Social Fail.

Well, that survey produced an underwhelming 3 responses. To those who did respond- thank you! Your results were included in the new method below. The following pedals were listed from those 3 responses:

• Ibanez Tube Screamer
• Big Muff
• MXR Blue Box
• Danelectro Tuna Melt Tremolo 
• EHX Double Muff
• Boss DD-3

New Method

This is not even close to enough data to begin feature categorization, so I am going to implement a secondary approach. The internet is full of articles on "The Top X Guitar Effects Pedals" or similar articles. I did a few searches for top 10 lists, best pedals, and different combinations in order to find as many articles as possible. For each article, I pulled out the named pedals and added them to a list. Each time a pedal appeared in an article, I increased it's occurrence tally on the list. The list soon grew to over 50, and since I am interested in gathering the popular features, I set a threshold for the occurrence tally at 3. This means that I am only considering the features for pedals that were mentioned more than 3 times in the dozen or so articles that I read. Final list after the break.

Another "problem" is that several pedals are actually expression pedals - they have a giant treadle pedal that is used to adjust a single parameter. When looking at these for features, they are outliers in form, so I am removing them from the list as well. They will not be forgotten, as they have brought an important requirement to the list - ability to remotely adjust parameters.

List of popular pedals

The following is the final list, along with the number of occurrences in the research:

Feature Categories

The next step is to define common features of these pedals. The pared down list will be analyzed in detail, including any available specification. The following is a list of features to catalog:

• Size (Length * Width * Height)
• Number of Audio Inputs
• Relative location of audio inputs
• Number of Audio Outputs
• Relative location of audio outputs
• Number of user inputs (knobs)
• Number of user inputs (switches)
• Number of user auxiliary inputs (remote pedals) 
• Number of user outputs (lights)
• Voltage input
• Battery size
• Bypass type
• Tone control type
• Input buffer type
• Output amplifier topology
• Power supply topology
• Number of composite effects (more than one in a pedal?)