The GigRig Story

If it wasn't for this effects pedal, The GigRig wouldn't exist.

That isn't a figure of speech. It's an old Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress, I still have it, and everything we've made since comes back to it.

The same D chord

I grew up in Australia in the 80s playing almost every single day, plugging into all the latest technology. I even had one of the early Roland GP-8s. But there was always this question. I remember seeing Bryan Adams on the telly playing Run To You, watching him play a D chord and thinking: that's the same D chord that I play. Why don't I sound like that? I honestly thought that when you got rich and famous, they took you aside and showed you some secret chords. Tone would keep me up at night, and this was pre-internet — I couldn't just go online and ask.

I played guitar for Alimony in Brisbane and then left for Sydney, where I joined up with Max Sharam and later with The Wheelers. I think one of the reasons I got Max's gig was that all my sounds were programmed in a rack using old MIDI gear. I don't think it sounded fantastic, but I could switch everything instantly.

"Just humour me"

I was in the studio with the racks and all the MIDI, and the producer said, "Dan, I just want you to try something." And he hands me one of these. An old Electric Mistress.

I thought he'd lost his mind. This thing is ancient — my rack had a knob on it that said flanger. Why would I want that when I've got this? Just humour me, he said.

Guitar into the Mistress, into an old black panel Deluxe Reverb. I was in the control room, not even in the room with the amp. I hit one chord, and I will never forget the sound of that Mistress coming through the monitors. Like a sonic waterfall. It was astonishing.

And then I went, hang on. I plugged the rack into the same Deluxe and spent ages trying to dial up that flanger, convinced the one in my rack must be broken.

Session over, I went down to Guitar Crazy in Coogee and bought one, plus an old Phase 90 and a Boss CE-1 I still have.

Three problems

I put what I think was five pedals on a board and started gigging them through an old Music Man. And that thing I loved about the Mistress wasn't there in the same way.

Worse, when I kicked the Mistress on, the comb filtering and phase cancellation of a flanger dropped my signal just enough to pull me out of the mix. Every time: back to the amp, turn up a bit.

And Max's songs had quick changes in them, so I was jumping all around the pedalboard turning some things on and some things off. It was a nightmare.

So I had three problems.

1. Why don't the pedals sound the same when they're on a board together?
2. Why is the Mistress too quiet when I turn it on?
3. How do I hit one button and turn some things on and some things off?

Those are still the three problems, and everything we make is an answer to one of them.

The rig I could never afford

Around then a friend teching for Johnny Diesel called me down to sort out the MIDI on a rack reverb. That rig had just been built by Pete Cornish, the English rig builder who built for David Gilmour and Brian May.

That rig blew my mind. One button: the pedals he wanted came on, the ones he didn't went off, the programs in the rack changed, the amps changed. This is the dream, I thought. And at the time it was just so expensive that I couldn't afford it in my wildest dreams.

I was lamenting exactly that to my producer when he says to me: just go and make it yourself. I thought, yeah, right.

So I started studying electronics with only one goal in mind: to make a programmable loop switcher. The first pedal I ever built was a Phase 45 copy, but the point was never to build pedals — it was one system that could turn some pedals on and some off from one footswitch, compensate for the volume differences between them, and take the things I wasn't using out of the signal path.

That last one is the whole company. Everything since is that idea getting better.

Early 2004: the Pro 14

Somewhere in there I met an English lady, now my wife, and we moved to the UK, where I met an engineer who also played guitar. He had the electronics, I had the guitar, and we each had enough of the other's language to talk. In early 2004 our very first ever product was born — the Pro 14.

My pedals went into effects loops, and each footswitch had DIP switches so I could programme which loops it brought on. No more tap dancing: one footswitch, straight to the sound I wanted. But the bigger thing was that the pedals I wasn't using were hard bypassed out of the system. Getting things I didn't need out of my signal path made the most difference to me tonally of anything, and it's been with us since day one. It's still the whole point of a switcher.

It answered the second problem too: a programmable master volume after the loops — post gain — meant a preset with the Mistress in it could compensate for the drop.

The second output wasn't isolated, so we added an isolation circuit and a phase reverse for running two amps without earth loops. Then I wanted my delays in one amp and not the other, so we made the HumDinger to split the signal path — what became the TPS wet/dry thing.

Selling a box that doesn't make any noise

Getting the concept across was the hard part, because essentially we were selling a box that didn't make any noise. I didn't know anything about marketing. I was a guitar player.

The Pro 14 predated the first Pedaltrain, so I'd go down to B&Q, buy plywood, cut it to fit those artist portfolio bags and glue loop Velcro on. Every original shipped with a homemade board and a gig bag.

Guitar Buyer was my favourite magazine and I thought those guys would get what we were trying to do. That's where I met Mick, in 2004 — our very first ever review, and a column I wrote until the magazine closed. The company he worked for ran the London Guitar Show, and they said we should come down.

We had no idea what we were doing. There was a space and a table; someone found a spare bit of carpet and we cobbled together a really abysmal stand. But people were fascinated — three deep for three days.

I remember thinking: if we can sell 300 of these over this weekend, I can quit my job and do this full-time.

I remember tallying up the sales at the end of that weekend. We'd sold one unit. And that guy called on the Tuesday to cancel his order.

It was heartbreaking. But the thing was so new there was nowhere to put it: it sat between the pro touring racks and a simple pedalboard. What changed that was the pedal resurgence — people going back to simpler rigs, like I had, because they sounded better. The more that happened, the more people found us.

The people who did buy one

Our very first ever customer didn't come from a show at all. I met Mark Johns — an astonishing Aussie player, with Ray Davies at the time — at a friend's wedding, and he toured with that unit for years. After that the pro players trickled in, all word of mouth.

I was full-time, Dave Mapleston was part-time, and my mother-in-law, bless her, let us move in while we got this off the ground. We converted her shed into an office.

G2, and the morning Boss launched a switcher

The system took up too much real estate, so we made it smaller: the G2, out in, I think, June 2013, with eight banks of presets and a matrix system instead of relays.

By January 2015 we weren't exhibiting at NAMM any more, but I'd still go every year to hang out with our clients, because America was and still is our biggest market.

Then on the Saturday morning, Boss launched the ES-8 switcher. It's a great switcher — not the same as a G2, but with some really cool features in it. I was heartbroken.

And Mick said something I'll never forget: "They've just legitimised everything that you've been working for for ten years."

He was right. There was more than enough room in the market for us all.

Those conversations were also the start of That Pedal Show — and putting a HumDinger in the loop of a G2 to make a wet/dry setup was the first time a lot of people had heard anything like it.

G3, and taking the transformer out

I kept a journal of things I wanted the system to do. The wet/dry thing internally, without needing a HumDinger. Really serious MIDI. And screens — because when you land on a new bank, how do you know what each footswitch does?

Dave left for semi-retirement around then, and moving on from G2 meant serious software, so I brought in a software engineer and an analogue engineer. That became the G3 and G3S: parallel signal paths to different amplifiers, built-in mixers so delays spill over between presets, and named presets on the G3S screens.

Then I had a revelation. The traditional way to isolate two amplifiers is with a transformer, and every transformer has some sort of colouration. Plenty of people love a particular transformer for exactly what it does to their tone, and fair enough. What rubbed me up the wrong way was simpler: I've already got the sound I want. I don't want to change it. We spent ages finding the most transparent transformer we could, and even the good ones weren't perfect.

Then I had an epiphany about how to balance the signal internally and remove the earth — a properly balanced signal with no transformer in it at all. Isolated, and what came out was identical to the signal at output one. That's what we call Hi-Def isolation: a truly colourless system, which — if you go back to the top of this page — was always the whole point.

Still the same pedal

The QuarterMaster and the HumDinger are still staples, the power range has grown, and we make our own pedalboards now, which feels like a fair joke on the plywood.

But at its heart, G3 is still an extension of what I came up with in Sydney in the late 90s. Press one button. Turn off some pedals, turn on some more. Get the ones I'm not using out of my signal path.

Every customer who has ever bought anything from us becomes part of that story. What I've learned, dealing with some of the biggest artists in the world and with people who just want to feel connected to their gear, is that we're all the same.

And it all started because somebody handed me an old flanger and I couldn't work out why my rack couldn't do it. I still have the pedal. I appreciate you all.

Daniel Steinhardt is the founder of The GigRig and co-founder of That Pedal Show.