1972 found Dan was underway working with Boosey; Hawkes® marketing his amplifiers at various music stores and shows, while also beginning to design his latest line of instruments known as the ‘London’ series. As 1973 rolled in he met, and became friends with George Merriman who was the electrician for the ‘Rainbow Theater’ in London (which is now a church) and who (like Dan) was an American, and originally from Pittsburgh, PA. – where Dan was born.

According to Dan, “If I remember correctly when I left Ampeg in ’71 one of their engineers gave me an Ampeg Scrambler as a going away gift. I can’t remember but I think it may have been a prototype or something they had lying around”. The Scrambler, according to Dan was “somewhat like a ring modulator but not very well designed and as a result they really didn’t sell very many. Back in those days everyone was selling fuzz units of one kind or another. Ampeg tried to market the Scrambler as a fuzz unit and while it would kind of distort it would actually do a lot of other things better.”

Dan told George about the ‘Scrambler’ and was surprised to learn that George already knew everything about the device and even built one for Dan, who went on to say “Together we changed it some, tweaked it until we got it to play an octave up, and like two octaves down as well as other neat sounds – all depending on what note was originally played”.

The last thing they did was to fit it all in a small green box. Dan continued, saying “we somehow fit it all into a box that was small enough to plug into a guitar and not detract the player too much. We wanted it so that when the effect is called for, you just reach down and flick a switch. Eventually we named the it the ‘Green Ringer® and went on to build more devices.”

According to Dan, “Ringer is the actual effect, while Green came from the green colored box that we put it in, also I never really told this to anyone before – but green was also my hope of us making some money on the unit. Ironic though, as we really didn’t make that much off it, or any other devices in the line.”

But such irony was hardly the thoughts or the mind-set of either Dan or George at the time as they began to produce even more and different effects devices that would all fit into the same size boxes. Dan decided that he wanted a distortion device next as any type of fuzz unit was popular. But unlike raspy, dirty square-wave distortion devices that were already flooding the market, Dan wanted something a bit more smooth. George took Dan’s ideas and went on to build an effect they dubbed the “Blue Clipper”®.

Dan recalls the next unit, stating “The third unit we made was our version of the Electro-Harmonix LPB-1 power booster. However, our version was a lot more quiet, plus our unit had a switch on it to change the ranges (treble, bass, or all frequencies) that could be boosted. We called this the Red Ranger®”.

Dan went on to explain his next device, saying “I already had a good working knowledge of graphic equalizers from building amplifiers some years before, and I began to experiment with the newer stuff, parametric equalizers and such. I soon discovered that with a few peaks placed in certain areas the sound of the guitar really improved. We installed a switch to allow either a midrange peak or a high end peak. Obviously, this is the Purple Peaker® – for its peaks. It worked so well that we decided to make a similar one for bass guitars, and we called it the Yellow Humper®”.

Another effect was a variant of the Green Ringer that would produce notes an octave lower than the note being played. But unlike the Ringer, the octave only extended downward, and it was possible to mix the effect along with the original note, or just use the effect alone. This effect was called the Orange Divider®. Unknown to Dan or George, this effect would eventually go through extreme changes in the future and even have part of its name changed. It would become one of their most popular effects devices of all, and would one day take a new name – the Orange Squeezer.®.

The last two units built were really not effects devices. The Silver Shifter® was basically a junction box that would take an incoming signal and feed it to one or two outputs via a switch. The Black Blank® was just an empty box that came complete with an input jack, a plug and a switch, that allowed custom effects builders the ability to make their own devices that matched the other boxes in the series.