JUNIOR: I guess a little fun snippet here is that jet pedals is my initials rearranged. So my 1st name is Edwin and since Junior is my middle name then my initials are E.J.T. So rearrange that and you get JET Pedals.
ROBERT: Interesting! So, how did the pedal company come about? What was the process that led you to wake up one day and say, "I'm gonna start a pedal company"!
JUNIOR: Yeah, and so it never really started out as I'm going to create a pedal company. So I have been an electrician pretty much all my life. And now there is some similarities between electrical engineering and electrician, dealing with electricity.
Anyway, so I've been an electrician and I tinker around with all kinds of stuff. I love programming and I've built quite a few things over the years. I've been a musician my whole life, but not a guitar player always. So when I started playing guitars, like, hey, I want to figure out how guitar pedals how effects work.
And so I just, tinkered a little bit and built some things, start off with some overdrive, real simple stuff that, probably most people do. But I really didn't think of it as. a company until really one day a friend of mine said, you know, it would be great if. We had a pedal that sounded like the Big Sky, but in a much smaller format with a whole lot less features.
So I'm thinking, I guess I'll give that a shot, you know, did some research, kind of did my own thing and figured out how we get close to that. Let me be honest here. The Big Sky is an amazing pedal and our "Revelation" is no way is an attempt to replace that pedal.
It's just something that a friend of mine had asked if I could get that kind of sound. So, I built that pedal. He really liked it. And I thought, if he likes it, maybe other people will. So we start a website and we start out with 50 pedals. I made 50 pedals and eventually it took a little while to sell out. But that's kind of how the company started. Just out of an idea that came from a friend, and then my curiosity of building effects. I'm a worship guitar player at our church, and I think that helps as well in the ideation stage of things.
ROBERT: That's a great answer. I love all the backstory and the fact that, you know, you're actually using the pedals yourself, dude, that's huge. So it's not just someone who's kind of in a vacuum creating stuff, you're in the trenches, so to speak, as a worship leader, as someone who's in a worship band, actually using those pedals. So, I think that actually puts you in a better position to know what the customer base would want, what your audience wants.
JUNIOR: Yeah, anything in life when you're creating, a business, product, or a service, if you're solving a problem, then you're solving a problem for yourself. And it's pretty obvious that that's going to be a problem for other people. That's a good recipe for success and that's where most of our designs have come from. I see a problem and I want to solve that problem.
ROBERT: That's so true man! In fact, you recently solved a problem for me actually. I just got this bad boy (holding up The Lamb Overdrive) from your team over there for review and full disclosure, I did not have to pay for this. Thank you so much by the way.
But I have to say, this is not leaving my board for a good long while. Believe me, a lot of stuff has come and gone. I'm sure, you know, pedal boards are completely evolving all the time.This pedal solved a problem that not a lot of people were looking at. So not only do you have three different modes of overdrive here, depending on how you set it, it can even be almost distortion. But then they have this cool little feature where you can tap this preset button twice real quick and you get a three DB boost!
JUNIOR: Actually if you look at the manual online, you can adjust that in global settings. So, you can adjust how much boost you want and it's relative to where you have the volume knob set. So, it's basically like taking another step, or two steps, or even three steps, from where the volume knob is, to your liking.
ROBERT: That's super cool because I don't know how many times I've had my tone dialed in, I'm doing some backing stuff, like in a worship set, you don't want to step on everybody. So you're kind of bringing in some swells and stuff like that, and then it's time for you to step up and do a lead line or a solo. Next thing you know, now I've got to adjust the knob or I've got to keep my volume pedal at a certain place and I can't touch it. So not only does it solve a problem, but it's just super cool. Like you can be mid solo and double tap that bad boy and just give it a lift.
JUNIOR: I appreciate you doing a demo for the, by the way, it was amazing. I love the insight you provided and you can almost see your reactions as you, you know, as you're applying it for the first time. So, very great review.
ROBERT: So a little bit more about the company, because I think there's a lot of companies out there that you come to find out later on down the road, they have a Christian background, but with you guys you're kind of just loud and proud, bold, which I absolutely love. Have you got any kind of, flack for that?
JUNIOR: Yeah, I totally understand what you're saying, it depends. Most people love it like yourself, whether they're Christian or they're not Christian. But, now and then we do get some negative feedback. It just depends on the market. We definitely try to stay within the worship genre because we're solving problems for the worship guitar player.
Of course, our pedals don't have to be for worship. They just happen to pedals speak more clearly to the worship guitarists. A pedal like "The Lamb" for instance is a very open transparent overdrive, which is highly sought after in the worship genre.
ROBERT: Absolutely. That's a great way to put it. Can you share a time when customer feedback has fundamentally altered the course of product development?
JUNIOR: Well... I'm not sure if I can pinpoint any specific moments, but definitely the creation of the "Revelation" was kind of a... well, it was a revelation, you know, it was a moment of clarity, when my friend suggested that guitarists were needing a smaller footprint, more affordable version, of the Big Sky. That simple need really led to the course of development for the Revelation itself.
ROBERT: That's great! I want to know, how do you approach finding a good balance between the analog, and the digital side of the technology within these pedals.
JUNIOR: Sure. Now that you mentioned this, it does kind of go back to your previous question. So, our very first pedal to kick off the company was the Revelation.It was a full digital product, so your analog came in and was converted to digital, processed, and then converted back to analog.
With that, there's some latency. And so when we jumped over to our version 3, one thing that we wanted to add to that was based on our user feedback, is an "analog through". So, that ensures your analog signal stays pure and it goes basically around the reverb signal and then the reverb and the analog blend back together on the output.
We want to make sure that your signal is as clear as possible. Protecting your single integrity is important to us. So we have a couple of pedals that are digital... the Eternity, and the Revelation for instance, and then adding the "audio through" really helped with that to remove latency while maintaining the analog path as well.
Essentially, we want to make sure that the pedals has a digital brain. So, what that means is, the brain is controlling the presets, and it's controlling actual knob turning. So, it keeps your analog signal intact and then the brain just kind of gives the user the ability to have the presets and so that kind of solves some of those problems with what would otherwise be a poor digital sound.
ROBERT: Personally, I have went through probably three or four different iterations of overdrive on my board already. Each one had a great sound. It was just a different flavor than what I was looking for. But you and I both know when you're looking to build a board out, in light of worship, that you want that sparkle that cuts through, a good clean sound. Concerning The Lamb, what I noticed immediately, the tone was crystal clear. It didn't affect anything adversely. In fact, it created sort of this pleasing breakup and it felt like I was playing into a real amp. So, I've gushed on my favorite features of this pedal. What's the one feature of Jet Pedals that you look at and you're particularly proud of, and why?
JUNIOR: Well, I think one thing we mentioned earlier is that we're solving the problem of the worship musician and trying to improve their workflow. Being able to call up presets, the live mode, and the ability to quickly jump back and forth between two sounds. We are always looking to add extra value to our end user, and anything that makes their life easier is a great feature to have for sure.
ROBERT: So, our band leader, (he's a guitarist as well) and he has like a spaceship of a board compared to mine, but he's got all his rig running off of MIDI. Now, I still have yet to jump into the MIDI space. I've been looking at it, but I just have yet to make that leap. What's your take on integrating MIDI into a rig?
JUNIOR: When I first started playing electric, I couldn't keep up with all the changes, you know, the tap dance, as we say, across all the pedals. So then, we started building MIDI controllers to make things easier to control, that really helped. To think that one tap can change your whole board, you know, getting the sounds to sound appropriate at the right time is tricky, that's where there is still some trial and error, but a MIDI controller can free your mind up a bit to think more musically while playing as you have less technical things to dwell on.
ROBERT: That makes perfect sense man. So, what's the most rewarding feedback that you've ever received from a guitarist who's been using your pedals?
JUNIOR: Oh man, our website is just full of reviews and we appreciate every last one of them. But I do remember, one time a mother bought a pedal for her son and emailed me to say that because of that purchase, her son is 16 going back to church again, and he loves our company, what we stand for. You know, to think that one of our pedals would inspire him to continue to go to church and play, and that we're (in some way) inspiring him to continue in his faith, that was was a very heartwarming moment.
ROBERT: Wow, dude, that's an awesome story! To think, these pedals are not just helping the guitarists out there get great tone.They're actually doing something for the kingdom as well, that's awesome. So, have you ever thought about teaming up with like prominent worship leader or musician to create a unique pedal just for them?
JUNIOR: Yeah, so, I don't think it's on the website anymore, but a few years back, we teamed up with Chris Rocha. He approached us and he wanted an overdrive that kind of resembles his sound. So we put together a pedal called Mr. Jax. He wanted a pedal that was very similar to the Crowder Hotcake. So we worked on it a little bit and we redesigned the tone stack and a little bit of how it was clipping and just to kind of get it right for him. He wanted a little extra gain out of it, a little more compression, and he didn't want MIDI. In his own words, he didn't want to pedal to get too far out of budget for his customer base. I kind of wanted to put our own sound in it so we did some unique gain staging as well.
ROBERT: So I've got a couple of curveball questions. First, this is a two part question. What's your favorite color?
JUNIOR: Oh, yeah... it's blue. It's like a bluish blue gray.
ROBERT: Here's the second part, he follow up question is, what does the color blue taste like?
JUNIOR: Well, I guess it tastes like blueberries.
ROBERT: Awesome! There you have it! Guys, the holidays are coming up and if you need some good pedals, they've got you covered. I'm telling you, you will not be let down.