ABOUT OUR PEDALS

Volume & Power create analog boutique effect pedals for guitar and bass, designed to suit a range of genres, from doom to electro, industrial or shoegaze and everything in between, our effects give you the potential to innovate without sacrificing more conventional sounds.

We design all our PCBs from the ground up, sometimes starting with an existing circuit topology and completely redesigning it, while other times we start only with an idea and end up with something totally new. We design, solder, drill, paint & engrave all of our devices in-house.

ABOUT JOHN

How did this little company come about?

I have been working as an engineer for over 20 years in the fields of automation, product development, testing and project management. In 2018 I was working as a systems developer helping to create consumer products for a big corporation and one of my projects was to reduce unwanted noise (from pumps) in kitchen appliances such as coffee machines.

My employer at the time knew I was interested in guitar and sound and music and thought I was the perfect fit for this mission. But to be honest I didn't know so much about free field microphones placement and calibration or anechoic chambers design so for the next few months I spent my time reading about frequencies and sound waves and sound pressure level measurement.

I needed to properly understand the tools required to do the experiments and the signals they generated and also how to understand the data produced. It was necessary to build prototypes of the preamplifiers and the electronic devices used to calibrate the test setup to prove the concept before asking an external partner to build us a professional tester that could auto generate reports.

During this time I became interested in guitar again and it occurred to me that I enjoyed developing audio equipment and as I had built effects in the past for friends, I could maybe build some cool pedals for myself.

Since I already knew how to design PCBs and I had plenty of tools, I thought this would be easy enough, but after a few months of development I was only ready with my first effect: the Power Lines Distortion. Although that was not what I had first set out to build – no, in my vision for the first device I was much more ambitious. My first attempt to design a unique effect was the Dark Forest Drone Fuzz! With octave up, octave down, fuzz distortion and resonant filter, it was a monster of a thing with a whole bunch of ICs, 8 potentiometers and about 50 caps and resistors inside. I must have gone through six different prototypes but I could never get the comparator to make both octave sections track in a way that was satisfying to me. That would have required even more parts!

I knew that I needed to greatly simplify my designs to be able to guarantee a quality product in terms of both sound and build that would work with all pickup and other effects. And crucially, be actually useful to musicians. Not to mention that too many functions often equal less actual playing and typically endless fiddling with knobs.

Now my approach is to utilise innovative analog electronic solutions which minimise complexity, while still delivering effects that give the artist a tool that can manipulate their sound in both weird and useful ways.

I have been collecting, building and playing with pedals for as long as I have been playing guitar (30 years). I used to think I was the only weirdo out there who was so fascinated by these little boxes, but now I know there is a whole world of people that are dedicated to the creation of new and wonderful soundscapes.

Between 2019 and now I have been slowly building up the Volume & Power product portfolio which now includes a variety of modulation and drive effects.