Raymond Lubow
- Associated organizations
- Tel Ray Electronics
- Fields of study
- Audio
Biography
Raymond Lubow invented the Morley pedal, a foot pedal that allowed guitarists and keyboard players to create musical effects.
Lubow was born in the Bronx and studied electronics before entering the Army Signal Corps during World War II. He and his wife moved to Los Angeles after the war and opened a radio repair shop.
In the early 1960s, he and his brother were running a television repair business when they began experimenting with techniques for creating echoes. Breaking with industry convention, the brothers did not use tape recorders to make these sound effects, but instead used a small electronic unit. The Lubow brothers created a company, Tel Ray Electronics, to market these machines under the name Ad-N-Echo. This technology was also incorporated into some amplifiers made by Fender, Gibson, and Rickenbacker.
The Lubow brothers created over thirty musical effects devices, but their most famous was the Morley pedal, which used an innovative photoelectric circuit and was operated like a car accelerator. Musicians like the Beach Boys and Stevie Wonder adopted it for its ruggedness, dependability, and flexibility and they appreciated its ease of control and signature “wah-wah” sound (which was actually invented by the Vox company in the mid-1960s).
The Morley pedal is still being manufactured under the ownership of Accutronics, Inc.
