This pedal was found by a local customer at a recent yard sale!  Some guys have all the luck!

Electro-Harmonix was founded by Mike Matthews in New York City in 1968, and the first few years of production — 1969 through the early 1970s — represent the most historically significant and collectible period in the company's catalog. The Big Muff Pi arrived in 1969. The Black Finger arrived in 1972, making this a first-year example of one of EHX's earliest production pedals. The Black Finger was marketed as a distortion-free guitar sustainer — a compressor pedal designed to extend sustain and even out dynamics without adding the fuzz or clipping character of the Big Muff. It occupied a different sonic territory from everything else EHX was producing: clean, controlled, musical compression rather than saturation. The original solid-state Black Finger was produced from 1972 through 1978 — a six-year run that ended before EHX's first closure in the early 1980s, making original examples increasingly difficult to find in any condition, let alone near mint.

The original Black Finger was an early example of optical compression in a guitar pedal context — super clear compression that can really squash your tone in the right way, described by players who know it as among the most transparent and musical compressors produced in the early solid-state era. The triangle knob layout on the earliest examples — present on this 1972 unit — is the visual identifier of first-year production, before the graphics and layout evolved in subsequent versions. Near mint condition on a 53-year-old pedal from a first production year is an extraordinary finding. Exactly as described: the cleanest one we have encountered.  

The knobs are likely not original to the pedal.

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