Shoe Pedals started out as a hobby in Brooklyn, New York during a violent thunderstorm. I was a graduate student at NYU then and I lived in Greenpoint while going to school in Manhattan. I sat by my bedroom window with a soldering iron while spectacular lightning and rain fell out of the sky. Wielding a cheap soldering iron and electronics knowledge passed on by my father, I built a clone of one of my favorite pedals which would later morph into something rather different called the Silver Apple. The next day I made a second one and intentionally broke it by adding extra elements. Knowing it would not work as I had made it, I experimented until the new elements added could be made to work again with the pedal. By the time I was done pretty much everything about the pedal was different from where I started. I called this new pedal the Pixel because it sounded, to me, like an NES game soundtrack. The next day I experimented more. And the next day. And so on, creating new designs all the time. I rarely made the same thing twice in those days.
I would bring these things to a nearby guitar shop to show to whoever was willing to go on a fuzz adventure. When I first brought one over, I simply grabbed a sharpie, labelled the controls. When I got to the footswitch I wrote SHOE and drew an arrow pointing to the button. Since there was no other name on the pedals people started calling them the SHOE pedals and sometimes people would just plain call me Shoe, too. In this same music shop I met Greg Saunier of Deerhoof and, though I was a bit starstruck at meeting one of my favorite musicians and forgot to mention I made pedals, I emailed the band later and gave them some pedals in appreciation of their making music I'd loved for years. What a nice surprise when they used a lot of them on their next album and tours!
Since then, I have earned my MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from NYU and moved back to my native Connecticut. There have been a lot of changes over the past couple years and now Shoe Pedals are at their highest quality ever, featuring durable fused stranded wire, quality components, very rugged Neutrik and Alpha hardware, and handwired PCB construction. If you get rowdy on stage and break a switch or jack, these things can always be replaced and repaired (just send me an email). Graphics on Shoe Pedals are all hand-stamped by me using a special high quality solvent ink designed for metal, glass, and smooth surfaces giving both a unique handmade look to each pedal and the durability and rough reproduction capabilities of screen printing. This is a vast improvement over the graffiti pen graphics of yore. I still don't recommend you spill your beer on your pedals but more for other reasons.
A little about my philosophy: I have little interest in cloning other pedals outright and most of my designs are actually not based on anything in particular. There are a few exceptions. The Silver Apple is a highly highly modified descendant of a certain Lupine Computation pedal and the Frog is greatly indebted to the fabulous Push Me Pull You concept. 314 was also something I never intended to make (a BMP type pedal) but after refining my take on that classic circuit people really liked it (myself included), so I decided to keep it around as long as I can get the parts for it. Everything else, however, is more or less a product of Theory, Research, and Development. I also do not use vintage components in any regular production pedals if I can help it (314 excluded). The great pedals of the past were all made using components readily available to the builders of the time and I am resolved to follow the same path with my own designs. Many other people can make you pure vintage clones, but that is not my style. I am a constant experimenter and have a very hard time leaving anything alone so I generate new pedal designs often.
Speaking of which, exciting things are also in store for the future. Though I got started by making very wild fuzz pedals, I also now make pedals that anyone can use and I am not stopping at distortion-based effects. LFOs are coming soon. Perhaps some day strange modulation effects will arrive. Who knows what I will come up with in the coming years? It's sure to be a wild journey. I hope you join me in creating great new sounds.
Sincerely,
CJM Venter
Builder and Designer
I would bring these things to a nearby guitar shop to show to whoever was willing to go on a fuzz adventure. When I first brought one over, I simply grabbed a sharpie, labelled the controls. When I got to the footswitch I wrote SHOE and drew an arrow pointing to the button. Since there was no other name on the pedals people started calling them the SHOE pedals and sometimes people would just plain call me Shoe, too. In this same music shop I met Greg Saunier of Deerhoof and, though I was a bit starstruck at meeting one of my favorite musicians and forgot to mention I made pedals, I emailed the band later and gave them some pedals in appreciation of their making music I'd loved for years. What a nice surprise when they used a lot of them on their next album and tours!
Since then, I have earned my MA in Interdisciplinary Studies from NYU and moved back to my native Connecticut. There have been a lot of changes over the past couple years and now Shoe Pedals are at their highest quality ever, featuring durable fused stranded wire, quality components, very rugged Neutrik and Alpha hardware, and handwired PCB construction. If you get rowdy on stage and break a switch or jack, these things can always be replaced and repaired (just send me an email). Graphics on Shoe Pedals are all hand-stamped by me using a special high quality solvent ink designed for metal, glass, and smooth surfaces giving both a unique handmade look to each pedal and the durability and rough reproduction capabilities of screen printing. This is a vast improvement over the graffiti pen graphics of yore. I still don't recommend you spill your beer on your pedals but more for other reasons.
A little about my philosophy: I have little interest in cloning other pedals outright and most of my designs are actually not based on anything in particular. There are a few exceptions. The Silver Apple is a highly highly modified descendant of a certain Lupine Computation pedal and the Frog is greatly indebted to the fabulous Push Me Pull You concept. 314 was also something I never intended to make (a BMP type pedal) but after refining my take on that classic circuit people really liked it (myself included), so I decided to keep it around as long as I can get the parts for it. Everything else, however, is more or less a product of Theory, Research, and Development. I also do not use vintage components in any regular production pedals if I can help it (314 excluded). The great pedals of the past were all made using components readily available to the builders of the time and I am resolved to follow the same path with my own designs. Many other people can make you pure vintage clones, but that is not my style. I am a constant experimenter and have a very hard time leaving anything alone so I generate new pedal designs often.
Speaking of which, exciting things are also in store for the future. Though I got started by making very wild fuzz pedals, I also now make pedals that anyone can use and I am not stopping at distortion-based effects. LFOs are coming soon. Perhaps some day strange modulation effects will arrive. Who knows what I will come up with in the coming years? It's sure to be a wild journey. I hope you join me in creating great new sounds.
Sincerely,
CJM Venter
Builder and Designer