Here’s how I used to record pedal demos:
- Attach phone to tripod
- Wrap tripod legs around mic stand
- Record video
- Suffer
The results were poor at best, certainly not up to the level of quality I want to express for my products. I think I have a tendency to put a lot of emphasis on the aesthetics of my pedals and less on the sound. It’s something I’m working on, as at the end of the day, these things are for making music with. If they don’t sound great, they won’t be used. And so, my most recent focus is to improve my demo recordings to try to convince you how awesome my pedals sound.
My background is actually in audio recording. In recording college, they teach you how to solder, and that served as the basis for me to build pedals. But before I was building pedals, I was out in the world with my portable recording studio making albums for bands around Calgary. Over the past 10 years since graduating from the college, I have built up a solid music production studio.
In this photo, you can see some of it at work. The signal path is simplified to show off the pedals as much as possible. Gibson Les Paul tuned to drop C, pedal, Peavey 6505 clean channel with Peavey Sheffield cab. (By the way, everyone talks shit about this cab. Why? Listen to it. It sounds incredible.
This room is in my mom’s basement. It has tile floors and is almost completely devoid of furniture. This gives the room very lively acoustics which always turn out cool.
The microphones seen here are the humble Shure SM57 and Sennheiser MD421 as close mics, an AEA N8 ribbon mic for a dark room mic, and a matching pair of Rode NT5s in X/Y position under the ribbon for a little bit of a stereo image. The close mics feed a 2-channel Neve 1073 preamp while the far mics use Focusrite ISA (and the Air effected Clarett) preamps.
These ingredients combine to form a warm, angry, full-frequency, eardrum-ripping wall of sound that can be heard on the shop pages for the BITTEN, the RENEWAL, and the PHANTOM GATE. All of my future pedals will receive the same treatment, of course.
Have a listen to a few of the albums I made using my studio.
