About Us (me..)
My name is Adam and I make guitar effects pedals, how cutting edge!
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I have been, I suppose, a professional musician for 2 years now, though I would consider myself to have been writing, recording and performing music at a professional level for much longer, but in terms of music paying my bills through income generated by musical endeavours, that started in April 2020.
My life is now completely sunk, neck deep in music and I bloody love it (and family.. of course..) I know how lucky I am, but it has taken years of work and dedication to carve out even my modest slice of the industry pie.
Prior to making the leap into full time music, for ten years my day job was designing and building electronic instrumentation for a small company in the Lake District. This skill set, along with my parallel music career meant blending the two was pretty much inevitable. I opened up my Boss SD-1 pedal to see what went on inside, changed this and that and was soon opening up every pedal I owned and poking at them with a soldering iron, uncovering their secrets, learning the science of 'tone' and so forth.
After much tinkering, and occasionally destroying, of pedals I began selling modded pedals on eBay and to my guitarist friends, while using my own creations on tour and in the recording studio. In 2019 I designed my first original pedal, the Nails Overdrive with much more to follow.
The Dome, London 2018 - I promise I treat my pedals better than my guitars..
The Sharp End 'Philosophy'
Truthfully, I enjoy doing this pedal thing. If we're honest with ourselves we're all nerds when it comes to our guitars and gear and I'm just indulging that part of myself here, but if anyone wants to own a piece of what I create then that's just ace!
Believe me, a part of what took me so long to turn my pedal hobby into any kind of ‘business’ was knowing how much BS there is out there when it comes to effects pedal marketing. There are many builders, big and small and so, so many brilliant, innovative ones, it's very difficult to do anything new in this game (in fact, one could get quite disheartened before they even started..) However I feel there is a place for someone with the skill-set and experience I possess.
First Sharp End Pedals - the Nails Overdrive (photo from November 2019)
Breadboard city! The first stage in getting the peds out there!
I make original circuits, modify 'classic' designs and will sometimes, though rarely clone a pedal, but I'll always give a nod to the source design and never pass any cloned circuits off as my own, this I promise. Then why get my version? Well, I try to be very fair with the pricing, and I do take meticulous care when building my pedals, I sincerely hope this is worth something and I guess is the whole vibe of this 'boutique' business.
Any questions head to the contact page, and consider any Sharp End product to have a lifetime warranty, unless you've deliberately thrown it in a river or ran over it, though it's a priority of mine to provide rock solid dependability for use at the, wait for it... sharp end.
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Adam T