A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of dropping by That Pedal Shed to drop off a Bravado demo amp… that we are hopefully will be featured in lots of videos of That Pedal Show in the future! 😉
After a horrendous drive up (I had to leave at silly o’clock not only to be there on time but to also miss the traffic bottlenecks at rush hour), I rolled into the Tone Shed just as the guys were setting up.
Dan and Mick had swung by the booth at NAMM this year and were interested in the Bravado amp and what it actually meant for guitar players, so once we had all got back Dan and I liaised and we set a date for me to go visit. Now, that Pedal Shed is in a gloriously normal Wilshire spot, tucked away in a completely uneventful business park, that is blissfully unaware of the magic that happens within, it always makes me smile when I go up just how unassuming the place is! The first time I visited Dan at the GigRig was about 3 or 4 years ago, back when it was just GigRig HQ and within it was a typically chaotic work space with pedals, amps, PCB’s, switches, components and the general chaos of a productive workspace. Since then I’ve been back a few times, and each time it’s been slowly transformed to the place we know today, GigRig is now run from an adjoining unit with the original location now the studio out back and general rig based workstation in front.
The best thing about walking into that place is the lovely welcome you get when you walk in, both Dan and Mick are genuinely lovely people so it’s always a delight to walk in and start chatting (Mick and I had a lot of blushes to cover up, we’d last seen each other at a Joey Landreth gig crying like babies at the beauty of the music), so after that, I grabbed the Bravado, as well as my home made cab, and in we went.
These days, it’s kinda strange to walk into that same room, the original workshop, as you know it so well as the Pedal Shed. Strangely enough, the only thing I can compare it too is when we took the kids to see the Harry Potter studio tour earlier this year, you just kinda knew the place before walking in!
I was lucky enough to be invited to stay for the filming of a couple of episodes, the Pedal Platform special and the Binson EchoRec (in fact, it’s my crappy brown Adidas you can see in the top left of the screen when the EchoRec is shown) and was treated to a behind the scenes view of the entire thing. Dan and Mick work so well together, they intentionally don’t really discuss the products that are on the show that much, preferring to see how they react to each others thoughts and comments. Dan is generally the nerd, what he doesn’t know about pedals you can write on the back of a postage stamp with a paint roller, and Mick’s practical experience of gear journalism makes a great blend. Plus, they’ve been mates for years so the jokes you see are unrehearsed, just two mates trying to make each other laugh as often as possible.
Before filming, we had a really long chat about the concept of pedal platforms, what they are, what people think they are, what other companies think they are, how much is marketing faff, how much of it is reality and what is what. They had a quick play through it to make sure levels were correct and then the filming started. So, what you see on screen is them discovering it properly, we didn’t specifically select the effects, Dan just took the ones he wanted to try and played them. I was a little nervous when I noticed that we were up against a Mesa Lonestar head, which retails at around £1000 more than the Bravado and has a stellar reputation, so it really was a trail by fire, and a trail that was likely to be viewed by almost 50K people in the first 7 days.
In the room, the Bravado sounded phenomenal – hopefully you can hear on the video about how much more articulate it was than the mesa when using pedals!
Here is the other video filmed that day, Bravado is all over it! Can’t wait to see what they do next with it!