Josh Scott sold 15,000 Notadümblë V1 kits in a single day last May. One week later, while filming a YouTube demo, he discovered every single kit contained the wrong circuit. That manufacturing disaster, which Scott calls “the biggest mistake in JHS history,” has now produced one of the most interesting $89 pedals on the market: the JHS Fumble.
The Notadümblë Disaster
In May 2025, JHS released the Notadümblë V1, a solderless DIY kit packaging two Dumble-inspired circuits. One side was an overdrive based on the Dumble lead channel. The other was supposed to be the “A Box Later,” a buffered loop device that Scott had reverse-engineered from a unit he built for John Mayer in 2019.
Scott had confused two similar schematics and loaded the wrong circuit into all 15,000 kits. Instead of the A Box Later buffer, every Notadümblë V1 shipped with Mayer’s even rarer BBC-1 preamp, a JFET clean boost that Dumble built for only a handful of Los Angeles session players.
JHS offered full refunds, discontinued the V1, and moved on. But customers who had already built the kits noticed something unexpected: the “wrong” circuit sounded fantastic.
A Clone of a Clone of a Clone
The BBC-1 carries a mystique that most Dumble circuits share: scarcity, secrecy, and astronomical prices. Original Dumble amps sell for $200,000 to $400,000. But JHS’s research into the BBC-1 uncovered a detail that punctures some of that mythology.
The BBC-1 is not really a Dumble design. It is a JFET preamp lifted almost part for part from a 1970s Barcus Berry acoustic preamp, the kind of utility box that bridged piezo pickups into electric guitar amps before modern acoustic preamps existed. Howard Dumble cloned the Barcus Berry circuit, housed it in his own enclosure, and later incorporated the same JFET gain stage into his amplifiers as the “FET mode.”
The legendary Dumble FET sound, the one inside amplifiers that sell for six figures, traces its lineage to a mass-produced acoustic preamp from the disco era. And the Fumble is JHS’s faithful production clone of Dumble’s clone of that Barcus Berry original. Three generations deep.
“I’m excited to commemorate my own failures,” Scott said when announcing the pedal.
What the Fumble Actually Does
Strip away the backstory and the Fumble is a straightforward JFET clean boost in a compact enclosure (1.96″ x 3.93″ x 1.21″). Two knobs handle everything:
Output sets master volume. Turn it past unity for a clean volume lift, or push it hard to drive an overdrive pedal or a tube amp into saturation.
Input simultaneously attenuates bass and gain at the front of the circuit. Roll it counterclockwise for a thinner, tighter response. Fully clockwise bypasses the input attenuation entirely, letting the full signal through.
The pedal runs on 9V DC (center negative, 5mA draw), uses true bypass switching, and has no internal battery option. At $89 and assembled in Kansas City, it undercuts most boutique boost pedals by $50 or more.
Four Ways to Use It
JHS positions the Fumble for four distinct roles on a pedalboard:
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Permanent buffer and clean boost at the front of the chain, preserving signal clarity across long cable runs and multiple pedals.
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Clean boost before overdrives, stacking gain stages the way players like Mayer stack a Klon into a Dumble’s front end. JHS’s own Morning Glory or Angry Charlie would pair naturally with the Fumble in this role.
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Front-end boost into a dirty amp, pushing a tube amp past its breakup threshold for natural compression and harmonic saturation.
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Solo boost at the end of the chain, adding volume lift for leads without changing the character of the tone that precedes it.
The Input knob adds a layer of flexibility that most single-function boosts lack. Rolling off the bass tightens the low end before it hits a high-gain amp, cleaning up mud without needing a separate EQ pedal. That feature alone makes the Fumble more versatile than the typical one-knob boost.
The $89 Question
Plenty of JFET boosts exist at this price point. What separates the Fumble is provenance and, frankly, a story that most gear companies would have buried. Scott publicized the mistake, offered refunds, and then turned the accidental circuit into a standalone product. That transparency is rare in an industry built on mystique (looking at you, Dumble).
Whether the Barcus Berry lineage makes the Fumble sound better than competing boosts is subjective. What is not subjective: this is the same JFET gain stage that ended up inside amplifiers currently valued at a quarter of a million dollars, available for less than the price of a set of locking tuners.
The JHS Fumble is available now at $89 from JHS Pedals and authorized dealers.