The realities of running a small guitar pedal company (18 months in)

I nearly made this as an apology - “sorry for the lack of content”, “sorry I haven't posted much lately”, that sort of thing, but I stopped and thought, who would I be apologising to?! So here's just an honest look at what a week running Hamilton Effects actually looks like right now, 18 months in.

Friday is pedal day (in theory)

For the last year and a half, Friday has been the day I set aside for pedal work, but it had been a while since a Friday was actually free for that! This one started with tidying the mess in the lounge while I waited for a customer to drop off his guitar, then straight into a list that had been building up for a while.

On the bench for the day: two Faded Embers to finish, a stock take ahead of the Brighton Guitar Show, and a rewire on an American Pro II Telecaster. That one has a customer swapping their push push switch for an S1 switch, upgrading the volume pot to a CTS pot, and having the control plate rotated so the layout runs tone, then pickup toggle, instead of the usual order - classic Tele stuff.

There was also an pedal mod to get to - I stopped doing mods on older pedals about a year ago, but someone played one at another job, liked it, and asked if I would build them one, so that’s on the list too.

Most of what I do is not building pedals

A big part of my week is guitar setups, repairs, and mods, alongside a genuinely interesting side project at the moment. A local musician has a tone in his head that he has not quite been able to reach, and we have been working through amps, (which ultimately will end up with some sort of a Quad Cortex capture), and a Stomp setup to try and get him there. He wants the same sound at home as he gets gigging, captured from his three amp rig. It has been a fun problem to help solve, and it is exactly the kind of work that does not show up on the Hamilton Effects shop page but takes up a good chunk of my time.

New pedal designs, projects sitting on the back burner, all the things I keep saying I want to get to, mostly have not happened yet. Not because they are not important to me, but because this is how the business runs at the moment.

Where the time actually goes

The honest answer is teaching - when I started Hamilton Effects, teaching was what let me start it at all, because it is regular income. I began with four full days a week through a teaching agency, working in schools during the day and then private lessons at students' houses in the evenings.

Over the past year and a half that balance has been shifting. More of my time now is pivoting to my own private teaching schedule rather than agency work, partly because it is closer to home, and partly because I keep more of what I earn when I am not giving a cut to someone else's admin. I have also picked up some different kinds of teaching, including leading a school worship band, which has been good fun.

A typical week currently looks something like this. Monday started with piano lessons at a school, then a buffer of a couple of hours for admin, emails, and increasingly, speculative enquiries asking if I can quote for a piece of guitar work. Then a second school, a couple of after school lessons, and in the evening a guitar dropped off for a setup and a fret polish.

Tuesday is a full school day followed by more of that buffer time, which this week went on restringing and conditioning a fretboard, then a late lesson at a student's house. Wednesday is my long teaching day, stacked back to back. Thursday is similar, with the buffer time going on finishing off a Squier Strat setup. Then Friday, pedal day!

As I head into the summer holidays, that changes - term time teaching drops away for a while, which means more hours for the things that have been waiting.

Redressing the balance

If you are readinng that weekly schedule and thinking this sounds like a video about a pedal company that is actually about a full time music teacher, you are not wrong. Teaching pays the bills. It is term time only, 39 weeks of the year, which is exactly why the summer holidays matter so much for pedal work. Pedals alone, at this point, would not cover the mortgage.

That is the reality of where Hamilton Effects is right now. Guitar servicing and the more regular work builds the foundation, and the pedals are what I am building on top of it. Redressing the balance means finding the line between doing enough paid, reliable work to support the family, and protecting enough time for the creative work that does not guarantee an income, at least not immediately. Designing pedals, making content, and other passion projects all fall into that second category.

Not everything in that second category is pedals either. The other week I recorded and will be mixing a couple of pieces for string quartet and piano that a friend had written, which was a nice change of pace and exactly the kind of thing I mean by creative work that will not pay much but is worth doing anyway.

The bit I am least confident with

If I am honest about where my process could improve, there is a real gap between designing a pedal and actually manufacturing it, and that gap is where I am weakest.

I love the design side. Finding tones, conceptualising ideas, prototyping, A B testing, the graphic design work that goes with a new pedal, all of that I genuinely enjoy. Design for manufacture is the part I am least confident with, and it consistently takes me the longest. Even now, I end up spending more time than I should troubleshooting the same design problems over and over.

Part of that is because, aside from the Faded range, my circuits are not simple. Embers is not just a fuzz. There is a pickup simulator in there, an underdrive control with its own bypass, a clean low end blend, an output buffer, and a treble cut. Faded Embers is a much simpler underdriven fuzz design, closer to where Embers started. The Twin has its own complexity too, with switching between series and parallel, plus a treble cut and attenuation. Those are the areas that consistently need the most work.

So I am starting to think about finding someone to help with that side specifically. Taking my current designs as they are and doing the design for manufacture work to make the build process quicker and more efficient. Ideally someone from the audio world, or at least willing to put up with someone who has fairly particular and occasionally complicated ideas about routing and switching. If that sounds like you, or you know someone who might enjoy it, I would love to hear from you.

The workshop problem

One practical thing I would like to sort out is space. I work from home, and my dining table doubles as the workshop. The top comes off and all my soldering and pedal building equipment lives underneath it. It works, for now, but a proper workshop would make a real difference, mostly to how easily I can keep track of what stock I actually have. Without a dedicated space, everything gets put away after each session and pulled back out again next time, which makes it surprisingly easy to lose track of inventory. This week that meant running out of power jack sockets partway through finishing a Faded Embers.

Why I am sticking with it

Despite all of that, I like the variety. I enjoy the guitar setups, the repairs, the mods, the teaching, the pedal building, all of it, even if the pedal market right now is a saturated one. I enjoy the creativity and the community around building pedals, and that is reason enough to keep going.

Thanks for reading, and if you watched the video too, thanks for sticking with it. It was not the usual pedal demo or design breakdown, more just an honest look at what 18 months into Hamilton Effects actually looks like week to week.

If you want to keep up with new pedals, stock, and whatever comes out of the extra time this summer should bring, head over to hamiltoneffects.com. That is where you can browse the pedals, read more design notes, and get in touch. I will also be at the Brighton Guitar Show on the 18th of July, so come and say hello if you are around.