Audio Engineer to Pedal Maker
After years of practicing, playing, learning, practicing, reading, and practicing some damn more I decided I wasn’t understanding parts of my music that I really should have understood a little more. Being a musician for 6 or so years and being, what I thought was pretty good, I wanted to learn how sounds were actually made and why certain things made sounds change and even how to translate those sounds into a completed and polished piece of music. Around my 8th year of practicing music I started recording with a cheap digital interface and a lap top and some extremely budget minded microphones, like the ones you might find at a Goodwill from a used karaoke machine. Thats right, complete junk, but it got me started down a path that I didn’t realize would go so far and have so much to see. So I got myself ready for a trip down the scenic route of audio engineering.
Let me start by saying that I am in no way an expert on this topic, none, so don’t pick me apart for what I say here. Audio engineering is a very in depth subject which carries over into electrical engineering with a lot of theory and math, so pay attention in school kids, this is where you’ll need that high school math in your adult life. Anyway I wanted to know how to capture, create and manipulate sound and what caused said capture, creation and manipulation. It’s easy to say, well the guitar plays and the amp makes it louder then the mic puts it in the computer, digital interface and lap top remember, and a program records it. Sure nice and easy but lets break it down some. Okay, so the guitar part is pretty easy to understand. Vibrating strings at tuned lengths and magnetic pickup coils. You can literally look at it and see how it works so no real information needed there. Similar situation with the amp. Yes there is a whole lot that goes into the circuitry of an amp but theres a basic understanding of the function. Eventually I come back to the circuitry of the amp but at this point I wasn’t worried about it. The microphone and interface parts are what really sparked my nads here. Sorry, really got me excited. Whats going on with these things?
The microphone is a really interesting thing. I can’t speak for anyone else but as I started researching different types and uses of microphones it was one of those, duh, moments when I realized they have been used forever in simple everyday items like telephones. Here I am thinking you had to buy used karaoke gear to get a quality mic. I tried to read everything about the invention and creation of the microphone to get a good idea about the design and how it can transfer a sound wave. I won’t go into any of that boring stuff here but it is useful information for personal use if you have any interest in any part of audio engineering or sound design or if you just like to learn for no reason other than expanding your mind. Taking this information and applying it to recording some sounds, like drums and guitars, it almost made it a visual thing for me even though I’m obviously hearing the sound, I could start to picture what the sound waves were doing. How they were coming off the instrument and hitting the mic capsule or diaphragm or ribbon. Then it made it even more interesting when I would try different distances or angles with a mic and hear how the output signal would change, sometimes so dramatically that it was worth writing down to be used at a later date. Another fun thing was trying 2 mics. Maybe the same or maybe different, close together or spaced apart and sometimes at different angles. Thats where I finally got to experience phase cancellation. Im not going into detail but look it up and read about it. Sometimes it can be a pain to deal with but like anything else, once you understand
what it is and whats happening you can use it as a tool and there are some practical applications for it. Once you know the rules, then you can break them.
By this time I’m starting to have a lot of fun with capturing sounds and understanding how to manipulate them through a microphone and obviously inside my audio software. I purposely left out the software part because the first thing we do is pull up an EQ and start turning knobs, whether digital on a computer screen or physically on a piece of gear or heck even the old record players and cassette decks had EQ adjustments, so I’m going to assume we are all familiar enough with that area. However the guitar, amp and mic can only effect what is included in those pieces of gear, so whats next? It was about this time that I started to look into circuit design for effects pedals. Again that’s an area that we are probably familiar with. The first thing a kid does when he or she gets a guitar is crank up the distortion and shake the house to some Smoke on the Water. Don’t laugh, you did it too. It’s sort of amazing that every person who picks up a guitar already knows that song though, anyway I started designing my own effects pedals. It really started with a tube overdrive to pair with a Fender Twin Reverb to be able to keep the complete signal chain within an analog tube circuit. It worked very well if I do say so myself. It took me a lot of reading and even more trial and error. I’m not an electrical engineer remember but I can read, a little, and have a pretty good electrical background from my career as a master automotive and motorcycle technician. Once I was finally able to make the circuit work correctly I could fine tune the parts I wanted to design it specifically for my application. I ended up with a great sounding pedal, and people actually asked me to make them so I made a couple. Then designed a couple more, and a couple more, and gave a few more away. Apparently I had made something that people wanted which was a good feeling because I physically made them but an even better feeling that they were hearing something that I heard as pleasant, and they agreed. As I stated earlier, I am not an electrical engineer but I have been an audio engineer for many years. Putting all of this together, it’s a nice feeling to see how one aspect of it helps me in another. Without the studying and practicing of different engineering techniques I don’t think that the vision to create a circuit to sound a specific way would have come to me. Don’t take this the wrong way either. I’m not an arrogant person. There are a lot of brilliant, educated and talented people who can lecture circles around me in all these areas, but for the average person who has an interest in audio or audio engineering, to be able to take pieces of what he knows and design new equipment to help him further that knowledge is an extremely rewarding experience.
I guess the moral of the story is probably the same as a lot of other stories. Don’t be a lazy idiot. Okay maybe thats not it but I think you can understand. Learning is a good thing. Learning something to help yourself is even better so go try something. Nobody will make fun of you, well in high school they might but that doesn’t count. If you’re worried about being made fun of then don’t tell anyone, or do and who cares because the people making fun are probably a little less than human. I did all of this in the privacy of my studio. It was a couple years before anyone even knew that I had made a pedal, or even knew how to read a wiring diagram for that matter. Most people are satisfied to remain ignorant to everything and just expect the world to go by and people to create and invent and the media will tell them what to do next. I see that as a good way to end up brain dead. If nothing else is taken from this heres my final thought. Think, create, innovate and enjoy!
