Death By Audio: The Accidental Pedal Company

If you have been to a show at Death By Audio, the venue, then you know what the crazy energy pedal makers Oliver Ackermann, Matt Conboy, and Travis Johnson are all about. Death By Audio, the pedals, harness that same energetic creativity and put into a small metal box. With some of the best fuzz on the market, Death By Audio have set a standard in quality, care, and boomingly loud pedals. I spoke with Matt about fuzz, Trent Reznor, and making shit in America.

Noisey: How did Death By Audio come about?
Matt Conboy: Our pedal company was started by Oliver Ackermann in around 2002. The whole reason that he even came up with the idea for a pedal was because he wanted to go on a vacation to Europe with his girlfriend and he didn’t have any money. He knew he could make this thing and probably sell a dozen of them to go on this trip, and that’s exactly what happened. I guess fast forward a couple years and Oli was still kind of building pedals part time and occasionally doing odd jobs. I ended up meeting him through a mutual friend and helping him. At that point, the company was: someone would place an order and we would have to build it from scratch. It was a very made-to-order operation and totally disorganized. I eventually told Oli that he should just be designing stuff and that we should make it an actual company.

It’s weird, Death By Audio as a thing kind of came out of our relationship because I was working with Oli building pedals and then our landlord offered us the whole floor of the building we were living in. I was into it, and accidentally ended up starting a music venue. We were going to build out rooms and then use the leftover space for a photo studio, in order to pay for that, we decided to throw a show. From that show we made enough money to complete the build out, but the guys who were going to move into the photo studio flaked out. So in order to pay rent we just kept having bands come and it worked. I don’t want to say it was effortless, but it did happen pretty organically and it allowed us to keep the space.

You guys are probably best known for your Fuzz pedals. Why is the demand so high for a Death By Audio Fuzz?
I honestly can’t even tell you why people love Fuzz so much. I mean I really love it as well, but I probably couldn’t tell you why I even love it. I think maybe everybody in some way is trying to get more power, volume, and intensity out of their sound. The one thing that I think is maybe a little bit different about us is that our shit is just really loud. You can always turn it down, but that doesn’t really make sense to us. We could never understand why some of the traditional fuzz pedals, especially the really great sounding vintage ones are actually pretty quiet. So I think that’s a big thing, we try to achieve that great sound, but really loud. Friends of mine and people that are in bands that I love are putting in orders for them which is awesome. We actually just did a custom design for John Dwyer from Thee Oh Sees’ which was a mod of our Fuzz War pedal because he wanted something that was a little more shrill and cutting. It was really cool to go through that experience designing it with him and then hearing it all over his records. It’s almost like you’re participating it this dialogue of art and craft.

Some of the craziest stuff you guys have done, it seems has come from custom orders. I noticed that you also did some work for Trent Reznor. How did that come about?
I think he emailed us, or maybe somebody that works for him did. I think Trent Reznor bought all of our pedals at one point and I guess liked them, so he reached out us to do a filter that was suppose to be modeled off of an old mixing board that you can’t buy anymore or something. The custom stuff is fun, but it’s always this weird balancing act because even though it says we don’t do custom pedals anymore on our website, we still probably get two or three emails a week inquiring about custom work. Unfortunately, I think it has to die down a little bit.

Did any of the pedals that are available now come from the ideas for the custom work?
Oh, definitely. Almost all of them in one way or another. It’s all really informed by the custom projects and even if it’s not, we will do prototypes to give to our friends to get feedback. We like to know what we forgot, or if actually sounds good. The John Dwyer thing is probably the best example of somebody requesting something, and then that thing ending up actually being a product that we sell which is Thee Fuzz War Overload.

One of my favorite pedals you guys have is the Robot. Can you tell me a bit about where it came from?
That is a great pedal, and it’s really interesting because it’s got this 8-bit lo-fi thing going on, but it also has a surprising amount of clarity. A lot of similar pedals that you hear that is doing that same work a lot of the times has a muddiness or shitty quality to it. I think ours is a good compromise between the destroyed Casio or Nintendo vibe and being able to hear what’s actually going on.

It seems that your pedals have made their way into setups that aren’t just guitar rigs. I have spoken to electronic musicians that swear by using Death By Audio stuff with their synths, drum machines, and sequencers. Does this sort of thing excite you guys?
We take great pains to make sure that our pedals are going to sound cool not just on guitar, but on bass, synths, and drums. A lot of people will ask us if we have bass pedals or pedals that are optimized for synths and I just say all of them. I think that because people don’t know the back end of the engineering side of things, they don’t get that there’s actually nothing wrong with using your guitar pedals with bass. I mean some of them are going to sound like shit, but a lot of guitar pedals are going to sound like shit with a guitar. We’re super into the versatility of our pedals and I personally get the most excited about people using our pedals for things that we didn’t think about.

There is a movement of DIY pedal makers cropping up all over the country, and you guys kind of started out of that same ethos. Is it encouraging to see this sort of thing happen?
Yeah, I think it’s great, but maybe time will tell. I think that there is a lot of things that need to be filtered through for their quality level or whatever. At this point I think it’s great. For me it’s not to the point where music is, where literally every fucking human being is making an album. I have a lot of friends who complain about that. It’s so much harder for someone to hear good music because there is just so many people making average music that it floods the market. I don’t feel like that is the case with pedals. I’m happy to live in a world where I have twenty options for pasta sauce. We don’t only need two, it’s fine.

What are some of the challenges of running a pedal company?
I don’t think it’s any different from any other business. Keeping up with orders is a big one. We are always getting ourselves into these pickles where the company will be growing, and we’ll get just a little bit too big for what we can handle, so we’ll have to find some crazy way to make demand. It’s not a bad problem to have I guess. I mean we’re not fucking getting rich off this or anything, but it’s how I can pay my rent and eat, so that’s cool. One big thing that we have been struggling with is thinking about our role in the universe as this weird thing that is still made in America and how that doesn’t exist anymore. There was a time where I thought it was great because nobody’s making shit in America. At this point I still think it’s great, but it can be frustrating because I don’t think that the people that buy pedals really give a shit.

I think people want quality, but they also want cheap and it’s a little bit of a bummer for me on a personal level. At the same time, I also live in this world and I have a fucking iPhone that I know wasn’t made in Utah. It really is something on an ethical level that we have been struggling with because it would be really easy for us to expand into doing stuff over seas. At one point, we were seriously considering it, but for us quality comes before the easy way out. For example, our friend Ty Segall uses the Fuzz War as kind of his only pedal, a couple years ago it broke in the middle of his tour but he was coming to our place so he decided to buy a Big Muff to hold himself over until he made it to Brooklyn. During the week that it took him to get to Death By Audio, he broke three different Big Muffs. I look at it like I would only want to spend $150 once instead of $50 a hundred times, but sometimes I feel like I’m in the minority.

So did you fix Ty’s Fuzz War?
Oh definitely, and I don’t know if I should be emphasizing this more or not, but we will fix any of our pedals if they break for any reason no matter what, no questions asked. I’ve even fixed pedals that have been submerged in water. I don’t know how many people actually understand that we do that. I’ve read on message boards where people are like “Fuck Death By Audio, their shit is such low quality and they won’t even fix this shitty pedal I bought from them.” And I’m sitting there like “Did this person even write me an email?” Because if they did I would have been more than happy to fix their pedal. It’s one of those things that we feel is the right thing to do. I want to live in a world where everything has a lifetime warranty, so I guess this is my way of taking control of that somehow.

So unless it’s super top secret or anything, do you have anything new coming out?
We just announced a new pedal called Ghost Delay. It’s basically three delay pedals in a row and you can control feedback and time on all of them. It also has an auxiliary output which creates this really great stereo field. Hopefully it will be shipping by early December.

Go buy pedals from Death By Audio right now: deathbyaudio.net