0:01:00 – Speaker 2
Greetings and salutations. Welcome to Embrace your Storm. My name is Jonathan Nadeau. Thank you for joining us today. I’ve got an awesome interview for you. I’m really excited about this because this company has at least it’s definitely like the top five name for an audio company name Without any further ado. Today I have an Oliver, and he is from Death by Audio. I told him before the interview that’s the coolest name ever. Oliver, thanks for coming on, man. Hey, thanks so much for having me. Jonathan, yeah, I appreciate it Again. Death by Audio. That is the coolest name ever. Did you have to fight to get that name or was it just freely available and you were able to just use it out of the game?
0:01:37 – Speaker 3
It was freely available. I was the first to think of it, nice.
0:01:41 – Speaker 2
There you go. That is perfection right there. Oliver, tell, if the audience isn’t aware of Death by Audio, can you tell them a little bit about what you guys are doing with these pedals and we’ll get to a little bit of what drove you to want to do that afterwards. But what are you guys doing with these pedals from Death by Audio?
0:02:01 – Speaker 3
Yeah, we’re building really crazy effects pedals in a warehouse in Queens. It’s like a crew of 11 people and they’re just these things that make the most craziest and sane sounds that anyone’s ever heard.
0:02:16 – Speaker 2
And I can believe that, and I haven’t used the Death by Audio pedal, but I was looking at a website. I didn’t memorize any of the names of your pedals, but I’m sure you know some of them. You want to just write awesome names because when people hear the names you’re going to be like I need to plug my whatever into that and see what happens.
0:02:31 – Speaker 3
Totally Soundwave breakdown, harmonic transformer, total sonic annihilation. The apocalypse.
0:02:38 – Speaker 2
The apocalypse. That was the one I saw too. I was like what in the world happens when you play, when you plug into an apocalypse? Well, that is awesome. So I think you have like, probably I think we had like 10 or 13 pedals right, or something like that somewhere around there.
0:03:00 – Speaker 3
Yeah, sometimes pedals leave the line and more pedals come about all the time. Yeah, 14 or 15 or something at the moment.
0:03:06 – Speaker 2
That’s awesome Now. So how did you get started with this Death by Audio Like? What drove you to want to? I asked Chris from Benson Amps. We, as musicians, were driven to want to record, create music, play on stage and stuff like that, but you were driven to create a physical product to help out your creation as far as music goes. So this drove you to a whole other level.
0:03:37 – Speaker 3
So how did?
0:03:38 – Speaker 2
that happen.
0:03:40 – Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean I was doing a lot of different things. I was like I wanted to. I wasn’t that good of a musician, or at least I didn’t think so so like I wanted to figure out ways to make sounds and become like a creative person at the table who was doing interesting things in some other sort of way. And at the time I was living in this warehouse in Virginia and we’re recording this record and I’ve been living there for like a year and a half or something and we’re kind of. You know, I just had so much time to sort of explore these things. So I was taking apart lots of different effects pedals. I was taking apart amplifiers and stuff and trying to figure out how this stuff works, to try to figure out maybe there was some magic way to make something crazy happen that wasn’t available.
0:04:27 – Speaker 2
Dude, that is awesome because it and people will find out soon enough. Like here you are, you’re sitting, you’re breaking open these pedals. Like you have no background like electrical or mechanical background, just like cracking open pedals, being like all right, I know I’m not getting the sound that I want. I’m assuming you probably had an idea, or maybe not an idea, but you just knew you wanted something different. And here you are, like tinkering with stuff. Like that’s just awesome. It’s awesome that you did that. And it’s like you bring it to a whole new level. Like so, as you’re working on the pedals in that warehouse, like were you able to kind of get you know? Like, did you just blow stuff up and break stuff? Were you able to kind of get something, some things going, and we’re like okay, that kind of did something different, constantly breaking things.
0:05:11 – Speaker 3
Nothing was working. I mean, it even took me so long to teach myself how to solder. You know, I’ve been doing this even for like years, kind of trying to figure this out, because I had at least like a somewhat of an interest in it, like I was playing the bass guitar and I would try to rewire it or something to make it sound different, and then it just was like really hard to do. And so, you know, eventually you start to learn some of these kinds of things, you start to learn how some of this stuff works and you figure out a couple of things about it and you kind of make some of this stuff happen.
0:05:42 – Speaker 2
Yeah, and while speaking of making stuff happen, you, in order to make this happen, went to things that kids don’t know what these are these days, libraries where books are held, like these things that have pages in them, and everything. You went to a library because the internet wasn’t exactly around at this time, so you were like you said you’d be going to like different towns and if you found out they had, like a technical library, you’d be like diving into it, like reading books right Totally all the time you know, with like copy and diagrams and stuff and like just trying to gain as much information as I could about these things.
0:06:17 – Speaker 3
I would read these books and I would even buy some books you know and read them like from cover to cover and have no idea what they were talking about in the whole entire book.
You know, even about you were talking about how your computer programmer you can read books about computer programming and it’s like, okay, first 12 pages or something like that. I know what they’re talking about, right exactly. I’m just diving into it. What the heck is this? And then you know. But I feel like you know what I’m not gonna. I don’t have any way to, like you know, work on this stuff you know, cause I don’t even know what the heck they’re talking about. So I’m just gonna read the whole book and maybe this information will kind of speak to me in the future.
0:06:52 – Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah.
0:06:53 – Speaker 3
You’ll help guide some ideas and decisions and you know definitely that stuff kind of keeps on coming up where you’re like, oh yeah, that’s kind of what someone was. You know, like I’ve heard this before Is that like a presentation or something you know and so. But I think that those like you know, every little teeny bit of knowledge that you can kind of gain, you can use as like building blocks to kind of create things as well as you know, inspire you for other ideas Totally yeah Knowing about that.
Stuff makes you inspired to want to do something else, you know.
0:07:23 – Speaker 2
Absolutely. I know it was kind of interesting hearing you say how like you could hear a sound like from an instrument or you know just something from a band that they’re playing and that could inspire you to be like, ooh, what if I made a pedal that could do whatever? Like I was like that’s interesting to hear, like just a creative person in that sense being like, oh, how can I be inspired to manipulate sound Like I don’t know, it’s cool.
0:07:45 – Speaker 3
Totally and you also even start to realize like that there is even more to some of these things than you can just sound. It’s even like performance and stuff or all of this stuff. Like when you see someone, they are doing something. You know when you see their hands moving and reaching over the controls and you know even when you personally let’s say, you’re even recording at home you know when you actually have to physically touch some sort of sliders or something with your hands or sort of switches, like there’s some sort of interest and intrigue and all of that stuff and even the way that it’s designed in the ergonomics and how you like interact with it.
As a performer, you know it’s really important and I think sometimes people don’t even realize that stuff and they just look at, like, some aspects of it and then send it out or something. Oh, that’s true, yeah, yeah, I think all of those things are like really important and really cool. It’s like the whole kind of you know, I don’t know the human experience helps yeah. Whoever the artists are, create something that will hopefully you know, guide them. You know a bigger and brighter and crazier place.
0:08:51 – Speaker 2
Yeah, now, as you’re working on your pedals and you’re reading your books in the library, what was the first pedal that you? I mean not like first production, but do you remember the first pedal you yourself got working Like, yes, I did it, like this thing works.
0:09:06 – Speaker 3
I think it was like some tone switcher or something. It was like I tried to build this pedal. I think it was the first one I ever built. It was like in a wooden box Nice Bad idea, yeah, Other circuits and stuff. But yeah, you know, at some point that somehow worked and I was like, oh my goodness, I can solder, you know. So that’s cool.
0:09:30 – Speaker 2
So what, like like, how did it kind of begin? Like, as you started making kind of more pedals or wherever like, were you like showing people or were like you just use it yourself, and people were like, hey, dude, that’s a cool pedal. Where did you get that? Like how did that kind of come about?
0:09:44 – Speaker 3
I mean, it was a few of those things. It was like, I think, right when I had come out with the first pedal, which was total sonic annihilation but by the second coolest name.
And so that I had like sent out to maybe like guitar magazine I think. Okay, I was like you know savvy and building like websites and stuff. So I like, oh nice, I’m really insane, crazy, you know, death by audio website. And then so made it like where it was just like a weird, attractive, like mystery site of insanity and I think that kind of intrigued some people and that’s cool.
They’re kind of checked some of that stuff out there like sound samples and stuff and you know. And then I think from that like maybe just like word of mouth and stuff, man, that’s so cool.
0:10:31 – Speaker 2
Yeah, so that night after it’s, after the like the first pedal, like what, like, what kind of made you, what kind of brought you into doing like other pedals Like you? Because, because, like I know you said, you’re you’re searching for sounds and you’re recording your album, like it probably gave it the taste that imagine, after you made the first, for, like, if I can do this, what else can I do now? Like it was that kind of thing, like let’s see what it was when I started the company.
0:10:55 – Speaker 3
I thought that it was just like a really quick as crazy as this sounds like a cash grab.
0:11:00 – Speaker 2
Oh, you can see you’re going to kind of make one one panel.
0:11:04 – Speaker 3
What I wanted to do is I really wanted to make like 2000 or $3,000.
0:11:09 – Speaker 2
That’s so funny.
0:11:10 – Speaker 3
On this trip. Yeah, since I was like I you know I wasn’t I told I wasn’t working. You know it was in a warehouse, I had no money and so I had to raise this money really quick. So that was like. I was like getting closer and closer to the deadline is why I came up with the name Death by Audio and an isolation, because I was like that sounds crazy, this would be pretty awesome.
And so it worked and so I made enough money to go on the trip and then. So I figured, once that was done, probably the company was probably over, you know, and then I was probably going to continue my my goal of trying to be a successful musician, and but people still kept on wanting the pedals. That is funny, other pedals do. Did all sorts of stuff. So man.
0:11:57 – Speaker 2
And so then then did you start diving in more and kind of learn. You know like learning even more of kind of like the whole electrical aspect and transformer. Is it all that?
0:12:04 – Speaker 3
stuff. One of the biggest things that I did is that once I started to make a couple circuits that actually worked and I was like, oh, people were really interested and would write me about different options and stuff they wanted, and I started doing this thing where I would take on any custom job that anyone would want to do, no matter what.
I was doing this for many years actually, and so I built all sorts of crazy things, and so I would just someone to give me some idea for an effect they wanted, or some rack mount unit or something, and I would just name them a price. I’d be like 500 bucks, you know, or because that sounded good to me. But then I would be like I have no idea how to build this thing. So then I’d have to figure out okay, how do you build an analog flanger or something Like you know, like four or five months or something to figure out that pedal, you know. So be like hours and hours and hours of work, you know, just slaving upon these things. So it was, it was pretty crazy, but it was also, you know, the customers we pissed off at. The pedal took so long to build. Oh yeah, for me to learn even a lot more.
0:13:14 – Speaker 2
That’s. That’s interesting because it sounds like, because you took on all the kind of like those custom jobs that help you figure out how to make crazy insane, you know, these pedals of my, adding in all those kind of random stuff and onto one thing.
0:13:26 – Speaker 3
Totally, it sort of seemed like I was away where I could almost be like you know, I don’t know, being like paid to train or something.
0:13:34 – Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah, seriously, like I don’t know, like yeah.
0:13:38 – Speaker 3
I wasn’t good at, like you know, picking up a good price for people, but you know I’d always probably blowball everybody. But whatever, yeah, you probably, you probably got more and I’m learning how to do all that stuff and yeah for sure, yeah, yeah.
0:13:51 – Speaker 2
So then, like you know, coming full circle now to kind of round to your pedals now and everything, what, what are some of your like, some of the pedals that you have and like what are they? What do they do? Just so the audience kind of gets in an idea of what kind of death by audio is all about. Like I knew you mentioned in the beginning kind of more not more into experimental, but you know, like You’d probably say not the average thing that you’re here on the radio, that people would listen to you, unimagine, you know.
0:14:15 – Speaker 3
Yeah, I mean it can be. You know there’s lots of average bands that use these pedals. You know we’ve some of the things we’re even just focused on, like what’s the best, like sustaining Buzz pedal you could possibly make, or okay, okay, but it’s like those are just ideas of like Elements of music and stuff that I like, and so you know, you kind of figure those things out as well.
As I don’t know like you’ll find out some cool technology, something that uses like backwards transistors or something gives a really interesting sound or uses there’s like Like this chip that they use which is very precise for like medical equipment and stuff, and then, oh, that’s interesting, like make some crazy filter or something, or we get into computer programming. You start making these like insane bending reverbs.
0:15:01 – Speaker 2
Yeah.
0:15:01 – Speaker 3
Yeah, you know, I don’t know. You just kind of go lots of different technology ways or even what is even kind of cool, like something that’s controlled with light or you know something, to kind of bring different elements into the actual interaction with these things and sort of Help people, like elevate the music to some cooler place.
0:15:21 – Speaker 2
Yes, that I love what you just said there. Like that, I can see that’s what your company is all about. Elevate the music to another place Good, that’s perfect. Yeah, with the other thing that I was looking at the website where I mentioned this before, like we were talking about, like man, would you ever, you know, imagine this would have happened when you know you’re you’re working on these Uh pedals, like I’m in that warehouse or whatever? Like I looked at the artist list of people that use your pedals Dude, that is so crazy, man. Like it must like blow your mind that these like flaming lips, pearl jam, like just all these people. I was like that is so nuts. That must be so. Like I don’t even know what it feels like because I’ve Obviously never been that position, but, dude, you go from that to all these musicians using your equipment. It’s gotta be so cool.
0:16:07 – Speaker 3
Yeah, it’s really crazy. It’s such a wild thing. That’s if you see all these people, you know even photos of them using them, or you see them at concerts using them, or you know there’s some documentary about some recording studio and they have your effects.
0:16:21 – Speaker 2
Yeah, yeah.
0:16:23 – Speaker 3
So crazy all of that kind of stuff. And then you even think about, like, all these people who you know have used this on their records and who constantly do and tour with this stuff. And it’s just, it’s such a wild thing because in some ways it must have even like shaped modern music.
0:16:38 – Speaker 2
So yeah, for real right. It is like I don’t know that’s. That’s pretty awesome dude. Like you know and that’s kind of the point of this interview, like the people listening like Oliver just got sick of whatever one day and had to do something about it and he just did it and, yeah, he didn’t know what he’s doing. He had to go to libraries and read books and yeah, he’s reading entire books and not understanding 90% of them.
0:17:00 – Speaker 3
But here he is now like I think you need to find, like, whatever it is that kind of drives you that you want to do, and try to like figure that out Totally you know, and it’s like you need to make those kind of conscious efforts in the day to be like, rather than you know consuming some, you know trashy television show or you know spending time on Instagram, but yeah we kind of working on projects and, yeah, doing that stuff and you know all those kind of things sort of build up to even bigger and greater things.
And you know you don’t have to be the best like silk screen artists that there is, but you can teach yourself how to silk screen and it’s pretty cool.
0:17:40 – Speaker 2
Exactly exactly now. We’re kind of wrapping up here with with death by audio. What are you guys coming up for for 2022? Like, what do you got any kind of crazy ideas you’re working on or anything you want to talk about or mention or anything like anything coming?
0:17:53 – Speaker 3
down. I got tons of crazy ideas, everything that’s been going on. We just got so many crazy and saying ideas. It’s just nuts and I’m so excited for all this stuff that we have work working out and coming about.
0:18:06 – Speaker 2
You must have some fun brainstorming sessions in your totally yeah yeah as well as lots of arguing and stuff too.
0:18:15 – Speaker 3
It will be cool you know, it’s funny, we have really good fun times, there are lots of jokes, lots of good kids. So but, um, yeah, but you know, with all that you know, we always have like maybe 10 or 20 projects that we’re working on at a time, only like 15 pedals in the line.
0:18:37 – Speaker 2
But yeah, yeah.
0:18:38 – Speaker 3
You know, I think that it’s kind of cool to sort of like I don’t know, keep your options open and constantly and shifting to other things that interest you if you get bored of one of the projects.
0:18:50 – Speaker 2
Do you guys mess around with, like doing plugins at all, or with recording and stuff, or do you just do physical pedals?
0:18:57 – Speaker 3
I haven’t done any of that stuff, but I would like to. I think that would be kind of cool. So if any of you guys know anyone out there who does that, wants to to talk or something like that yeah.
0:19:06 – Speaker 2
Yeah, because it sounds like you get. You’d have some interesting plugins, like you know, because you have interesting ideas for pedals, so you might, you might be coming up with stuff that you know other people wouldn’t otherwise think of yeah, you never know.
0:19:19 – Speaker 3
Yeah, yeah what I want to do, recording wise, and I can’t do. That’s a whole other conversation exactly.
0:19:28 – Speaker 2
Well, oliver. Thanks so much for your time. Is there anything else you want to good? You know I mentioned about death by arrow. Check out death by autocom. Is there you know any last words or anything you’d want to?
0:19:39 – Speaker 3
Whatever you know, just To each other’s. You know, have fun. I don’t know, there you go and go out go out create. Yeah, go on and create.
0:19:48 – Speaker 2
Yeah, stop consuming and go out and create. There we go. That’s how Len and everyone. Thank you so much for listening and downloading, and don’t forget to embrace your storm.
0:19:59 – Speaker 1
Tornado with Jonathan Nadeau. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe now. See your first to hear new episodes with more stories of inspiration about the highs and lows of life and how embracing the storm Is so much more fulfilling of a life than being crushed by the weight of the world. And until then, we hope you’re inspired to do something, whether it’s creating, participating or learning, whatever leads you to your personal passion.
