A little back story:
I started making pedals last summer after having told a friend of mine (several years before) that I wanted to start my own pedal line and wouldn't buy any new pedals until I made one myself. Ok, so that turned out to be completely bogus as I bought many pedals between the setting of that goal and the start of Shoe because I'm a gear whore. I did, however, build a telecaster out of parts with my dad in that time period and started down the path to music electronics that way. Anyway, about a year later I moved to Brooklyn while I was going to graduate school at NYU for a Master's in Interdisciplinary Humanities (my background is in Literature, Creative Writing, Linguistics, Publishing, and Social/Literary Theory) and lived right near a neat little music shop called Pentatonic Guitars.
After hanging out over there with the very talented and cool luthier, Domingos Fialho, he and I designed and co-created my now locally and mildly internet-famous stereo stratocaster seen here in an early form:
So that got people talking a bit and, after getting to know the area, I asked the shop owner if I could sell a pedal there if I made it. He said he wouldn't buy them from me outright as he didn't have that kind of money but I could put them on consignment there alongside a few other builders who were doing the same thing in the shop (like Smitty Pedals, for example).
So, I decided to get some supplies and try building fairly simple but awesome pedal that I'd been using for years, the Mellowtone Wolf Computer, but with a different control scheme that tailored the controls to travel only the ranges that I found useful on the Wolf CPU's knobs and made some other modifications to the circuit. So, in summer of 2011 I stayed up during a massive thunderstorm and put together the first Silver Apple and it worked quite well on the first try. My dad had taught me how to solder when I was a little kid (my dad is a computer programmer and we used to build small electronics projects and computers when I was a kid and teenager and he taught me well so I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I have a very low failure rate when building). So, I had a blank silver enclosure and a marker and set out to decorating the box. I labelled the footswitch "SHOE" with an arrow pointing to it and then named the pedal after the psychedelic band The Silver Apples who had a great song called "Oscillations" since the Silver Apple is an oscillating fuzz first and foremost.
So, I brought it down to the shop and people really liked it. For the next few weeks I would go home and build a new pedal every day each time tweaking the design a little bit (or a lot) making the circuit into something different and my own. I would bring in the new prototypes every day and see what people in the shop liked the best. Because of the footswitch label, people started calling them "those 'Shoe' pedals". This tweaking process ended up spawning two different pedals. One was a Silver Apple much closer to the current production design (using a mixture of germanium and silicon transistors and refining the controls much further, eventually adding a momentary footswitch for oscillation control on the fly and adding clipping options). The other was the Pixelfix. The Pixelfix came about by my completely breaking the silver apple by adding an extra transistor stage to the circuit and then figuring out how I could fix it so it worked again, thus ending up with something entirely different. During this time I also realized that sharpie was a terrible idea and started painting the words on my enclosures using graffiti-style paint pens.
So, maybe a month or so later I am in the shop talking to Domingos. Everyone else has gone home or is out for the day and I overhear a guy and girl playing bass in the shop. He's commenting on how he likes it cause it reminds him of the Hoffner bass. I kind of note that in the back of my head and then the guy comes up to me asking if I work there and if they carry drum keys. So I look at him and he looks kind of familiar. And I say, "Well, no I don't but the drum keys are over here," and find him a drum key. He says "Oh yay! Now I can be in tune!" So I say, "Hey you look familiar, are you in a band?" He says, "A band? Yes!" And then I ask, "Are you in Deerhoof?" And Greg Saunier says, "You've heard of us!" So I ring him up even though I don't work there and introduce myself to him. Then I realize I should have told him about the pedals so I send the band an email and get a reply saying they checked out my videos and are interested. So I send them a bunch of pedals on the house because I'm a huge fan of theirs
and that's how Deerhoof came to use Shoe pedals live and (I hear) in studio on their upcoming record.
The Evil Rainbow they have is a very very very early prototype and very much unlike the one that's out now, but perhaps I'll release the old version at some point too.
So, anyway, after studying a lot about audio electronics, the workings of various transistor types, and a lot of classic pedal circuits I've now got quite a few different models.
etc.
So, the basic gist of what is what:
Silver Apple: An oscillating fuzz that has developed into something similar to both the fuzz factory and wolf computer but distinct from both with features like clipping distortion and momentary oscillation activation.
Pixelfix: An analog/chiptune-sounding synthtone (extreme distortion to the point that it doesn't really sound like a guitar anymore) suitable for use on bass, guitar, or cheap synths that you'd like to get sounding like an old monosynth on single notes and like a very extreme guitar distortion on chords.
Kung Fuzz: Based somewhat on the mosrite fuzzrite but using mosfets and having the ability to add Jim Kelly (a third silicon distortion stage) for grungey distortion as well as classic psychedelic/funk fu/spaghetti western fuzz sounds. The Black Box is actually a very stripped down version of the non-boosted mode of this pedal at a lower cost.
Frog: An octave-up boost/drive rather than an octave-up fuzz. Controls are Gain and...more Gain. Great for live use as it gets extremely extremely loud if you want it to. It also comes in a version with master volume instead of a second gain control for lower-volume use.
Boot: A basic low cost two-transistor booster pedal for kicking your amp in the ass. No it's not based on a super hard on. In the future this will also include a tone knob that does a good job of morphing single coils into a humbucker sound and vice versa.
Evil Rainbow: A Mashall-style distortion with tone controls reminiscent of a big muff (and also with controls for incoming treble response for either very dark smooth sounds like Robert Fripp or cocked wah kinds of sounds). It's also very amp-like in its reaction.
Savior Machine (the cream-colored pedal): A much simpler stripped-down and lower gain version of the Evil Rainbow. Basically it is a Marshall-style amp-like distortion/drive and probably my best-sounding pedal for traditional blues classic rock and jcm-type breakup. Deceptively versatile. Named after a David Bowie song but you know whatever. P+W guys can think what they like.
Elephant: Kind of like the Octophant (a pedal I designed for HCFX) except without the octave and with other controls instead like the ability to make it a treble booster or to turn on self-oscillation via internal feedback loop.
(Not Pictured)
Spitvalve: A fuzz that sounds like a moldy rusty trombone on leads.
Legalizer: A fuzz for when you have the munchies.
Black Samurai: A silicon Fuzzrite with a baxandall EQ and gain control. Named after the Jim Kelly film.
TL;DR: Awesome pedals. Like me on facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/Shoe-Ped ... 7637461219
Demos:
Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/shoepedals/videos
soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/shoe-pedals
I'm in the process of moving all shoe demo clips to the new shoe pedals soundcloud but there are still some located here http://soundcloud.com/cjmventer
