An Interview with Steve Demedash
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Sound Shoppe:
I noticed that Jordan from Pine Box Customs gives you credit on his site for partially designing “Crooked Teeth”. Would you mind talking about that?
Steve:
There’s also this Discord chat group that I’ve been part of since about 2017 or 2018, made up entirely of pedal builders. We do a Secret Santa every year, and the general guideline is that it should be something cool, preferably that you made yourself, but which isn’t necessarily part of your main catalogue (or, say, maybe a cool variant of something in your main catalogue). So what I’ve always done is use this gift exchange as an excuse to try to get a fun or weird idea working in a very short period of time in order to gift it. That year, Vince’s idea came to mind, and I came up with a very straightforward way to make it work, along with some cool extra features like some wild routing options that configure themselves automatically depending on which jacks have inputs/outputs plugged in at any given time. I managed to get it working after 2 attempts. I then promptly shelved the design as I’m already working on another trem that’s a bit more up my alley.
Anyhow, Jordan from Pine Box have been good friends since back when both of us were tiny little unknown companies. He is (or at least, at the time, he was) more comfortable with drive and gain design work. So when he brought up that he was wanting to make a trem but not really sure where to begin, I offered to sell him my dual trem thing for a very good price, with no licensing or strings attached or anything. I helped a bit with layout and getting some bugs worked out in the tremolo side, but besides that, I’ve had very little involvement. It sort of just switched hands, rather than being super collaborative.
Sound Shoppe:
Steve:
But there are a couple of individuals I still bounce ideas off of now and then. John Snyder from Electric Audio Experiments, who I bounce ideas off of a lot. Like I said, my friend Vince in the UK. He’s not a pedal builder, but he's just a funny guy to talk to. Yeah, a small group of people.
Like I said, I used to kind of just throw ideas out there on Instagram. When the company started, I was just building shit in my spare time and selling it online. I was paying off student loans with my job, but I wanted to buy gear and I was like, okay, well maybe I'll just do a side hustle here and started the Instagram. Then I kind of built up. So I always treated Instagram as, “ I'm just posting things I'm working on” rather than this is my company I'm marketing, you know?
That became a bit problematic sometime last year when I started posting things, like T60. I'd be like, Hey, these are some graphics I'm working on for the T60. What do you think? And so many people started sending messages and commenting things like “When can I buy it??! When are you releasing it?” Which would have been cute and encouraging if it wasn’t such a heavy and sustained response.
It still happens from dealers. It’s not out yet and people still try to buy it. Which makes more sense now, since the design is finished and it’s listed on my website. But this was happening a year ago too. Like, I just got these graphics to a place I kinda like the overall aesthetic, and I don’t have a circuit I’m happy with. I wasn’t secretive about either of those things. But it’s like… dude, not only is there a huge manufacturing pipeline between now and then, there’s also all this unfinished design work that I refuse to rush. AND we’re in the middle of a pandemic that’s interfering with global supply chains. I don’t understand how you can expect me to give you a release date right now. It’s literally just an idea at this stage. So I just pulled back from sharing idea I hadn’t finished or didn’t know if I’d be interested in bringing to market or not.
Sound Shoppe:
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Steve:
So the pedal printer, I've used a couple in the past. I started using Mammoth originally. They closed down in 2019. I used F5 Metal Works for a long time, and lately I've been using Disaster Area.
Sound Shoppe:
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Steve:
So with the grid, there's no way it's going to perfectly line up. You're going to put the white down and then if you do another shoot, you're not going to get the grid perfectly lined up. The lines are just too thin. So they had to figure out the black and white content and just do it all in one shot. And it took a few tries before I was happy with the grid, like how bright it was. I don't have them here, but I can show you some of the other ones that I got. It was just way too bright or way too Dark.
Sound Shoppe:
Steve:
So I've been working on an analog chorus, so I don't know if you're familiar with how analog choruses work?
Sound Shoppe:
Steve:
So to modulate that you just modulate the speed of how fast or how stretched out or compressed the pulses are. So like in a fascial pulses, the quicker the things go through the delay line. The slower they are, they take longer to go through. And so you bend the pitch by stretching and compressing that wave. You know, so the samples come out slower then faster, slower then faster. So you get a Doppler effect. So I'm using a microcontroller to generate the wave form that modulates the clock speed. So anything that you can select the waveform on, that's also like an analog kind of chorus or something. That's exactly what's happening. Even like a tremolo pedal, that's the same thing. There’s a microcontroller in it that’s generating the waveform.
And it's manipulating in some way. You know, it's outputting a way form, that's modulating something. So with anything like an analog delay line you're modulating the clock, so you're just controlling how fast it's going up and down. But there's a weird issue around this, if the voltage level you're putting into that clock is too high, it sort of red lines. It's not going to actually increase the clock speed anymore. Same with going down. So there are limits. Your waveform can kind of distort. The pitch swing doesn't necessarily reflect what you're putting in. And so what I want is something where I can measure, like, show me the frequency, like graph against time so I can actually see frequency, you know, cause with my oscilloscope, I can see the waveform. I can see it stretching and compressing. But what I can't mentally see, is that a perfect triangle or is that like…?
So I wanted to compute the frequency and graph that over time. And then I want to be able to overlay the waveform I'm inputting and do the voltage over time, and then compare and see like, you know, figure out what the parameters are. I need to get it to match. It's like I was able to do it by ear on this thing, but it would have saved me a lot of time if I was able to do that. And I'd like to be able to do that in the future. So in a different clock circuit I’m going to need to do this whole thing again. like if I ever want to do a flanger or something, so yeah. Okay. Yeah.
Sound Shoppe:
Steve:
As for the microchips shortage.. I think that has more to do with specialized microchips chips for cars and shit, not really what microchips I'm using. But shipping has definitely slowed down. Things take forever. I mean I submitted all the design files for manufacturing the T-60 PCBs in early April and it’s now nearly August and I still don't know when I'm going to get them. I wanted to release this like in July, but it's not gonna happen.
Sound Shoppe:
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Sound Shoppe:
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Sound Shoppe:
Steve:
“Boutique” in the more modern sense is a type of marketing, applied to shoes and shit. It means doing “limited edition” versions of the same things in different prints or colors. That's what JHS and Earthquaker and walrus are, they're not ``boutique” in the classical sense. They’re marketing. they're big. They're not in it for the love. And of course the classically boutique companies can participate in this sort of marketing too. I certainly do now and then. It’s not black and white a lot of the time.
But those bigger quote-unquote “boutique” outfits, they've got business people running it these days. you know, you get to a certain size. That's what happens. You can pretend you're a small business, but when you've got a certain number of employees, you're no longer a small business, maybe in the government’s eyes you are but...
Sound Shoppe:
Steve:
I do it as kind of like my creative outlet. And yeah, it does make me money. And that's great, but I'm not motivated by money. I'm motivated by wanting to make interesting things.
So I would say businesses run by people who want to make money are the kind of people that you look at like, “ I hope they don't tread into my territory” because that would be competition. ‘Cause they're always trying to get things to people for the cheapest so they can make the most overall, you know, they have more manufacturing capacity. ‘Cause they're all about, you know, making sales. So somebody like that starts making something that's too close to your, your product that's competition. But somebody else who's doing it for the love of doing it. That's not competition.
Sound Shoppe:
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Sound Shoppe:
Thank you again for your time.