Back on the pedal dive podcast
I was invited back on Hello Sailor Joe's Pedal Dive podcast on Monday, second time round. The first time I was on it was one of the earliest episodes they'd done, so going back over the conversation afterwards was a decent marker for where Hamilton Effects has got to in the last year or so.
Eighteen months isn't very long really, but I did turn up with a much more refined range than I had last time. Here are a few of the things we spoke about.
The boring bit
The hardest, most time consuming and honestly the most boring part of this whole thing is making the same pedal, exactly the same, over and over again. The creative bit is the bit I love. Breadboard, one out, one in, one out, one in, and then that moment where you swap a transistor for a different one and the pedal suddenly does the thing you'd been chasing for a fortnight. Great. And then the job becomes doing that again. And again.
This is a big part of why the Faded range exists. I had an Embers I was happy with and a Twin I was happy with, and rather than sit there building the same two boards forever I set myself a challenge, which was basically how stripped back can I make each of these and have them still be good? So the range runs in pairs now. Core Embers and Faded Embers, Core Twin and Faded Twin. Same voice broadly, but very different amounts of control on offer.
Backing my ears
Joe and I ended up on capacitors for a while, which is the sort of tangent that verges on being a bit too engineering-y for me. What I'd say is I'm not an electrical engineer, I back my ears. Breadboard, swap one out, put one in, listen, keep whichever one sounds right. That's how the Embers got its voice. I was after a low gain, rolled back, textured fuzz rather than a wall of it, so I went through a load of transistors, listening but also measuring hFE and working out which pairs got me what I wanted.
Joe made a good point that goes with this, actually. Once someone tells you what they don't like about a component you start hearing it. He'd had a conversation with another builder about tropical fish caps in Rangemasters, and then went and recorded the same Rangemaster over and over with different caps in it, and afterwards he could hear the thing he'd previously been deaf to.
Why are they so loud?
Someone in the chat noticed that both my pedals and Joe's are loud. Unity at about nine o'clock on the Embers, rather than the usual fuzz face routine of cranking the volume just to break even.
Some of that is that I design through my HX Stomp rig, which is also the rig you'll have played my pedals through if you've found me at a show. Usually I set a modeller up with the master volume on the amp model itself all the way up and then never think about it again, and then you plug the same pedal into a Hot Rod Deluxe and the jump is way more obvious than you expected. I'd like to think it's some clever output processing in the Stomp, recreating the amp itself hitting it’s ceiling and not having any more headroom (which in reality would be crazy loud), but I don’t really know.
Mostly though it's deliberate. I'd much rather have more in the tank and turn it down than have it full whack and be sat there going, I just can't. It helps things blend, too. If you're going into an amp with loads of headroom, everything you put in front of the pedal is clipping the pedal and doing precisely nothing to the amp, which is chilling out over there waiting to clip. Level is what pulls it all together.
It was never really a boost
Which is also why I dropped Boost from the Twin's name this year. Calling it a boost puts people off and it isn't really one, it's a gainstaging pedal. Two very simple circuits, series or parallel, gain control on one and a bias on the other, and depending how you set them against each other you're anywhere from clean boost to overdrive to a two transistor fuzz.
Thanks to Joe and Martin for having me back. If you want to keep an eye on any of the above it'll turn up at hamiltoneffects.com and on the YouTube channel, which is coming off its summer break.