that song, something with humbuckers …” or whatever, so I had a lot of guitar changes. I like having a fairly broad palette available. With guitar changes, I didn’ t always want something with tube pickups, to be really quiet relative to everything else, so I made a buffer and I put a Level control on it and a Tone control. Then eventually I thought since I’ ve got some active stuff there, I could now put a tuner split and just have a tuner running the whole time that doesn’ t affect the signal at all. And then I put a mute switch on it. It was just one of those things that evolved. I had that for five or six years before I ever showed it to anybody at Fender. I showed it to one guy at Fender and he went,“ Oh wow! This is super cool, I need this- make me one!” So I made him one, then he told a couple friends, so it kind of grew on its own.
When we did the pedal offering, one of the things I wanted to avoid doing was copying other manufacturers‘ six best’ SKUs or products. The other thing I wanted to avoid was generic offerings like,“ Here’ s our chorus, here’ s our phaser, and here’ s our overdrive …” and just go down the line of sort of generic things. That thing was tweaky enough and different enough that I hoped it might telegraph to people that we were pretty serious about sound quality, and flexibility, and the rigors of having a pedalbased rig and going through guitar changes.
It’ s a hard one to describe, and I think this is a little bit of the‘ black sheep’ of the pedals. People still look at it and go,“ Wait, what?” But if you are that person that does go through a lot of guitar changes, or maybe you just want a little more inspiration, or just want to kick the gain up a little more, I like it a lot. I like the fact that it’ s kind of tweaky and weird and it’ ll hopefully tell people that we’ re serious and have a bunch more stuff we want to do.
[ WM ] I’ ll go a step further and say that with the singular exception of a drive pedal and delay, if you switch guitars a lot, this is the first pedal I’ d suggest buying.
[ Stan ] Awesome! I like it, I’ ve had it for a long time and I’ ve always used it. I can have no other pedals and just that pedal if I’ m still doing a bunch of guitar swaps and it still makes life easier.
[ WM ] I recently ran into you at the Fender Bungalow in L. A., and you were kind enough to talk me through the ins and outs of your latest pedal offerings, the Pelt fuzz, Full Moon Distortion, and Engager Boost.
[ Stan ] Yeah, that’ s our product development area, and it’ s in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard. Humorously it’ s an old CBS building. That’ s a chortle and laugh.
[ WM ] How would you run them in your signal chain if you were using just these three pedals?
[ Stan ] So the Engager Boost. If I was trying
80 September 2018 WorshipMusician. com