#righteous ryan

[thetonecontrol]

Interview with Electronic Audio Experiments

Righteous Ryan: When did you decide to become a builder and what motivated you to do so?

Electronic Audio Experiments: Even before I taught myself how to play the guitar I was always interested in what makes instruments work, so naturally I was a pedal nerd as soon as I learned what they were. After studying electronics for fun on the side (took a couple extra courses during undergrad and then read books on my own) it became a natural progression of my interests to start tinkering with my own. I did a few tagboard clone builds before I realized I wanted to have more control over the design process. And that's still my primary motivation: I love the design process with all of its challenges and room for artistic decisions.

EAE as a company formally started in approximately winter/spring of 2015. In February of that year, Boston was slammed over 5 feet of snow. I spent a lot of time in my crummy basement apartment eating frozen pizzas and breadboarding what would eventually become the Longsword V1. I used it on a couple records I was a part of (Perfect Moments by Tiny Fractures and the Native Wildlife s/t - both on bandcamp, for the curious) and that generated enough interest to do a release that summer. The rest has been a whirlwind!

RR: What motivates you to create original circuits?

EAE: Short answer - it's really satisfying to me, basically my favorite pastime.

Longer answer - I love the challenge of making something from scratch that hopefully lets my personality come through. I should qualify; I am not reinventing any wheels here. Designing "from scratch" is like building something out of legos. You can't really design new pieces (which leads some of the more cynical folks out there to say there's nothing new under the sun) but there are lots of building blocks and lots of ways to arrange them. The artistic merit is in the details, and the fun is in the thrill of the chase. It's an obsessive process but endlessly gratifying.

RR: Are you currently working on anything new?

EAE: Oh god, too many things. Here's a sampling:

Halberd - this is a drive which started as the preamp block of Sending, but heavily mutated into its own thing. It features pronounced treble attack/clarity, stupidly high output, and a strong second harmonic response. Been "finalizing" it for a while but I'm trying my damnedest to release it this summer. (If you want to hear a rough demo of an earlier iteration, check this video out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpGgzl3lOgs)

Sending V2 - I'm trying to add some features while I do an SMD conversion - mostly modulation and CV control over delay time. Currently on the back burner while I get the Halberd sorted out.

Hypersleep - this is my weird multi-tap chorus/vibrato/reverb-ish thing (nb: this is also in Ian's video linked above). It's also on the back burner while I get the Halberd sorted out. I really want to put it to production but it depends fully on whether I can source enough MN3011 BBDs to make it happen. If I can get enough to build 50 I'll do a limited run, but I'd really prefer to do 100 if at all possible... so we shall see what happens.

Super secret collab with Electrofoods Pedals - stay tuned, I am very excited

Surveyor - IVP side of the Dude Incredible, will be released later this year. It's ready to rock.

Various contract designs - Caroline Somersault (just wrapped up), Caroline Megabyte (working on the second round of prototypes), Dunable Eidolon (close to done, just needs some code fixes), another 2 or 3 projects all TBA.

RR: What is your design process like?

EAE: Whenever I design something new I have to answer two questions. 1) does it exist already? and 2) does it address a need or want in my own sonic pursuits? For instance, drive pedals will reflect my tone in whatever band I'm currently in. If it's already been done I can go buy it. If it hasn't been done then the work can begin.

If the design is simple or contains simple building blocks I often go straight to the circuit board layout and if necessary, debug from there. I can often turn a project around pretty quick if that's the case. If I'm not sure whether or not a building block will work, I can try simulating or breadboarding. Circuit simulation is extremely powerful but requires interpretation of the results, which also sometimes differ from reality. Breadboarding is great for audible characterization of a new idea, but the added parasitic capacitances can dramatically alter the frequency response of a circuit - especially a high gain drive or something with lots of complex filters. So there's usually a loop of steps where I move between a breadboard, circuit simulations, and a working prototype until everything works out. Sometimes I just have to resort to plain old math to get what I want.

The first pass of design is a go/no-go check. Does it work? Once it does, I refine it until it can produce sounds I truly like. This is also the step where I do the most work to address noise, oscillation, unwanted artifacts, etc. The final step is to identify which controls I want to keep, and then I determine the tapers/ranges of those controls.

Once there's a working prototype I do extensive beta testing with friends, local musicians and engineers, etc. When testing at home I can lose sight of how good (or not good) a prototype sounds. So a sanity check helps! Once this feedback is incorporated into the process we can go to production. At that point we get the artwork done and start working with our local SMD shop to get boards going.

RR: What's your setup (guitar, amps, pedalboard)?

EAE: I've been awful about maintaining a static setup. I realized that when you're not in a band you can just buy whatever sounds good instead of worrying about serving a song or particular mix. I have a wide assortment of guitars and amps that I use to test pedals during the R&D phase but listing those won't really tell you a coherent story. BUT I started a new band and we're tracking a record (we just did guitars + drums at GodCity) so I can tell you all about the gear I used for that. It's a post-metal sort of outfit so there are lots of heavy sounds but lots of unique mid-gain tones as well. This is also a great chance to plug some work by my friends...

Guitars - Travis Bean TB1000S, which is essentially vintage correct after some restoration work at Electrical Guitar Company (new bridge + pickups). Sounds like a piano. A very angry piano.

My very heavily modified Classic Player Jazzmaster with EGC JM500 pickups and a Robot Graves neck. It can do pristine, chimey cleans or a savage clang depending how much gain you use.

Amps - Traynor YBA1 MKII - Basically a marshall-ish amp with really big transformers. I modded the preamp to roughly superlead specs, but it's got way more bandwidth than a typical marshall.

Traynor YBA3 - not mine, lives at GodCity. Was extensively modified by my friend Scot from SnK pedals, who is also a gifted amp tech. It's loud and clean with a sound that's almost like an ampeg.

For cabs we mostly used an emperor 6x12 with an assortment of speakers. The mic was placed on a Texas Heat.

For my own use I have a pair of Joe's TL806 cabs (Thiele 1x12 design) with EVM12Ls.

Pedals - Halberd proto - great for slamming tube amps!

Electrofoods Oprichniki - the highest gain big muff variant around. I don't even know if it should be called a muff variant because of how twisted and souped up the circuit is. It is an absolute beast.

Dr. Scientist Frazz Dazzler - another extraordinarily high gain fuzz which sounds like absolutely nothing I've ever heard. It's a nice contrast to the more scooped flavor of the Oprich.

SnK VHD - a high gain distortion, used extensively for lead parts especially. Super tight and clear.

Sending V1-ish prototype - also has a tone control. It works ok I guess. Still very much a work in progress!

Lastgasp Misty Cave - weird drone-y reverb/flange thing? Hard to describe. Sounds heavenly.

Hypersleep proto - for room-ish reverb

Red Panda Tensor - Used for a particularly glitchy "solo"

Dirge Slowly Melting - I saw the end of the world, and it was terrifying

Lots of other stuff - I forgot!

Other - Yamaha FX500. The ultimate digital pad machine.

Roland RE-501 Chorus Echo - my drummer owns this, holy hell it is magic

My modular synth - a whole goddamn mess of its own

[thetonecontrol]

Q&A With Kentucky Hot Brown Pedalboards!

Righteous Ryan: When did you decide to become a builder and what motivated you to do so?

Kentucky Hot Brown Pedalboards: I have always been a carpenter and learned that from my grandfather. I've always built my own pedalboards and a couple for friends. In January 2013 my wife and I went on a trip to Tennessee to see a couple of places. We stopped in Nashville for one and went to a couple of local music stores just to look around. We also wanted to go check out the Antique Archaeology (American Picker Guys) shop. They were in this small strip mall type of area that had some other stores in it. There was a store that was basically everything you need to be a country artist (Except the talent). They had guitars, clothes, boots, amps, you name it. It was there. I happen to see these really cool looking pedalboards that were made out of old suitcases. They folded up and had all of the connectors in it and everything. I thought that was really cool. I looked at the price tag and just about had a stroke right there. It was over $300 and it wasn't even that big. That got my mind churning and thinking "I could do that and make them look better and a lot more affordable". Face it, I know what it's like to be a starving musician. I am one. That was the motivation to make my pedalboards. I wanted to make them cool and affordable.

RR: What is your design process like?

KYHBP: At first it was very basic and I was literally trying anything that I thought could work. It took me until December of 2013 to nail down some designs that I thought were worthy of selling.

Today the design process is a lot more thought through, plus I am always tweaking our designs to make them better. I take more time to think through the design and I always make prototypes. Some work and well....some just don't. I don't see them as failures, but as stepping stones to other new models. I listen a lot to what my customers tell me. Feedback is a MUST in this business. My customers come first and always will. They are the reason for many of the models that we currently have.

RR: Where do you source the wood?

KYHBP: We get a majority of our wood from local mills here in Kentucky. There is also a place very close to our shop that we get our Baltic Birch from. That is what a majority of our boards are made from. The other woods are Pine, Cedar, Oak, Walnut, Cherry, African Padauk, and if someone wants something custom, we can order specialty woods. We also have a line on recycled woods as well from local shops that look to get rid of. We repurpose it and make some killer boards out of it.

RR: Are you currently working on anything new?

KYHBP: The newest thing that we are working on right now is a pedalboard model called the X-Wah-Z. It is a version of our Hot Box Standard that is customized to hold a wah pedal. We are looking into making different versions of that.

We also started working on a model called the Slat Back. It is a pedalboard made for pedals that have their connectors on the back, so we made a board that accommodates that as well. We have some others in the works, but nothing solid yet.

RR: And anything else you want to add that you think people should know about your products :)

KYHBP: We just want folks to know that we will build anything. We have literally built as of now over 1,500+ pedalboards. That is custom and standard models. We are a 5 Star Rated company and a Preferred Seller on Reverb.com. We have been with them since early 2014 and have a strong partnership with them.

Our pedalboard products have a lifetime warranty. If you are the original owner and something happens because we failed in building your board. We will fix or replace it. That simple.

All of our stuff is Made in the USA, by hand, from Kentucky. We are a real Mom and Pop business. My wife and I started the company together and she is 50% of KYHBPB

[thetonecontrol]

Interview with Tom Cram of Spiral Electric FX!

Righteous Ryan: When did you decide to become a builder and what motivated you to do so?

Tom Cram: I’ve been modding pedals for years as a hobby, but I’m not an engineer and I never was a real builder. When I ran DigiTech/DOD my hobby mods made it into the updated DOD line. I designed, or had a hand in quite a few Dig/DOD things. But I always left the heavy-lifting to the engineers, and building to the manufacturing crew.

After I got notice that Harman was closing the DigiTech/DOD division in July 2018 I went to the Summer NAMM show looking for a new job. After talking with a few of the usual suspects I realized that after working for Harman for 20 years, I didn’t want to work for a corporation ever again. So on the road-trip home from the show I decided to start my own company. I called my wife while I was driving and told her what I wanted to do and she sighed and said “oh ****.” Hahaha!

I’ve always had a zillion ideas on what kind of pedals to make, and I have a lot of varied skills that kind of dovetail with pedals. Once I realized it was time to do my own thing, it all came together.

RR: What motivates you to create original circuits?

TC: Well, I haven’t created an original circuit yet. I have what I think are original ideas for improvements to circuits that I love, and I try to implement them in a way that sounds good and makes sense to me, and hopefully to other players. My goal is that as I dig deeper into these designs, and I learn more about electronics, maybe someday I’ll be able to design a truly original circuit.

RR: Are you currently working on anything new?

TC: Yes, I am working on lots of stuff simultaneously for Spiral Electric FX. The projects that are closest to being done are the White Spiral and the Red Spiral. The White is a boost with some fun improvements and features. While developing the Yellow Spiral I realized that the Girth Control is really cool and flexible, so it will be incorporated into the White. The Red is a collaboration with Christopher from SHOE Pedals it will be a high-gain version of one of his circuits.

RR: What is your design process like?

TC: It’s very much like my songwriting process. I imagine a song that I’d like to hear, then I try to write it. With pedals I imagine a pedal I’d like to play, then I try to build it.

Since I’m not a trained engineer, that means there is a lot of time spent swapping parts in out of a circuit while sitting in front of an amp with a guitar in my hand. The White was the first time I ever sat down and drew out a schematic first, then tried to build it. I hope that means I’m getting better at this!

RR: What's your setup (guitars, amps pedals,etc)?

TC: My personal setup is pretty simple. My main guitar is either my white or silver burst SG. My main amp was a VoxAC30 for ages, but I switched to an Orange TV50H about 5 years ago. I use it with either a Vox 2x12 or Vox 4x12 (both with Greenbacks). My pedal board is simple too: Hardwire HT-6 Tuner > Morley Maverick Wah > Yellow Spiral > Black Spiral > DOD 490 Phasor > DOD Rubberneck.

I used to have a massive pedalboard with a loop switcher and I ran 4CM with all the mods/delays in the FX loop, but I finally realized that I rarely used most of the stuff and pared-down quite a bit. Unless we are talking recording, then everything comes out of storage and I can barely move due to all the gear everywhere.

Now, if you are asking what gear I own, well that would require a spreadsheet and adderall. And, this is probably like revealing a really ugly scar, or telling someone you want to marry them on your first date, but - I’m an avid fuzz collector. Dun-Dun-DUNNNNNNN!

I’ve been collecting fuzz for most of my life and I now have over 200 fuzz pedals. I’ve tried to pare it down, but The Collection has taken on a life of its own. People send me stuff now; fuzzes just show up. It is both awesome and frightening. Joking aside, I absolutely love plugging in a fuzz for the first time and finding what it wants me to play. There’s a new riff in every pedal.

[thetonecontrol]

Interview with Pladask Elektrisk

Righteous Ryan: When did you become a builder and what motivated you to do so?

Pladask Elektrisk: I started building fuzzes the summer of 2012. Always looking for the circuits with the best balance

of simplisity and expressivity. At the time I'd finished my first year at Music Technology at NTNU Trondheim. I think the main motivation for starting out came from the noise scene, Meta.Morf Biennale and "Lydeksperimentklubben" (The Sound Experiment Club) in Trondheim. "Lydeksperimentklubben" is a great workspace where you meet up with likeminded people and do whatever you want related to soundart. Sculptures, contact microphones, synths, pedals, repair work and whatever else. Among other things I'd attended one of Tore Honore Boe's "Acoustic Laptop" workshops which was very inspiring. Another factor that played a part in getting me started was the

fact that there weren't any audio electronics courses integrated in the Music Technology degree. I did a lot of digital signal processing (DSP) as part of the degree and was interested in freeing myself from the computer. I like the physicality of effect pedals and wanted to apply what I'd learned in my DSP classes to effect pedal design. Pladask Elektrisk was created in late 2014.

RR: What motivates you to create original circuits?

PE: Firstly the great lack of originality in the pedal industry. Clones, slight modification and new

circuits with the same old functionality. There are of course a lot of innovation and experimentation

happening too, but I think I was originaly motivated by all the generic pedals. The thought that "Damn! All these talented people have zero creativity! Even I, who don't have a degree in electronics, can make something with more exciting functionality!". This has developed into a kind of rule for my designs. Every pedal must offer some kind of truely unique feature. Like the selfmodulation of Romferd or the expression pedal input of Kniv.

RR: What is your design process like?

PE: A jumbled mess. I've scraped too many designs to count. There's a lot of trial and error involved, but the process has developed and improved a lot in the past 2 years. Matrise and Kniv were definitely the easiest to develop. I a big fan of matrise mixers and discovered that there weren't really any readily available active matrix mixers in the pedal format. Kniv felt like a very natural follow up. Gjengangar and Romferd were much more chaotic. A bunch of different revisions, adding and removing features, pulling my hear out, and finaly landing at a compromise where I feel there's nice

balance between simplicity and expressivity. Initially a pedal will start with either a purely technical curiosity; What will it sound like if I do this?, or it will come as inspiration from a piece of music; the desire to replicate or expand upon a sound. In the end there's always a bit of both. Gjengangar and Romferd was mainly inspired by themusic of Sightings and Grouper.

RR: Are you currently working on anything new?

PE: I've designed a noise synthesizer in collaboration with the musician Snorre Solberg of Club No-No. It should be available around spring/summer. I'm also developing a new workshop series in collaboration with the organization BandOrg for the autumn.

RR: Anything else you would like to add that you think people should know about your products?

PE: Thank you for having me! Make sure to check out Sightings, Grouper and Club No-No if you haven't already.

[dayandadream]

H.E.R. Warms Things Up for the Winter on "Your Way"

H.E.R. Warms Things Up for the Winter on “Your Way”

Mysterious singer H.E.R. drops her first single of the new year, the steamy “Your Way.” 2016 was a pretty good year for R&B. In addition to getting drops from some of the usual suspects and witnessing some lesser-known acts finally get their moment in the spotlight, 2016 also brought with it a lot of surprise new acts. One of those surprises? H.E.R., a mysterious songbird known only by the…

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