My absolute favourite part of this job is the creative process and the sometime silly things that come of it. Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of working with Brian, Travis, Max, Jeff, Alex… so many people and with each one we’ve had moments of utter brilliance (even if I do say so myself) that have created some great products and moments.
One of the best parts of it all, for me, has been the concept of the silly pedal graphics. I did my first for Christmas in 2011 and we’ve been doing them regularly ever since, I have an extremely short attention span and when I have photoshop in front of me things tend to happen to relieve my boredom – I think we might have been the first to do an April Fool pedal graphic way back then, and then we upped the game in 2014 when we did the video for the HAIRstortion (that came from a drunken conversation between Brian and I over dinner at NAMM, we were crying with laughter in a very nice restaurant and receiving some extremely interesting looks from the staff and other customers, but you know…. meh).
Come the start of March I had realised we’d not even considered an April Fool thing, and had all but conceded to the other companies that have also started to do it, as we were going to miss out this year. Shame, but we’ve been really busy and the inspiration hadn’t hit yet…
All this started on March 9th, a Thursday at about 17:50 or so, Lee Anderton posted a video on his page and I commented on his tone, which was lovely. He shot straight back with a typical Lee comment (I first met Lee in January 2012 at NAMM, over the years we’ve done dinner, we’ve done banter, they’ve become one of the biggest selling dealers we have, he’s cut me some great deals on some gear… so, you know, this wasn’t random, I’ve known him as an industry guy for years), and within 20 minutes the idea was born!
You can take a look at the conversation here (look for my “nice tone mate” comment and then read the thread that came from it), kudos to Lee for the initial idea, and then it went to email and we had the entire thing planned out in 30 minutes from my first comment to me making this in photoshop and sending it to Lee as a concept for April Fool…
When thinking about things like this, especially if you intend to make a couple for a video, you tend to use a casing etc that is already in production, that way there will be units already around and it’s much easier for the guys in manufacturing to complete. As this was basic, I used the casing of the dB+. Font was a free one from one of the free font sites, happy days, and it was done. I sent it to Lee, he absolutely loved it… As you can imagine, in order to get this filmed and ready for April first, we had absolutely no time to mess around. Lee needed them ASAP so it was all systems go.
I emailed Brian, Avi and Steve (Avi is the boss of manufacturing and distribution so EVERYTHING goes through him eventually… Steve is the director of marketing for the company that Avi heads – Steve is in overall charge of transferring my pedal graphics on to the unit and their general appearance etc) with the outline, the graphic, the assets for the graphic and most importantly the timeline… I knew I didn’t have to convince BW that this was a good idea as he gets ‘it’ and he did, the trouble I saw was convincing Avi that this would be something worth doing from a marketing perspective. Avi got it straight away, he saw what this was, who it was, and why we were doing it and just said “No need to keep me in the email chain, just do what you need” which was tremendous! Steve printed a couple of cases up, we put the dB+ circuit in and they overnighted it all the way from California to Andertons over here in sunny ol’ England.
Lee had already said he was trying to get others involved, I asked Brian to shot the breadboard section (I love things like this, because I get to script and direct the worlds best analogue pedal designer at a breadboard and he just trusts me and does it and he always does it perfectly) and we sent it over, Lee told me about a week before the reveal they’d got Paul Gilbert in on it, Chappers, Bea and Danish Pete, and of course Dan and Mick from That Pedal Show… I was SO excited to see it as not only are all of those guys ace, but each are individually funny in their own right, I knew that Andertons were putting full production values into it, so this was going to be amazing… I hoped! Lee and I were spending a lot of time trying to convince the guys that we should make a run of these to sell for charity, and it didn’t look like we have the capacity to do a small individual run like this, but once Antony (the sales sale rep for Europe) got involved it happened! More about that later!
March 31st… TC Electronics and JHS Pedals released their April Fool videos a day early, the cheeky monkeys! I thought Tore’s was genius, the Vacuum Compact Kill Switch Pedal, hats off lads, excellent work – they do keep us on our toes …
Here is the video!
As you can see, it turned out fantastic. Each person in the video played it perfectly, tremendous display of dead pan humour and the production is incredible. 🙂
The following day, Andertons released this…
18 hours after the launch of the first video and it’s already been viewed over 47,000 times. The follow up over 6,000… Andertons put 25 pedals up for sale at 10am and within a matter of minutes they had all gone, so that’s £1500 to the Teenage Cancer Trust for what was effectively a silly idea and some banter… Wonderful.
So, 2018… I’m already thinking about it. 🙂