Musician's Friend Interview

Bob Weil: How Visual Sound Brought "Boutique" To The Masses

Seemingly countless effects pedal companies have come and gone over the past fifteen years, with more popping up every day. Nearly all of them started with a guy in a garage and never got any further. But a few (okay. very few) of those "boutique" companies actually survived and became real companies. Visual Sound, which was started at the end of 1994 by Bob Weil, is one of those unique companies that survived and thrived by bringing high-end tone to the masses. what they call "Real Tone for Real People".

Musician's Friend:: So Bob, how did you get into designing guitar pedals in the first place? Did you have a degree in electronics?

Bob Weil:: I get that question a lot because people assume that I must have an electronics background, but the truth is, I don’t. I actually had a sales and marketing background and a business degree. However, I’ve been a guitar player since I was 16 and started needing things that nobody was making. Back in 1988, I bought an Ernie Ball volume pedal that quickly drove me nuts because the taper was way too abrupt for me and I kept wishing that it had some sort of visual reference, like a 0-10 scale. I figured that since everything else has a 0-10 scale, like my amp, stereo, etc., surely there was a volume pedal that had it. But when I went around to shops looking for one, I found out that nobody had ever made anything like that before. For some reason, I became a bit obsessed with making my own, figuring "how hard could it be?", neglecting the fact that I didn’t know anything about electronics at all. I didn’t even know what shielding was at the time! Anyway, I started going to libraries and reading books about electronics (this was before the internet) and began to experiment with a soldering iron and various mechanical designs. Some of my early attempts were pretty comical! After a few years, I learned enough to design the first Visual Volume pedal, complete with 10 LED’s for a 0-10 scale. So, that’s what I started the company with at the end of 1994.

MF: I heard that you almost went out of business at one point many years ago. Can you tell us about that?

BW: Looking back, it was a really stupid idea to start a company with a volume pedal. First of all, it was a huge engineering challenge for a guy who didn’t know anything about electronics or mechanical engineering...much more difficult than designing an overdrive stompbox. Secondly, not everyone uses a volume pedal, so it wasn’t a very good product to start a business with. I mean, we sold a fair number of them considering what it was, but it was a brutal first few years. I ended up experimenting with other kinds of circuits in 1995-96, all in the Visual Volume type of housing, but nothing really jumped off the shelves until I came up with the first Jekyll & Hyde pedal later in ’97.

MF: That does sound like a bit more than coincidence.

BW: Yeah, you could say that.

MF: So how did you turn things around after the "miracle orders"?

BW: Once we got some more pedals in stock, I hit the road in a rental car and drove thousands of miles, all over the country, visiting hundreds of guitar shops during several epic road trips. Sometimes I’d sell pedals right out of the trunk. Other times, I’d call my wife and ask her to ship pedals to dealers. She would read faxes to me and ask how I wanted to respond. It was a crazy time. We had two little kids, by the way, so I tried not to be gone from home more than 25% of the time. Now, I make sure that I’m home at least 80% of the time, even with all the trade shows and trips to Asia. The kids won’t be at home forever and they’re well into their teens now. Since we moved to Tennessee in 2002, things have grown tremendously. We bought an office at the beginning of 2005 and actually started hiring people! We had some part-time help before that, but it was all out of our home. Now we have seven employees, two of whom are family. My brother is our operations manager and our mom is the office manager and bookkeeper. It’s really a great group of people we have here and it makes work a lot of fun. We’ve made huge strides in artist relations and dealer expansion too. You ought to check out the Artist page on our website. It’s pretty impressive.

MF: Some people think that Visual Sound is still a boutique pedal maker, while others think that it’s not. Is Visual Sound "boutique"?

BW: Well, that all depends on your definition of "boutique". Most people don’t even have a definition really. They just have a vague impression that if it’s not a major brand name like Boss or DigiTech, then it’s boutique. And most people typically envision a guy in his garage making stuff. We’re not in the garage anymore, but I would say that we’re definitely boutique and I’ll give you the reasons why. First, the guy who is most responsible for spreading the knowledge that allowed all these independent guys to start making pedals, R.G. Keen, is our chief engineer and a long-time friend of mine. He actually did the circuit board layouts for the early Jekyll & Hyde pedal long before he started working officially for Visual Sound and he’s been doing all our board layouts ever since. R.G.’s website, geofex.com, has been a huge resource for all of the boutique community for many years. With him as part of the team, we’re at the epicenter of the boutique world. Second, since Visual Sound is run by a guitar player...uh, that would be me...we make sure that all our products are as good as they can possibly be regardless of the manufacturing cost. There’s a very odd impression out there among some musicians that says, "If a company comes out with a new version of a product, it must be inferior to the old version." Now, maybe big corporations do things like that when the bean-counters are in charge, but no company will stay in business long-term if that’s how they operate. And for Visual Sound, nothing could be further from the truth. Any time I find a way to make our products better in some way, we do it. Period. I’m still designing circuits along with R.G. Keen. I still put two components on a switch to compare how they sound in a circuit and then choose the best sounding solution. If that’s not boutique, I don’t know what is. Third, while it’s kind of cool to know that some guy in a garage made something, I can tell you from experience that electronics made on the kitchen table are not nearly as reliable as electronics properly assembled in a manufacturing factory. Homemade artwork, crafts, and other non-technology products make sense. Homemade electronics would make some sense if the end product was very cheap, but the built-on-a-kitchen-table pedals that are out there cost a fortune. Sorry, that just doesn’t make any sense to me at all, even if you call it "boutique". Real "boutique" is who’s standing behind the products, not a bunch of hype and buzzwords put on a guy’s website.

MF: You mentioned that Visual Sound upgrades products to make them better regardless of cost. What do you say to people who insist that your old flat-top pedals are better than the new V2 Series pedals?

BW: I haven’t personally met anyone who has said that, but if I did, I’d be seriously tempted to grab them by the lapels and shake them! I mean, if you take an old Jekyll & Hyde and put it side-by-side with a new V2 Series version, it’s no contest. The new one looks better, sounds better, and is going to be more reliable. The noise reduction in the distortion channel of the V2 Jekyll & Hyde (it’s also in the compressor channel of Route 66, by the way) is a huge improvement. You can even combine channels without getting a bunch of white-noise. The new V2 Series pedals also have an indestructible die-cast aluminum housing and a proprietary switching system rated at 10 million hits! I mean, why would we put out a new pedal that didn’t sound at least as good as the old version and not be more reliable? Heck, I use these pedals too, and I own the company!

MF: Your products are all made in China now, right?

BW: Yes, they have been for years.

MF: What do you say to people who think you should be making your products here in the USA?

BW: We made our products through sub-contract assembly factories in the USA in 1995 and 1996, but very nearly went out of business as a result. The cost was very high and the quality control was poor. In 1997, we moved production to Taiwan and had good success there until we moved production again in 2003 to south China. The move to China allowed us to upgrade the components in our pedals without raising the price. If you look inside the most expensive boutique pedal or amp, you will see a lot of electronic components... none of which are made in the USA. Resistors, capacitors, diodes, and IC chips are simply not made here anymore. They're all made in Asia. Switchcraft jacks? Mexico. Carling switches? Same thing. How about your iPod? China. So, we simply go to the source for all our components and assemble them there, too. This allows us to use superior quality components with superior circuit design, but offer the finished product to musicians at a fair price. This also enables us to maintain and grow our business in a more streamlined fashion -- rather than getting a larger facility, buying machinery, and charging triple for our products. And by the way, I’ve taken 22 trips to Asia in the past several years so, yes, I take quality control very seriously.

MF: I know that your 1 SPOT power supply can power a pedalboard, but some of our readers have a hard time believing that. Can you explain how that works?

BW: The first thing to understand is that your pedals only take the amount of power they need, typically measured in milliamps or mA for short. Most analog pedals use 10 to 20mA, while digital pedals will use 50 to 100mA typically. Some digital pedals, like the Line 6 modeling pedals, will use 200 to 300mA, but not much more than that. The 1 SPOT can handle up to 1700mA of electrical current being pulled out of it. That means that a single 1 SPOT, if you connect enough daisy-chain cables to it, can power dozens of pedals at a time. The trick with a switching power supply like the 1 SPOT is making it quiet with audio signals. It’s actually very difficult and all the other 1 SPOT knock-offs that we’ve tried over the years add noise to your guitar signal. By the way, the 1 SPOT was the first compact pedalboard power supply to hit the musician market back in 2000.

MF: I noticed a flyer in one your pedal boxes which talked about how Visual Sound has partnered with an African AIDS relief organization. How did you get involved with that?

BW: A close friend of mine, Tre Sheppard from the band One Hundred Hours in the U.K., went to Africa a few years ago and saw first-hand the devastation caused by AIDS on that continent. HIV/AIDS carries a real stigma there so a lot of communities and even churches don’t want to deal with it or help those who are infected. The hopelessness of that, combined with incredible poverty, is staggering. So Tre started a fund-raising organization called EngageHIVAIDS.com which partners with relief workers in Africa to bring hope and assistance to those who need it most. One of the great things about it is that 100% of the funds donated to Engage go directly to the victims of HIV in Africa, as all the administrative costs are covered by a few wealthy benefactors. It’s really an amazing organization. Tre had been talking with me about it for a while, so we decided to partner with Engage at the end of 2007 by donating a portion of the proceeds of every product we sell and putting a flyer into every pedal and 1 SPOT box to help raise awareness of the plight in Africa and the solutions we’re working on for those desperate people.

MF: That’s great that you guys are doing that. I don’t think there are too many other companies in our industry who have partnered with a relief organization in that way.

BW: I don’t think so either. Hopefully, we’re setting a good example for others to follow.

MF: I saw the Visual Sound Pedal Shootout on your YouTube channel
( www.YouTube.com/visualsoundusa ). It seemed like quite an undertaking and a risky proposition. Tell us about the Shootout and the myth-busting segments you did.

BW: I came up with the idea during a trip to Japan in September, 2008. I was going around to guitar shops with our Japanese distributor reps and decided to grab the most expensive pedals off the shelves and do A/B tests with our pedals right there in the shops. I honestly didn’t know if ours would sound better or not, but in every A/B test we did, our pedals sounded better than the most expensive boutique and modded pedals they had in stock. The guys who worked in the shops over there were shocked. So, in November, we invited over 50 musicians to the Pedal Shootout, held at the Sound Kitchen studios in Franklin, Tennessee. It’s a pretty famous studio and they have a beautiful big room that we rented for the occasion. We also hired a video crew to document the event. The audience couldn’t see the pedals we were comparing because they were behind a partition. So, they had to vote on lots of different well-known pedals based on hearing alone. That way, we eliminated people’s preconceived notions about what pedals should sound the best. The pedals were grouped into categories; overdrive, distortion, compression, fuzz-octave, and chorus. Everyone there agreed that we had set the effect and volume levels the same for all pedals in order to keep it legit. It was risky, for sure, but we ended up winning the overdrive, distortion, and fuzz-octave categories, losing the compression category (to an original script-logo Dyna Comp from the 70’s), and tying the chorus category. The fact that we actually lost one of the categories and tied another showed that we didn’t rig the event at all. After that, we did two myth-busting sections, one on "true-bypass" and another on op-amp chips. Those are two things that are so over-hyped in the boutique community and there’s just nothing behind the hype. Virtually everyone in the room thought that our Pure Tone buffer sounded better than "true-bypass" because it eliminates cable capacitance without introducing any artificial EQ. And everyone also agreed that changing op-amps in an overdrive pedal caused such extremely subtle differences in sound that it really didn’t matter. We had actually tried 6 or 7 different op-amps in our office last year, looking for that magic one that would make the pedal really come alive, but we found that they all sounded basically the same. Even a video op-amp, not made for audio at all, sounded like all the others. The real magic is in the caps and resistors and the overall circuit layout. In my opinion, most guys who promote "mods" are simply trying to sell something. And since you rarely get the opportunity to take a modded pedal and compare it side-by-side with an identical un-modded version, you think that the mod did something special. After all, you paid for it. We’re just trying to keep it real.

MF: That sounds kind of like your company slogan.

BW: Yeah, Real Tone for Real People. That’s what we’re trying to do by making the best stuff we possibly can, not over-charging for it, and avoiding all the hype that’s way too common these days.

MF: One last question that everyone wants to know. What’s on the drawing board?

BW: Well, I can’t give away too much, but we’re working on new stuff all the time. We’ve just released two new pedals, Open Road overdrive and Truetone clean boost. The Open Road is a very amp-like, open-sounding overdrive without any mid-range hump. Truetone is a genuine clean boost that just makes your guitar louder without coloring the sound. It does have a Tone knob, in addition to Volume, but that’s about it. Beyond that, just stay tuned to our website ( www.visualsound.net ) which is also in the process of being completely re-vamped.