What this is

The idea

Most writing about pedals describes one pedal by comparing it to a different pedal you have also never played, and the vocabulary runs out fast: warm, creamy, transparent, musical. None of those words survives contact with a second person. stompbox.world tries the other approach. Soft clipping inside an op-amp's feedback loop and hard clipping to ground are genuinely different circuits, they behave differently, and once you know which one you are looking at, the sound stops being a mystery and becomes a consequence.

How the entries are written

• Every claim is meant to be checkable. The "what to listen for" section on each page is written so that you can pick up the pedal and find out whether this site is right. If something here is wrong, that is the mechanism for catching it.
• Dates are decade level, deliberately. Prototypes, production runs, revisions and reissues all disagree about what year a pedal "is". A precise year would be a false precision, so the entries say "late 1960s" and mean it.
• There are no artist credits, on purpose. Every pedal here has a famous name attached to it in somebody's memory, and that is exactly the problem. Rigs change between tours and between takes, so "this pedal is on that record" needs a source, and a wrong credit printed beside a circuit description reads as fact. Attribution deserves a dataset with real sourcing behind it rather than a decorative field here.
• The chain page gives reasons. Signal chain order is a convention, not a law, so every position states why it sits where it does. A reason can be argued with. A rule can only be obeyed or broken.

What it does not do

Nothing here is for sale, and there are no affiliate links anywhere on the site. That is not modesty, it is what lets an entry say a pedal sounds thin into a clean amp, or that a tone control scoops a hole in the middle of the frequency range, without any of it being a sales problem. It also collects nothing about you: the chain builder runs entirely in your browser and stores nothing.

The one exception to "no third parties" is the Instagram section on the home page, which uses Instagram's own official embed. It is off unless post permalinks are configured, and the site works fine without it.

Corrections

The dataset is hand written and small, which means it is wrong occasionally and fixable quickly. If a circuit description does not match the pedal in your hands, that is worth saying.