One of the most expensive — and probably the most hyped — guitar pedals is the Klon Centaur. Created in the early 1990s by Bill Finnegan and engineer friends, and built exclusively by him from 1994 to 2008, the unit got too popular for Finnegan to meet the demand, and prices on the used market skyrocketed. He shipped roughly 8000 of them, all told.
Now, the guitar pedal world is choked with recreations, clones, and reinterpretations of circuits that go back to the 1960s and earlier. For instance, I own an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi with Tone Wicker, a 2008 variation on the 2006 Little Big Muff Pi, which was a repackaged and modified 2000 "New York City" Big Muff Pi, Fran Blanche's update of Sovtek's 1992-1994 Big Muff Pis, which Mike Matthews had based on his (and Bob Myer's) original 1969 "Triangle" Big Muff Pi. But the Centaur was one of the few analog effects pedals that wasn't based on a previous effects unit; the circuit was brand-new, and to keep it that way, every shipped circuit board was "gooped" — covered in an opaque epoxy — to keep others from cloning the circuit.
As you might expect with the originals going for between $4000-$8000 on the used market, that didn't actually stop cloning, though it did slow it down. Today you can get Klon clones from a number of different manufacturers — including Klon; Finnegan redesigned the circuit for contract manufacturing and launched it in 2014 as the Klon KTR. The case of each pedal includes the text, "Kindly remember: the ridiculous hype that offends so many is not of my making."
At any rate, the trouble I'm currently having is an internal debate as to whether I need my own Centaur clone. A local pawn shop has an Electro-Harmonix Soul Food pedal, their version of the Centaur, for sale at a reasonable price. The trouble is, of course, that I'm not actually a good enough guitarist for such a thing to make an appreciable difference in my sound, and even were I to put the required funds into pedals, there are more productive places than another overdrive/distortion, like a better reverb, or maybe I could pick up one of the Centaur clone kits that are out there and build one myself.
