There is no proprietary thing going on. If you provide the correct voltage with the correct polarity and enough amperage, your pedal will work. Also, you need to pay attention to the grounding of the pedal- some are positive ground, some are negative ground (this is different from polarity) and those pedals must have isolated power supplies (they can’t share!)

If you don’t follow those rules, your pedal may not work properly, may be noisy, or components may become damaged. If you know what you’re doing, giving it the “wrong” voltage values may give you a more desired result.

Generally:
too little voltage: not work properly or become noisy, can give interesting effects
too much voltage: can cause damage, can increase headroom
too little amperage: noisy, may not work properly
too much amperage: I don’t think you can have too much amperage
wrong polarity: definite damage will occur
negative ground + positive ground sharing power: a ground loop causing noise, damage to components, or shut off of the power supply (if it has that safety feature)
digital and analog pedals sharing power: noisy

The HOG is 9V center positive polarity, the SMMH is 9V and center negative polarity. If I were you, I’d use the power supplies that came with them.

1spot puts out center negative power, so I never tried it with the HOG. With the SMMH it was noisy. It puts out enough amperage, but I had it daisy chained so the SMMH wasn’t getting enough I guess. Digital pedals generally don’t like to share. Technically with the HOG you could power it with the 1spot if you have a reverse polarity adapter, but I would guess that it would be noisy.

Until you get a better powering solution, I’d suggest you just use their individual power supplies.

This is why a lot of us get stuff like the Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2+. That’s what I use.

yeah, that’s what I did for awhile
at one point, I had two power strips on my boards:

1spot for all my small 9v pedals
adapter for SMMH
adapter for Polyphase
adapter for frequency analyzer
adapter for HOG

!!!

I’m sure some other people have had even more ridiculous power needs than me

So, I just bought a Big Muff a few months ago, and it’s having problems, but I think it’s cause of my power supply stuff.

I’m powering it using my SKB Pedal board ps-45. I’m not using a power supply directly to it. Instead, I grabbed a stereo mini male to stereo mini male plug and powered it from the 9v bunch on the top of it.

http://guitars.musiciansfriend.com/product/SKB-PS45-Professional-Pedalboard?sku=544735

I’m guessing I did the wrong thing, because randomly the volume will drop and everything will buzz and scratch if I try to take it out of the pedal chain. The problem is it doesn’t do this everywhere, and it just does it on occasion. In different bedroom locations, it works just fine. Do I need to buy the actual power supply, or did I get a bad pedal, or does this pedal not react well to voltage situations where lots of things are plugged in (I mean a pedal board and amp on the same electrical circuit in the same wall outlet at gigs?)

So, my question is still, if I’m supposed to have a positive tip power supply, does a standard pedal board that powers boss equipment have a positive tip if I run a male to male mini to power my big muff pi?

julian,
thanks for the great info! quick question, is it ok to power a ehx voicebox off a 1spot? (not daisy chained, just the 1spot right into the voicebox) it seems as though that would be fine, but reading the warning in the manual has me a bit nervous thanks in advance!
bobby