Ley Lines

Live: leylines.cryptideffects.com

Platforms: a static web app that runs in any modern browser.

Why#

Almost every pedal is based on another pedal. A boutique fuzz is a Big Muff with a mids knob, a kit is a clone of a Rat, and that Rat owes something to the circuits before it. The family trees are out there, scattered across forum threads, maker interviews, kit build documents and a few devoted reference sites, but there has never been one place to follow a circuit from its original all the way down to the boards you can build today.

What it does#

• A lineage graph. Pick a family and follow its links: version of, reissue of, clone of, derived from, inspired by, rebrand of. Every link points from the newer pedal to the older one.
• A timeline view. The same pedals laid out by year, so you can see when each branch appeared.
• Shared circuit blocks. Tone stacks, clipping stages, buffers and gain stages are records of their own, so you can see every pedal that uses the Big Muff tone stack, wherever it sits in the tree.
• Kits and layouts too. DIY boards come in from Akashic, linked to the originals their vendors say they are based on.
• Search and filters. Find a pedal or block by name, and narrow the graph by family and by kind: production, reissue, boutique, kit or DIY.
• Over 4,000 pedals in 146 families. It started with the Big Muff and has grown to fuzzes, drives, phasers, flangers, choruses, delays, tremolos, rotary simulators, ring modulators and more.

Every link has a source#

Each lineage link cites at least one source and says how sure it is: stated by the maker, documented by an established reference, shown by a schematic trace, community consensus, or unverified. Doubtful records are flagged for a human check. The descriptions are facts written in my own words, never copied from another site.

How it is built#

The data is hand-curated YAML, one file per pedal, family and circuit block. A Python build step validates every reference and writes a single graph file, and a static site draws it with Cytoscape.js. The same graph exports to graphify, so I can ask it questions like how two pedals are connected.