We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dan DeMay a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Dan, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

Spun Loud was an accident, really. At least initially. I had started a band after several years off the scene and was looking to find a new guitar tone/setup so I called a good friend, Dakotah Cole, who’s a touring guitar tech, and asked him what pedals/gear folks were using. He ran down a lot of gear but then casually suggested that I could also build my own pedals.

I have a pretty diverse work background that included a fair share of electrical work in both AC and DC realms so I had at least some foundational working knowledge and experience. That said, I also am not an electrical engineer by any stretch, so while the idea didn’t scare me off, it felt a little daunting and I certainly didn’t initially think, “oh yeah, I’ll start a pedal business.” But I started looking up simple circuits and how I could build them, and pretty soon I was trying out different parts and so on, and had a couple different functioning variations.

In testing these, the drummer of my band (who was primarily a guitarist) suggested putting them together in one enclosure. So I decided to make that pedal for him for the holidays. I couldn’t just make a plain aluminum box so I decided to come up with some art for it, and felt that it needed a pedal “company” name even if it was just for the one, and Spun Loud Effects came up pretty quick. Back in the 2000s, I ran a live music production outfit on the Olympic Peninsula that we called Spun Loud Productions, so it seemed like the most natural thing to carry that forward to this.

When I took the pedal to our rehearsal space, I think we were all kind of blown away at how good it sounded. Plugged into a Marshall JCM900, it just ripped. The bass player and our other guitarist both said they wanted one, too, so I decided to build a few more.

At this point, I still wasn’t really planning to be a pedal company. I just thought I would build a few more and then continue to work on ideas for myself. But I quickly sold the few that I built and decided to source some higher-quality, powder-coated and UV printed enclosures, and ended up building 10 more.

Somewhere along in here, it occurred to me — and probably somebody said this — that I was making these boxes to suit my taste and other people loved that taste, too. I mean, I didn’t invent guitar pedals and certainly wasn’t reinventing the wheel in terms of production, but I found that there was a place in the world for the tone I wanted. So I started a website and got going on new ideas.

And what I’ve learned since then (I’m six years in now) is that there are people out there who really love the way I think about pedals and design them. I’ve got at least a handful of folks who say they’ll buy anything I make because they hear what I hear and love it. That is such an amazing feeling, especially when I still feel imposter syndrome regularly.

Dan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I grew up with music in my life. Something was always playing in my house growing up. My mum sang and played piano, my uncle sings, whistles and plays harmonica, and other family friends would come around and jam. And there were always lots of records (and later tapes and then CDs) or just the oldies radio station on. I was interested in guitar from as early as I can remember, first inspired by Elvis and later by the Beatles, the Smashing Pumpkins, the Stones, Nirvana, the Presidents, and maybe more so by super local bands like Circle of Fear. So I started playing guitar when I was 8 and got serious about it when I was 13 or so, and then it was just always part of my life.

Guitar pedals first entered my sphere when I was 14, with a Zoom multi-effects pedal, Sure, it was plastic, but it transformed my always-clean-tone 1968 Fender Bassman into a monster that rocked like my favorites. I rocked it for a few years and then, when I was 19, I sought out something more serious and settled on a Jekyll & Hyde pedal from Visual Sound.

Fast forward 18 years and I fell into pedal building seeking out my new tone. As mentioned before, my dear friend Dakotah Cole, a professional guitar tech, suggested that I might build my own pedal and off I went. A few iterations of simple circuits later, I built one as a gift for my then drummer (who was primarily a guitarist) and the other members wanted one, too. This was the Blister & Peel, a two-channel fuzz drive that would help me realize that maybe I had something to offer other players. Perhaps not by reinventing the effects pedal wheel, per se, but by making effects that I wanted to play and sharing that tone, that flavor, with other people.

I think that’s what I set out to do and why my business happened so organically. It wasn’t a ploy to make an extra buck, but instead it was me in honest pursuit of a great guitar tone. When I found it, I made that a pedal. And as I have continued building pedals, that’s what I’ve done. I don’t just build a pedal because it seems like people want it or that I think it is a great marketing concept (and there are some GREAT ones out there). I design a pedal because I want to play that pedal. It may not be a brand new idea, but it’s definitely going to be sculpted to my taste, to what I want it to sound like, play like and look like. And I think that genuine interest in just achieving good tone is what makes people love my pedals. It’s a subjective thing, so I don’t have any illusions that every player will always love my pedals, but I do think when it’s pursued to be a great sounding, high quality product that you can see a lot of effort and concern went into designing and building, a lot of people will want to be a part of that.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

When I started, I didn’t really know how to make guitar pedals. I knew they went in enclosures, and I had an idea that you could buy those somewhere, and that they often used circuit boards, but that’s about it. So my first pedals — not even prototypes because they were just my experimenting with circuits — were built in bare aluminum enclosures. I found some articles on the internet that listed some suppliers for DIY pedal builders so I gathered enough info to order some blank enclosures and some strip board and some parts and then set about drilling and painting enclosures. I also used what are called waterslide decals on my first pedals. They are actually a great product but all of that is so much work. And that’s not even getting into the effort, once I had the first pedal design nailed down, of making each circuit board on strip board. I had to cut each piece by hand to the required size, then make all the copper cuts in the right places (and I made plenty of mistakes at the beginning) and then populate and solder each one, plus all the off-board wiring.

So, pretty early on, I found a vendor where I could order small batches of enclosures that were drilled, powder-coated and UV printed. That was a huge leap forward in efficiency, and while that vendor went out of business not long after I started using them, I had stared to make some connections and quickly found another company to handle enclosures.

The other big leap was when I made the switch from strip board to printed circuit boards (PCBs). This was a huge hurdle to get over as I had to learn how to use a CAD program (Eagle) so I could design them, but once I did, it made the manufacturing process so much faster and more efficient. And that’s even with through-hole components. I’m now transitioning more of my designs to be at least partly surface-mount device (SMD) which speeds it up even more.

I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is that suppliers, in general, can be challenging. Sometimes they get behind, sometimes they run out of parts, sometimes they are too expensive or sometimes they don’t make a good enough product. For me, I’ve found that I have to balance my desire to support other small businesses with my needs. Whenever I can, I try to order most of my parts from small businesses, but that’s not always possible. I’ve struggled to meet my enclosure and PCB needs with small companies so tend to rely on larger companies that simply have the systems and scale to produce quality products in a timely fashion and at a reasonable cost. If my production grows to a scale that it pencils out, I would love to re-evaluate and try to work with smaller, more local shops to get my enclosures or possibly even my PCBs produced.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

There are a million pedal companies out there, so it definitely takes some effort to stand out from the crowd. For me, the first thing I came up with was just to make something that would be tough and have high quality components. Every solder joint needs to be right and if it’s not, I fix it or start over. Every part needs to come from a reputable supplier or be tested. For instance, I had a few stomp switches fail early on, so when I could change to using Gorva switches (an ultra high quality switch rated to 30,000 cycles,) I did it without a thought and have never had an issue since.

Really, for me, every pedal needs to be perfect looking and function absolutely as intended without variation. If something is even hinting at not being quite right, it doesn’t go out the door. If it’s cosmetic, it might get sold as b-stock, but everything must work perfectly.

Beyond that, I think just being genuine with customers is a really valuable part of building a reputation. I try to let my followers and customers know that it’s just me designing and building all these things, so sometimes it may not hit the schedule I aimed for, or I may not respond to every message right that second. But I do respond, even if it’s to say I can’t make that pedal or it isn’t available or that yes, I love the recording of you jamming my pedal with your band. I want people to realize they’re buying a product that is handmade by a real person.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.spunloud.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spunloud/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spunloud

Image Credits
Images of Dan DeMay by Lisa Baumann. Pedal images by Dan DeMay.