A Clear Case of Distortion
Alum John Snyder creates custom pedals that rock guitarists use to add fuzz, delay, and other effects to their sound
A Clear Case of Distortion
A Clear Case of Distortion
Playing guitar gave John Snyder a respite from long hours babysitting experiments in a clean room in the basement of BU’s Photonics Center as he worked toward his doctorate in electrical engineering. A gearhead since high school, Snyder (CAS’14, ENG’20) melded his two interests, designing an effects pedal to use with the band he was playing in. It worked well, so he made a few more and sold them.
“Those early adopters were very excited about what I was doing,” he says, “and suddenly 15 turned into 30, that 30 turned into 50, that 50 turned into 100.” He designed other pedals, often collaborating with musicians to deliver the specific effects of distortion, fuzz, and echo. At a few hundred dollars apiece, the side hustle became his full-time job. Snyder is founder of Electronic Audio Experiments, a niche pedal maker with a handful of employees, including a partner who worked for legendary synthesizer innovator Moog, Inc. They’re headquartered in a light industrial space in Waltham, Mass.
“Not at all what I thought I was going to be doing,” says Snyder, who plays in the noise-rock band Weird Machine, among others. “Before, I was doing this in my spare bedroom, and eventually I realized there’s no way I could run a legitimate business with that quantity of dog hair in my packing tape.”
Call them guitar pedals, effects pedals, or stomp boxes. Plug your electric guitar into one of those rigs—most of them about the size of a paperback book—and you can wildly change the sound of your music simply by turning a knob or tapping a pedal with your foot.
Most rock guitarists use one, two, or more pedals to add fuzz, delay, and distortion to their six-string sound. Snyder pulls out his “demo board,” a sampler of his pedals all set up for an easy demonstration. They have names like the Longsword and the Model feT, the Limelight, the Bard, and the Prismatic Wall. Plugging in a guitar, he takes each pedal for a spin, producing a wild array of effects as he picks and strums.
“This one sounds like broken glass,” he says. “This one makes crazy playing come out of you, which is always fun.… I’m really excited for someone to use this one in a horror movie.”
Some of the sounds are astonishing; with others, you’d need a musician’s ear to hear the difference between them. “A lot of these pedals are just here to make your guitar sound more overdriven in a particular way, and that is something that people address with just a staggering amount of nuance,” he says. “People are so particular about it.
“Coming at it as a student of electronics, there are so many different ways to do something that should, on paper, be the same process every time. But in reality, those nuances are, at least to me, just as interesting from an electronics theory standpoint as they are in the hands of a guitarist with a trained ear.”
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