What is your favorite non-Fuzzrocious pedal? How did it influence your approach to pedal creation?

The pedal that I have owned the longest at this point is the Moog Freqbox. In layman's terms, it turns your guitar or bass into a synth. It has envelope filter, waveform, drive, frequency, blending, and fuzzy modulation features to help the user dial up a lot of cool dirty synth sounds, but most importantly it has expression outputs in the back to let you operate one of the pots (knobs) via an expression pedal to let you sweep a frequency or make an envelope sweep scream! This pedal opened my tone, sound, and playing on bass in unbelievable ways allowing me to be different that most other bassists in bands. It's been with me for around 6 or so years now and it's something that I still use from time to time in personal writing (when I have time to do so in PLUTONIAN). The Freqbox inspired me to make a short-lived pedal called, "The Terrordactyl," which was a fuzz/envelope filter. In the big picture, it reminds me to keep making fun, weird, noisy, dirty pedals that sound awesome on every instrument a customer can plug into it.

What is your favorite pedal type?

I love delays and reverbs most of all because the add texture to what a musician plays and influences how they play a song or part of a song. A close second is "dirt." I love making fuzz, overdrive, and distortion pedals because I like what they do to an instrument. I don't like unaffected guitar/bass in what I play and the bands I listen to. I want to hear dirty tones most of the time and it's a dream to be a part of making people's clean tones sound dirtier than they would without our pedals.

What song/album featuring Fuzzrocious pedals makes you most proud?

Oh, come on...now you want me to name favorites?! Fine. The top three that immediately come to mind are: O'Brother "Poison! (Alternate Version)" from Basement Window - when the bass comes in around the 45 second mark, our Demon with gate/boost DESTROYS. I don't care how cocky that sounds! The gating of that dirty bass sounds like NIN incarnate. Just nasty. Queens of the Stone Age Like Clockwork - the cake is knowing that thousands upon thousands of people dig this band and when they play Like Clockwork, our Demon (with some special mods built in) is used on the some of the most key parts of the album. The icing on said cake is that Troy van Leeuwen from Queens believed in us and brought us into the Queens' camp introducing us to the band, who also use our gear, and the crew that helps them bring their vision and sound to the masses in the studio and live. Being accepted with open arms into this group of people (including the techs and production team) is special. Being a part of the music that a band makes is cool, but growing a friendship and having your pedals heard by "the masses" is extra cool. Russian Circles "309" from Empros - When Brian Cook's bass get eeeeeeextra dirty on 309, I want to take off from the stage and run across the crowd's collective heads. When I lose my balance and fall on top of the crowd, my fists and feet would leave no face untouched. I am 6' 4" and 175 lbs. You're all ****ed. A very, very close fourth is the bass on "Field of Zzzz" by Young Widows. The whole song is next level bonkers for me and the bass tone in that song SCREAMS Rat Tail.

What trend/technique/style really bothers you in the pedal industry?

So many companies lack the personal connection. I hear from customers often that they are surprised that we replied so quickly (usually within an hour or three during the day or 12 hours if sent overnight) or that we replied at all! When I write to or call a company on the phone, the last thing I want to get is no reply or a stock/automated response. We are people and so are you, so why can't we talk like normal people? If you listen, are understanding, helpful, honest, and polite, usually people will reciprocate. It's pretty simple. Other than that, the relationship between consumers/customers and many companies on social media and forums is a broken, but mendable process. I see a lot of negative language, posting, etc. from the consumer and either no or very little response/action from companies. The internet isn't going away and even though there are so awful aspects to internet life, the positive is that it opens ALL of us to the opportunity to talk together. To the company - be prompt, be present, and be helpful. To the consumer - remember that the people who are making a product are people who may have a family hinging upon the income generated from said product, so reach out to the people who are part of the company you're unhappy with and think before trashing the company or product. You could be ruining someone's life over something as trivial (in the big picture of life and living) as gear.

Why do we use pedals? how would you describe a pedal’s value? One criticism of guitar pedals might say that they are crutches for guitarists with weak chops? that they have as much to do with guitar talent as Instagram filters have to do with photography. How would you (ryan) respond?

People like use pedals for many reasons - for fun, to be weird or different, to help a song or part of a song shine based on that "thing" that a pedal can do, or to cover up minor playing mistakes. I have fallen into these four categories before...hell, I have fallen into all four of these categories on a song that I used effects on! When it comes to the argument that pedals are crutches, that's a subjective argument. Yeah, some of us use fuzz to cover up our mistakes in playing, but at the same time not all of us want to play perfectly. I am a fan of happy mistakes and sometimes pedals make accidents into sonic gold. Anyway, if you break your foot, you don't HAVE to use crutches. You could limp, use a cane, use crutches, or use a wheelchair. With pedals, you can play without effects, add them digitally in post, or play with effects - it's all about what the effect does FOR the player or song. Fuzzrocious isn't out to change a person who doesn't believe in effects into a pedal junkie. We'll just be here if s/he is ready to open his/her mind and give us a chance! A pedal's monetary value combines a lot of different factors - length of time it takes to build (or in our case, paint), amount of parts, availability and sourcing of rare parts, amount of employees...the list goes on. Our biggest factor in the cost of a pedal goes back to how much the pedal costs to make and how much of my and Shannon's time is worth. We don't add value to a pedal with mojo parts or cool factor. We have to make some profit to pay bills, feed the family, and provide our children with as comfortable a life as we can give them, but we also keep the price as low as we can to squeak by. A pedal's worth in terms of how important it is to the music world or the tone world is up to the user(s) and shouldn't be on the creator. The joy of this job is to make cool shit for people and get a little something in return to keep the gears turnin'.

What would you tell an amateur pedal-maker about getting into this business?