TubeNexus

Hello neglected readers!  I have to apologize for the lack of new content these last few months… I did deliberately take the summer off, but then got deeply involved in the design, simulation, prototyping, refinement, pre-production, web-design, copywriting, clip making, video taking and tons of other minutiae involved in trying to bring a little pedal project to life!

I feel like we’ve reached a major milestone with the publication of our press release on Harmony-Central: http://news.harmony-central.com/Newp/2009/Cause-Effect-Pedals-FET-Dream-Overdrive-Distortion-Pedal.html and I expect to soon get back to blogging here on TubeNexus (there’s lots of unfinished business and new projects to talk about).

But first, let me introduce you to Cause & Effect Pedals!  (Gratuitous self-promotion follows)

I have started this company with a good friend and fellow Dumble Amplifier enthusiast who is like-minded about what is required to ‘do things right’ in the pedal space and we were both itching to ‘get it done.’  The FET Dream is our debut product and we have a number of other innovative ideas that we hope to build on the foundation of this pedal.  Some of our motivations are shared on the homepage of CEPedals.com and additional detail is provided in About Us.

With the FET Dream we have tried (and succeeded, IMHO) to deliver a unique and differentiated distortion pedal to market with unmatched clarity, definition, and presence yet harmonically rich and with a bit of tube-warmth in its tone (sorry, no tubes in this particular pedal ;-)  You can read an overview of its capabilities here and get some detail on the specifications here.  The pedal is designed to be very versatile… easily adapts to many guitars and delivers an incredible variety of useable tone, with each control musically useful over its entire range of operation.

We have had tremendous help from friends, associates and fellow forum-ites in realizing this project, some of which are provided as Links and many more that remain anonymous.  In particular, we were able to quickly pull together some excellent clips from our friends with good chops, including Blues-purist, JW-Jones. (Disclaimer: my poor/non-existent guitar chops should in no way reflect on JW’s or his excellent teaching skills!)  Please check out the entire collection of FET Dream Clips.

We will shortly be in production on this pedal and we have set a deeply discounted price to encourage early adopters to get on our waiting list for the production version: How to Buy One.

It was really gratifying to have lots of positive feedback from our beta testers on this project, but I think the most gratifying of all was the process of bringing this to life.  I happened to watch an Eric Johnson DVD the other day where he was being interviewed and talking about how important it was for him to enjoy the process and not just focus on the end goal of a finished album… this really rang true to me as I reflected back on the development of the FET Dream.