Electric-guitar players strive for a trademark sound. Jamie Stillman has one that is patent protected.
His patent, US 9,899,013 B1, isn’t for the licks he’s played over galloping drums in his punk band, Party of Helicopters. It is for the electrical engineering recipe that sculpts his guitar sounds and those of players around the world.
Mr. Stillman, 43 years old, and his wife, Julie Robbins, own and operate EarthQuaker Devices, one of the top-selling brands of guitar-effects pedals, the small metal boxes strung between electric guitars and amplifiers like the ones Jimi Hendrix famously cranked for Woodstock’s “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Since the ’60s, guitar players have used the sandwich- and half-sandwich-size devices to distort, sustain, reverberate or create shimmering echoes with a toe tap. Mr. Stillman never made it big playing music. But among musicians, he is a rock star for his pedals, some of which rest at the feet of the famous.
A standing-room crowd filled Brooklyn heavy-metal bar Saint Vitus in December to hear Mr. Stillman shred with EarthQuaker’s house band, Relaxer. The musicians made liberal use of Mr. Stillman’s made-in-Ohio pedals, which were for sale by the bar.
While touring bands usually have so-called merch tables to sell their T-shirts and the like, Mr. Stillman set up three dozen models of his pedals. They were connected from a guitar to a pair of headphones for showgoers to try.
The lineup included two of EarthQuaker’s hits: Avalanche Run, an echo device that has the patent-protected feature that lets players swish between forward and backward delays and sells for $299. The Rainbow Machine, $229, makes guitars sound like Saturday morning cartoons.
EarthQuaker Devices’ Rainbow Machine guitar pedal.
The pedals have earned the Akron, Ohio, company a passionate following among musicians, as well as applause from the federal government. Earthquaker Devices was named the U.S. Small Business Administration’s 2019 exporter of the year.
Guitar pedals have been a bright spot in the music business. Gibson Brands Inc. and Guitar Center Holdings Inc.—a storied guitar maker and a ubiquitous retailer, respectively—have struggled with debt and weak sales. Sales of effects pedals were $125.5 million in 2019, double what they were a decade earlier, according to Music Trades magazine.
Like craft-brewed beers, the pedals are produced by an eclectic mix of small and large makers. Buyers include pro musicians, weekend amateurs and stay-at-home guitar nerds. Like beer, one pedal usually leads to another.
“There are guys I know that have 60 overdrive pedals,” said Justin Norvell, executive vice president of products at Fender Instruments Corp., maker of the iconic Stratocaster and Telecaster guitars.
Some musicians string together a dozen or more effects pedals when they play. Mr. Stillman used 17 pedals, plus a tuner. The most popular pedals replicate the sustain and gritty texture of a vacuum-tube amp turned up to 10. Others make a guitar sound like an organ or replicate particular amps.
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Avant-garde New York groups Uniform and Show Me the Body use so many pedals that they are arranged on tables and manipulated by hand as instruments. In many bands, including Mr. Stillman’s Relaxer, guitarists do a lot of toe-tapping and mid-song squatting to twist knobs for fine-tuning.
Fender CEO Andy Mooney was backstage at a U2 concert in 2017 and noticed the Irish rock group’s guitarist, The Edge, had 21 guitars, four amplifiers and too many effects pedals to count. Maybe 150 of them, he said.
Reba Meyers of Code Orange uses her pedal board while playing in Philadelphia.
Anthony Anzaldo of Ceremony adjusts a pedal while recording at Studio 4 in Conshohocken, Pa.
Mr. Mooney, who made a name at Nike Inc. and later developed Walt Disney Co.’s princess franchise, said punk rock helped expand the pedal market. The genre elevated style and texture over technique. Pedals were sonic paint brushes that layered effects to create unique sounds.
“The pedal business is a hit-driven business,” said Mr. Mooney, who is hoping for at least one smash among the Fender’s latest line of 22 pedals.
The biggest selling pedals include a lot of oldies. Electro-Harmonix’s Big Muff fuzz pedal came out in 1969. Like most guitar pedals, its metal box contains a circuit board, a push-button switch, dials and is powered by a 9-volt battery. The name is trademarked but not the circuit, which doesn’t qualify as intellectual property. There are many knockoffs—hundreds, said Electro-Harmonix founder and Chief Executive Mike Matthews.
Mr. Stillman started out as one of the copycats. He made a version of the Big Muff for Black Keys’ guitarist Dan Auerbach while he was the band’s tour manager and guitar technician. “I had to fix one of mine that broke,” he said. “Then I went into a rabbit hole.”
Some shaky video from a 2006 Black Keys performance in Boston kick-started Mr. Stillman’s career. Soon, he was selling handmade pedals on eBay, adding ones of his own design. The orders came in faster than he could fill them, and he hired a band of buddies to build them in his basement.
They were soldering elbow to elbow when Ms. Robbins, who had supported herself in college booking rock shows in Akron, quit her job as a financial planner. She became Earthquaker Devices CEO, signed the company up for a health plan and moved the operation to a 15,000-square-foot facility.
“It became clear to me that if we really focused our efforts on it, it could support our family and our employees,” Ms. Robbins said.
The company now has annual sales of about $5 million and about 50 employees, mostly dexterous, detail-oriented workers who weave tiny components onto circuit boards. Many are musicians who take vacation time to tour.
Copying pedal circuits, like copying guitar licks, is part of the rock ’n’ roll business. Electro-Harmonix, which originated the Big Muff, sells an $86 pedal, called Soul Food. It mimics the Klon Centaur, a rare pedal from the 1990s that commands four-figure prices.
At Electro-Harmonix headquarters in Queens, N.Y., Mr. Matthews, a shorts-wearing septuagenarian who chomps unlit cigars, asked a room of his pedal designers, “Who did most of the work on Soul Food?”
“Klon did,” one said. Everybody laughed.
Electro-Harmonix's Big Muff fuzz pedal came out in 1969.
Write to Ryan Dezember at ryan.dezember@wsj.com
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