirection/misremembering is happening; in that “tell-all” Japanese Guitar mag from a few years ago here he talked about Only Shallow: “Two amps are playing, one is a British-made Burman from the 60s. The other is a silver panelled Fender amplifier from the late 60s and 70s”. No mention of The Twin either, iirc…

I never read that article. Is there a translated version available online? I'm just going by all the 90s interviews and the Alan Moulder interview.

[sessylU]

I don't really have any interest in any of this (although the pedal does sound cool, like, I'll take £80 clone cool), except that I've learned that Sheilds has a terribly clacky wet mouth and would be a terrible podcast guest.

[cpeck]

I wonder how much misdirection/misremembering is happening; in that “tell-all” Japanese Guitar mag from a few years ago here he talked about Only Shallow: “Two amps are playing, one is a British-made Burman from the 60s. The other is a silver panelled Fender amplifier from the late 60s and 70s”. No mention of The Twin either, iirc…

I never read that article. Is there a translated version available online? I'm just going by all the 90s interviews and the Alan Moulder interview.

I’ll send it to you.

[UlricvonCatalyst]

Not many shoegazers using marshalls for some reason these days. I've heard a lot of suggestions for AC30s although i don't have a clue where that was from. I've seen him use one, but it was within some live setup of many many amps so i've no idea how the shoegaze/ac30 association started that i have seen.

it's well documented that he used two AC30s on Loveless, especially for the 'lead guitar' on Only Shallow. In interviews in the 90s he said the AC30 didn't add much live and thought it would just be another thing for "the sound man to get wrong".

I wonder how much misdirection/misremembering is happening; in that “tell-all” Japanese Guitar mag from a few years ago here he talked about Only Shallow: “Two amps are playing, one is a British-made Burman from the 60s. The other is a silver panelled Fender amplifier from the late 60s and 70s”. No mention of The Twin either, iirc…

I played with the Shields Blender for an hour this afternoon. Sounds great. A lot of sounds on tap! The Sag feature was not overly intuitive (or at least an immediately obvious sound), but the rest of the pedal was shockingly “good” sounding.

I remember an old interview where he specifically cited putting a mic between two AC30s with slightly different tremolo rates facing each other. Don't think he mentioned it being a stereo mic, so the effect may not have been that noticeable to anyone but him.

[jorri]

Not many shoegazers using marshalls for some reason these days. I've heard a lot of suggestions for AC30s although i don't have a clue where that was from. I've seen him use one, but it was within some live setup of many many amps so i've no idea how the shoegaze/ac30 association started that i have seen.

it's well documented that he used two AC30s on Loveless, especially for the 'lead guitar' on Only Shallow. In interviews in the 90s he said the AC30 didn't add much live and thought it would just be another thing for "the sound man to get wrong".

I wonder how much misdirection/misremembering is happening; in that “tell-all” Japanese Guitar mag from a few years ago here he talked about Only Shallow: “Two amps are playing, one is a British-made Burman from the 60s. The other is a silver panelled Fender amplifier from the late 60s and 70s”. No mention of The Twin either, iirc…

I played with the Shields Blender for an hour this afternoon. Sounds great. A lot of sounds on tap! The Sag feature was not overly intuitive (or at least an immediately obvious sound), but the rest of the pedal was shockingly “good” sounding.

A lot of mis-something. He must have used 20 amps and 50 pedals and its all mixed together. If i wanted MBV sounds i might try putting my guitar and vocal into a sampler (i missed this part in previous post as an essential component) than worry about the amp used is exactly the same as it sounds like there was a different setup for each overdub, if not a different studio given the whole process of perfectionism in that album

[fuzzjunkie]

I wonder how much misdirection/misremembering is happening; in that “tell-all” Japanese Guitar mag from a few years ago here he talked about Only Shallow: “Two amps are playing, one is a British-made Burman from the 60s. The other is a silver panelled Fender amplifier from the late 60s and 70s”. No mention of The Twin either, iirc…

I never read that article. Is there a translated version available online? I'm just going by all the 90s interviews and the Alan Moulder interview.

I had never heard of Burman amps before or any mention from KS that he used one. After a search I found an Allan Holdsworth interview and he liked them. He mentioned they were 50w 2x12 transistor combos, but somehow “they sounded like valves thanks to magical parts.”

A picture was included and they have 2 channels, one with RED knobs. So maybe KS did use a red knob Fender Twin, or maybe he’s just misremembering the Burman?

I was always under the impression it was mostly 2 AC30 and a vintage Marshall, along with a couple of Roger Mayer fuzz pedals (he had the Mongoose and the Octavia along with the Axxis) and the SPX-90.

Edit: while I was walking the dog something occurred to me that Kevin might have mentioned using a red knob amp (Burman) and Fender Twin (‘70s silver panel) in the same sentence and the writer transposed that as meaning a Red Knob Twin?

[BlueMelody]

a ton more coming in september. If you look at the gut shots, it's a typical mass produced SMT ckt.

Is this actually confirmed or just a rumor/speculation?

direct from a friend at Fender

So will it be identical to the limited model, or will it be more like the Reissue with less features?

[OffYourFace]

Is this actually confirmed or just a rumor/speculation?

direct from a friend at Fender

So will it be identical to the limited model, or will it be more like the Reissue with less features?

Of course it’ll be the same model. It’ll still be the KS signature model. It just won’t have his signature etc

[MrShake]

I admit, I was wondering the same thing. Figured maybe they'd feature-strip the "regular" run to make it somehow less "special" and avoid pissing off the pool of limited edition customers for the next time, keep them from feeling duped and get them coming back.

Of course, if you're gonna have a limited edition fuzz pedal, I'd say a "1-in-7 chance of finding unreleased Kevin Shields music" inside is a pretty good special feature to entice a limited run.

Recently picked up a used Boss pedal online and while it was a little over "impulse buy" pricing, I was joking with my wife that "Well... it MIGHT have an unreleased MBV demo inside".

Like, I strongly doubt a Boss reverb from the '90s would, but now all bets are off. It COULD happen. It's become a "non-zero" possibility.

And it's gonna be my "impulse pedal buy" justification for the rest of my life.

[fuzzjunkie]

Now that they’re out in the wild, will a signature Shield’s Blender ever show up in the Pedal that exceeded my expectations thread?

[LVC]

Two MBV-related gear threads going on simultaneously and not a single vacuum cleaner joke? I'm disappointed.