I’ve been designing professional audio products for over 20 years, and playing guitar for 35. I’m much better at the electronics part.
In the early days I was the kid pulling stuff apart, interested in how these things worked. It started with fixing a twisted jack or a loose pot and by 9th grade I had built and installed a couple of simple boost circuits in friends guitars. I was the one setting up the vocal PA for band practice and making sure the bass player had a working cable. My first guitar amp turned out to be a lemon, and the pain of having to trade a guitar to get it fixed and finding out it still had problems made a strong impression on me. I never again paid someone to work on any of my gear.
Studying electronics came naturally. In college I got myself a mid 70’s Bassman, and I learned about tube circuits. Amp mods and repairs for friends followed. I played in some bands, but found the lure of paid work as a live sound engineer to be too strong. I mixed a lot of bands. Front line of the indie rock and punk scene in a college town in the mid 90s was a grand time. I wasn’t much into pedals, but I had a TS10 + Boss GE-7 rig. I built my first pedal for a less bandmate which was a LFO driven cut switch mounted in a treadle enclosure.
Eventually I graduated and moved off for a real job in pro audio product design. I was mixing bands on the weekends for another decade on top. I traced my GE-7 and put that on the web back in the early 00s along with some mods I did to my own. I loaned it to someone… cant remember who… been gone a long time. I still see that schematic floating around the internet from time to time. The guitar and amp work has been a hobby.
I found that building, fixing, and modifying things for other people meant that the gear didn’t just sit and collect in my basement. Mostly I’ve been doing the custom tube amp thing. I scratch built the amp I use which is a stereo 2×10 angled baffle combo with a quartet of EL84s doing ~12W per side. I did some experiments with cross fed power amp driven reverb which turned out kind of cool…
I’m generally content to buy other peoples guitar pedals… there are SO many to choose from I can almost always find exactly what I want.
Then I came up with the idea for the Ratchet pedal, and found that nobody makes one…
Building one for myself wasn’t really a challenge. So I set out to design something that I could produce as a product, and learn about all of the other things that go along with that like mechanical/industrial/graphic/web design, branding, sales etc. It seemed like a pedal someone else might want and its certainly unique. Besides everyone has a guitar pedal company now… 😉
The journey has been enlightening. I’ve had to think about branding, and logos, and industrial design. The mechanical design has been poured over and reworked multiple times. How do I make this rugged and look good without making it too expensive or painful to build. Without some help from a friend with the firmware I might have given up by now, or been forced to make serious compromises.
I have ideas for more, but lets see how this one works out first.
Do I want to run a pedal company? Is this compelling enough to take on accounting, sales, marketing, customer service? That’s a big question.