The History of JHS Pedals

you know the petals and you know the show but who really is jhs is jhs a tall man with a weird hobby or is it something darker more insidious today we answer that question who is jhs [Music] all right josh this is gonna be um it's gonna be really serious i hope you're ready uh i don't want people to assume that just because i work for jhs i'm gonna take it easy on you this is gonna be some real hard-hitting questions i just i want to prepare you ahead of time it's only fair i wouldn't have it any other way really well neither would i and because then that's what we're doing okay it's going to be hard hitting and it's going to be journalism no one will doubt the sincerity of this interview all right um so first off uh i just want to ask you where were you during the wall street crash of 1929 i was born in 82 so uh i don't know you tell me i don't know that's an eternity sort of suspicious josh when you see uh this picture what do you see there's some water what do you see here in this picture gate it's weird watergate it's kind of interesting i want to do a little psychology test just to see where you're at mentally can you read these words tread brundy now can you read these words without the r's ted bundy need i say more what was it like being uh born into oil royalty i i wouldn't know i might you know my i'm not nothing like that nowhere near that yeah i grew up on like a horse farm so this is where i was raised so absolute middle of nowhere yeah a one mile gravel road in we we raised horses oh yeah yeah oh my gosh there was a guy that tried to train us train us a horse for some gear that happened at the old shop this is graduation senior year very handsome how did you get into music first got into music because of my older brother who played piano but he listened to tons of music i just grew up hearing stuff and then one day i was at his apartment heard a pearl jam cassette tape and then kind of just went bonkers like got fully into it did you start any high school bands there were like three bands where did you and your bands play in the beginning the town i'm from it's not even really a town it's called bell green it's like a gas station and a stop sign but their our school was there so you know we played like talent shows the first place i ever played live with the band was this auditorium across the road but this is really cool i used to come in here with my best friend who was the guitarist in the band and it's a tunnel that connects one side of the school's property to the other and we would play our guitars and bring a tape recorder okay and so it was like reverb so we would sit right here on the steps and play yeah i have so many memories of early guitar buying my first pedals you know playing in a band and my band mates were at school doing stuff at night like coming down here yeah thinking we were going to be rock stars that's amazing and you told me this was like one of the first times you kind of knew what reverb was yeah i had never heard a reverb pedal or anything we would bring our guitars uh and and play and we were just like it sounds so good down there there was no definition of why it sounded good it was just that's where we go play guitar who had this in their high school no but none of you so let's go all the way back to jackson mississippi okay where it all started what got you started uh tinkering with guitar pedals i was doing a lot of like local session work and didn't have a lot of money i mean that was kind of the income stream which as you can imagine is not fantastic and also flipped a lot of gear like before ebay existed i would make a decent percentage of my money flipping gear out of pawn shops and things and i had a pedal break am i gonna buy another blues driver i don't have the money to buy the blues driver so i figured out that it was the broken switch and then i fixed the switch which is a super easy fix anybody could do that yeah i have like a really obsessive one-track mind as a kid it was like everything is horses like i grew up on a horse for like horses or like basketball everything's basketball and everything became it was guitar next music and then everything became circuits we are on the street of the house right where it all began jackson mississippi yeah it all started here so 2007-ish at this house yeah 2-3-4 um it's still the same color same door they have not done anything what was like some of the first mods that you did the very first thing ever was i had a stock blues driver and i had found a robert keeley blues driver okay and i used them together like stage one stage two and when i fixed the one that had the broken foot switch it was a stock i had it open and then obviously curiosity was like what did this keeley guy do to this one why does the unmodded blues driver not sound the same as my keely win what did he do open him up notebook on the kitchen table and i didn't know what stuff really was but i noticed that they're capacitors i didn't know what to call them that day but why is this one look different and there's a different number on it so i made like little graph charts from there like okay i'm gonna mod the blue server to be like the other one i did it i went to radio shack up the street it's there i mean it's not in there the sign is still there right i vividly remember having the notepad with the nup the parts for the keely knowing i needed like okay yeah i need to remove these which isn't easy when you don't know what you're doing once i figured out how robert keeley's whole thing led me into the modding then i realized okay this is what this part does well let me adjust it to what i like most i didn't want as much bass as the keeley one i wanted less gain here and so i called my version the blue drive and then i started modding a lot of stuff tube screamers rap dod 250s mxr distortion pluses kind of the run of the mill classics i took ds1s and i was able to find some circuit analysis of the ds1 because it's been around for so long cocktailed my own mod you know took all those just like if you're cooking i took some things i liked from a lot of places and made what's now known as the lexi drive and the synth drive there was like a like a swing like a porch swing on an a-frame setting right there and my wife is sitting there with a friend of ours and i walk out with a ds1 uh-huh and i had labeled it jhs mods lexi drive we had a greyhound we adopted named roxy right and i was like plex helix i thought it was yeah yeah yeah very basic jhs stupidity right it's like jhs mods lexi drive and i walked out i showed alice i was like hey i'm going to sell these i started this thing she goes that's cool right if i remember right you had a friend who owned a music store and that's where you got those ds ones right i got the original ds ones from guitar center okay which was down the street but i had i became friends with a guy named patrick harkins and he had a much cooler shop that was more up miley was like all used gear it was like a guitar pawn shop vibe which is like that was where i you know always looking for old stuff or weird stuff that's probably what 2007 seven seven or eight 2007 2008 i had two i had two ds ones josh was like i got a soldering iron i'm thinking about i've been modding a couple things he was like i'm gonna take let me take two of them i'll i'll mod one and maybe we'll sell it or i'll keep it and then i'll mod the other one i'll give it to you and then we would circulate he'd sell them on consignment and the very first one of those mods um even before i sold some on ebay he actually still has it he he bought it from me i marked that number 10 and signed it i think he did it maybe he probably did he did it with a sharpie or i'd probably yeah it's the first sold thing and i'd hacked around enough that i'm standing there going 10 sounds about right i'm going to start here 10 is that 10 is better than one it looks sounds more efficient i'm a pro i've been yeah oh it's a company tim it's a company there's ten of them that's the first official jhs petals product under the label jhs mod so did any like jhs pedal designs as we know them begin in jackson the pulp and peel was started there you'll see v1s that actually have a jhs mod sticker which is funny the morning glory idea was starting because i had modded my blues breaker but also started building some scratch blues breakers started modding them so those were being built all american i had been modding rats so i thought i'm gonna build some rats from scratch and put the mods in them that way i don't have to buy rats so there are some things like that i believe an old pedal called the banana boost mini bomb boost is jackson the transition from modifying to building pedals from scratch was two things me wanting to do that and me wanting to make things that i wanted the sound of you know make my own sounds and also people just being like oh can you like make this little fuzz right and so i would just make stuff and if it turned out really cool and i felt like for somehow i landed a fun name i'd be like well that's a product i guess a lot of things like a pulp and peel that just was an evolution of some mod and it became a product and now there's a v4 that's insane but it really just started from modifying an orange squeezer yeah it wasn't that complicated you are modding you're in jackson and then you leave jackson we wanted out of jackson yeah it's just my one of my least favorite places that i've lived a lot of great people there but get me out and my wife is from tupelo her brother at his house he had basically a lawnmower ship like those pre-manufactured sheds you buy at lowe's yeah so we moved up here used his shed in the back it's no longer there and these people were very kind and letting us stand in their driveway awkwardly um but yeah this is the little shed that was like a lawnmower yeah and it was the beginning of the summer of 09 100 plus degrees humidity yeah and my dad came down because i grew up about an hour and a half from here our we put a window unit in it cut a hole put a window unit and put like the pink styrofoam insulation right right and it looked when you walked in it was pink yeah yeah there's the tupelo newspapers first press i ever had right and it said like tupelo man something yeah like that and you see the pink and all my friends had come by local musicians and it was always skilled pink palace so i worked back here all the time and that's where like momentum started to happen making stuff for certain artists came up with a lot of pedals in that little shed what pedals were you building out of the pink palace at the time yeah this is this is original morning glories okay double barrel is from here sweet tea is definitely from here angry charlie charlie brown mr magic it would have been here that i really discovered the stamps in the craft store more and more one of the things that i think that people identified with jhs pedals is like the icons and how did the icons come about the icons came about through that same ocd thing where i hated sharpies and i did not like just a sticker really bothered me my wife i was with her at a craft store and we walk into a craft store not thinking about petals maybe i was at all times but like just walking around and i saw the rubber stamps that teachers use to like say like good job right yeah and i like had this freaking crazy moment i was like oh my god that's it and i looked there was a half orange slice i was like and it was the right scale of yes the chances of this were crazy this is that original craft store pulping wow this is it yeah and so you see it first appear on the heel because i was unsure what to do and then you see it later on the tops you're gonna do this i'm gonna let you okay you're gonna add some ink and then you're just gonna do some tests and i'm gonna do some tests feel it out and like see if you can get a clear thing on paper first you've never done this okay yeah see what it looks like all right that stamp has held up it's pretty we used that you know i use this scent for a while and then we made our own bigger version here oh yeah we have some old cases over here all right i think we can do that we have some old cases we have an orange one so you have the icon stamp okay i'll do the big you do the little doesn't matter now there's other elements to this every if if you're a nerd and you want to you know you're crazy like me and you really care you'll notice that on most all almost 99.9 percent i always put an explanation point at the power oh okay it didn't mean anything it was just a it was a look there are different stamped brand icons now the first ones are typewriter set okay and i still love that yeah and that is three separate jhs's and it was this one particular typewriter font over in that bin still are untouched i bought these everywhere i could find them because they cut they wear out right and the whole branding was this when we started making our own stamps like hey make the orange bigger designer you will notice there are hollows with an arrow okay there are just hollow big there are like hollows a little bit smaller uh full okay pick your way of doing it i'll do og orange and i think i'm gonna do i like this hollow the holo font okay and if you mess up basically this is your only hope on the orange case you're kind of up the creek this is just a d solvent yeah spray some on here and just see what happens okay and what would happen a lot of times is i would mess it up i would get it off and i would have to perfectly lay it over the outline you probably remember that yeah because it would leave a little bit of like and you can find really old ones every once in a while i got really good at this but there would be a shadow and that means i messed up so if you ever see an old one i had to redo it that's cool for a long time you only bought the amount of cases that you needed yes so in this scenario this is the this is the pulp and peel case that you bought for this one order and if i screw this up this order it's really painful yeah someone's not getting their pedal yeah oh i'm like actually like this is a little a little bit harder because you don't have a foot switch here a lot of times you would like have something to hold to it's like it's like nothing great i didn't i did it upside down but it's perfect oh yeah that's a lemon look it's the lemon the lemon juicer or something let's see if i can do this again did it come off yeah pretty pretty much there's a little faint like little residue left over but you know okay who's this order for this is for eric clapton this is for eric clapton that would literally happen sometimes okay and it's horrifying that's pretty good pretty good that's really good pretty good better than the last solid so you're making jhs pedal pedals yes yeah we called them custom-made yeah where were you selling those ebay reverb didn't exist this is way before yeah there was a small shop in tupelo this was called main street music and it was the first place in tupelo where someone sold the pedals in a retail spot so it's a guitar shop there were these two brothers they were really amazing and they had like insane vintage guitars in here and they were kind of an anomaly in the area like how do they have the shop yeah a lot of people will come through on tour because oxford which is ole miss is not far away you get a lot of bands coming through for guitar repair and stuff but yeah they sold i would put pedals in here and just sell them on consignment they weren't a dealer but a lot of people like balsa all americans i sold a lot of all-americans here it was in a blue enclosure little black corner knobs and that that stamp that i found it felt it looked so good and i remember texting me a picture this kid bought it charlie brown's mr magics i remember bringing them in here i remember making those in like batches of five or so and dropping them off every week and i would walk in it was like andy griffith shows right right we didn't really communicate yeah i'd just show up with five and he had sold five it's a big piece of like the retail history down the street is a hardware store and it's where elvis bought his first guitar wow yeah it's not part of the jhis narrative but it's kind of cool it's a very historical music this is a street yeah i mean yeah i mean ghs pedals yeah absolutely so your selling pedals this whole thing has to work you've bet your life on it basically what comes after uh tupelo after that there's an opportunity to have a slightly bigger shop my wife's dad he lived a few minutes outside of tupelo there's a little town called ecru ecru is mayberry and he has a bigger shed and we actually moved out there onto the property as well it's a big house everything we're trying to decide where we're going to live for a long term and do this so that was like the next shop it was interesting it had a garage bay next to it which was kind of nice i would back my jeep wrangler up open the door alice would be boxing stuff on a table it had a good feel yeah um so i did the same thing there but there is where it got nuts the one vivid thing about this shop was i remember this was what i always refer to as like the 18-hour days like it was very real here i would do insane days of work um i can remember many many many many days waking up before alice and emma i would wake up in the house there at sunrise or before i'd come out to the shed and i my family would wake up and i would see them for lunch and they'd come in and say hey my daughter emma was really small and um they would go to bed and i'd come in at like midnight six to eight months behind wasn't charging enough barely making any money um and i got so behind that basically my best friend lived in kansas city i would actually drive out here we would build some pedals in his basement just so i could like see if i could train somebody because i didn't trust anyone i didn't know anybody i would drive back and i'd set back up in my shop i'd come out here i was like could he help and then eventually that's where we met you and your dad and you guys drove down to equity yeah which is wild how old were you oh i was probably like 15 or 16. you have the only living memories in this shop of the this yeah like yeah i remember there was a card table in the corner of the shed the floor was caved in i think the first thing you handed me was like a clone clone i remember you building clones because burned my hand a bunch of times and you just said put some germ x on it this is where i told you yeah that was the other thing happened my dad destroyed a ts9 destroyer like which was dumb of me that's a hard pedal too right right it blew me away that your dad came and did that like it was so amazing yeah it was like literally a glimmer of hope like i was feeling bad i was so far behind everything started snowballing here and getting better which was technically worse because i didn't know what i was doing and orders are backing up and that's why i was like i got to move to kansas city because you were there your dad was there my other friends and i was like i know i have enough people we can like start a crew so we moved we loaded up a u-haul and moved to kansas city so after ecru after the shed yeah you guys move here to kansas city and we start building out of this basement in this house yeah rented a house sighed unseen saw it over like skype and built out a shop in our basement and i had people helping and so i was trying to dig out of the hole to save the business because it was imploding on itself december freezing cold we unload the u-haul and we had packed the shop in a way where it was at the back so i unpacked it first like and we just knew like we're gonna throw our furniture in and have somewhere to sleep but i have to set the shop up immediately because people are wanting christmas orders and i have about five days to ship yeah everything was hinging on this working to the point where we moved to a state 10 hours away never been to the city really basically i'm absent from the moving process of the house to build pedals for other people we've never seen and it was like we were all on board and it was crazy so it's in the house for a bit you'd know as much as me i can't remember maybe it was long enough for for basically like alice to be like okay there's too many people coming in the morning garage doors kids waking up i remember sitting in the backyard here and i saw my wife were talking she's like you know like you've gone for it this far you got to get a building i remember moving out of the out of your house into the new building yeah we move in it's basically just like a giant garage storage section and it was four guys working under this rickety loft thing i used to work right here at like a little bench and the water from the air conditioning used to drip down behind my bench it was the first real shop but it was like it's like what you see in a movie you know right you you're making it work yeah right that's the vent where john worked here and when people would take a dump the particles would blow out of the bathroom over his head but it felt great at the same time it was so genky when you combine that with the electrical box with rain pouring over it this is a pretty hazardous environment but it also felt like things are working yeah this would be like this is where jhs i guess became a company you could say for sure there's kind of two iterations of 7-eleven maine there was the back room which was rain pouring in through the through the garage door you know on the electrical box and then there there was the short-lived jhs music store it could have worked but then jhs just kept growing and growing and it was like this is insane this is two startup businesses yes so i sacrificed the music store on the altar of the pedals that was actually making money yeah but yeah that was wild and then we switched them yeah we moved yeah we took that front and made a nicer cleaner shop where water is not pouring in the switch box we had two benches and we'd kind of like face each other and that's where like the assembly line started that's where like kind of like the beginning of the way we kind of build now like sort of evolved here what other pedals were invented in the 7-eleven uh space moonshine for sure was that our first teaser ever yeah that was that okay first teaser ever we went down to blue river and yeah yeah that was your directing debut that was my first yeah i was directing debbie super bolt is that bill super bowl super bowl i remember making the proto and taking it to an atlanta guitar show and nobody even touched it nobody looked at it but the color box it's gonna be impossible to top that yeah panther cub yeah panther that's right those are both there that's huge actually i can't discount how huge that is it was for us the second ever tap tempo analog delay yeah it's a big deal so another really big part is you brought steve on um to help you out what was that like because that was a huge lift off of you that era was a really big part of it for me was admitting what i'm what i really suck at people's orders are getting lost why don't you run pedals oh that was like one of your first days here you came in and there was like water dripping from the ceiling onto onto an order i was like remembering to pay bills like a few days late i was i was just like i'm not great at those functions yeah yeah i had to have somebody that could just think about the business not failing from that perspective like i needed to do what only i could do and i needed to find people to do everything else i needed operations manager i need somebody that's like good with numbers somebody that's black and white i need somebody not like me i need somebody to argue with me too i had met steve as a guitar player he actually bought i think the first morning glory ever or something like that something crazy when i was in tupelo and i remember going to him he had a job at the time and i said hey can you come and be the manager so steve started working in this building and you had a desk right here and he like perched it up and he would like just work over here on the nike it's a foot off the ground and he would just work like every like in view of everyone and i was like he's like how much he's like i don't know i don't know what i can pay you because i need you to tell me how much i can pay you i don't know how much money we have i literally had no accounting it was it just kept working oh yeah i kept yeah people's paychecks and it worked and it was like insane right yeah and he quit and literally came and worked for me probably for years making a tenth of what he showed me yeah yeah and yeah i mean it's similar with you yeah people people saw something there to attach to and own yeah and that's why it kept working right it wasn't just me it was like you owned a thing and steve owned the thing and that grew the big thing so now we're currently sitting in the building that we're in now which came after 7-eleven yeah and we are currently like straight up bursting at the seams what are some of your like uh top memories of like this building we moved here 5 000 square feet 2500 per floor and i remember going i will never move you upstairs like this and i was gonna sublet it yeah kept it for storage and right now it's like we're just on top of each other yeah yeah you know 40 plus employees and this room's now a show it's like ridiculous didn't see any of that coming my favorite memories here i mean it's all it's mostly going to be stuffed with like how we started the show how we started rethinking having fun like i remember admitting i hate guitar demos right and that was great yeah being like how do i have to like him yeah i'm friends with andy he loves them he's great at it i don't have to like this it's like being like having the moment was like i don't have to like this okay right sweet you coming to me and go let's do a youtube show it's like youtube show like you know and it was just that's a great memory i think it's just been the growth that's wild you know 7-eleven main i think the highest amount of pedals we built i'm bad with numbers like i said i hired someone for that but i think we built 12 500 there at the end and then last year we built a hundred thousand here that's such a crazy feeling to remember my wife saying do you think this can work and then now seeing 100 000 pedals who bought those and knowing that's like a small dent in the guitar industry it's really crazy all the employees all the families people that have worked for me you know now you have three kids it's like it's crazy yeah we live in another world it's like an alternate dimension of what it used to be it's like creating another family sort of it's like that's awesome i love it this whole thing as accidental as it feels i just i said i kept going and i kept going it made space for people to do really cool stuff a lot of people think i do everything like we still get emails where it's like man i don't build pedals anymore you know i don't want me building your pedals i have much better builders since 2009 jhs and everything that it is has been an amazing team of people that took chances i mean some of the chances you guys took are crazy it's my initials but it's not me you know i'm an equal part of the craziness with other people that you'll never you might not know or see yeah people have owned this in similar ways that i have over the years and that's super amazing that we have such a good team what's exciting about the future for you having gone through the process with the pedal side of creating pedals and continuing to do that but i think about like what i love the education side of things i love what the show has become like what you and i have made over these three years of chugging away at that what's next for that what's the next things there alongside the pedals who are the new people that will add what will they do yeah just seeing the team get bigger and bigger and having the resources to do even more out of the box weird stuff you know i think we've i think we've done a good job at not trying to do what anyone else does admitting that like yeah this is who i am we'll do this right no i love that that sense of identity and just leaning into what we know we're good at which is goofs and making fun stuff and like it would be really weird like if right now there was like a really overly emotional song playing and like we wouldn't want it was like you know it almost sounded like kind of you two-ish or something and it made us seem like like this was way more important than it actually is or something like that it wouldn't be good if we did that yeah it'd be like super weird and would probably make a lot of people really uncomfortable cringy yeah we were really cringy like if it was black and white and then like you know we don't want black like we like it was you know like there was like a close-up of me and it looked like i was crying and then like you know there was like lots of just like hand pictures of hands stuff yeah that's probably not what we want to do no probably not thank you for watching this exclusive look into who jhs really is i hope that you feel more part of our family after watching it i can tell you for sure that we feel like more a part of your family as long as that's not too weird for both of us anyway hit like if you like this episode subscribe and hit the bell icon to get notified every single time we drop a new episode thank you and good night [Music] you

Channel: JHS Pedals

Views: 188,415

Keywords: JHS, JHS Pedals, The JHS Show, Guitar Pedals, Guitar Effects, Guitar Gear, Guitar Pedal Demo, Music History, overdrive pedal, chorus pedal, distortion pedal, boss pedals, compressor pedal, univibe, delay pedal, octave fuzz, reverb pedal, reverb, eq pedal, boost pedal, behringer

Id: yTfYvqFQgm0

Length: 34min 4sec (2044 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 11 2022