Step On It! A Fuzzy Welcome to the Stombox Blog

September 25, 2018

If you’re checking out this blog right now, I’m going to guess that you’ve probably spent some time with an effects pedal in the last 24 hours, either playing one, building one, tweaking one, buying one, or just simply admiring the bitchin’ graphics on one.

Whether as musical tools or just cool items to behold, guitar pedals hold a special place in our imaginations, and every pedal seems to hold the promise of new possibilities: new sounds, new landscapes, new moments of excitement and transcendence. New ways to irritate your neighbors.

Our goal with Stompbox: A Visual Exploration of the Guitar Pedal, our ambitious book project planned for a Fall 2020 release, is to bring the single preferred pedal of 120 of the world’s greatest guitar players into truly vivid detail: big, beautiful art-quality photographs of these road-worn beauties alongside fresh interviews about them with the players themselves, unlocking the stories and the sounds behind these special pedals, their quirks and peculiarities, and the way they’ve inspired (and sometimes frustrated!) some of the guitar world’s biggest names. The interviews are lined up—now here’s where you come in.

With this blog, we’re hoping to build a community around you, one that ties together all of our reasons for taking an interest in guitar pedals, which, in many respects, go beyond simply their role as musical tools into the realm of being an art form unto themselves. That art form touches many, many lives, and takes many forms, and that’s what we’ll be covering in this blog. Not just the end-users of guitar pedals—whether they be rock stars or bedroom shredders—but the interesting people who build them, the characters who sell them to you over the counter at your favorite music store, the artists who lend their talents for creating the incredible art and graphics that make them visually unique; the folks who collect them and fetishize them.

In the process, we’ll take in the history of stompboxes, pull out their guts and see what’s under the hood, map out which classic tunes used which classic pedals, and much more..

You may step on the boost switch now . . .

Roto Editor

Guitarist and author James Rotondi has been a touring member of Air, Mr. Bungle, and The Grassy Knoll, a former Senior Editor for both Guitar Player and Guitar World, and a contributing writer for Spin, Rolling Stone, Mojo, and Premier Guitar. His 2014 album Into the Unknown, by Roto’s Magic Act, was hailed for its “masterful songwriting” (Blurt Magazine) and “wickedly skilled guitar work” (Powerpopaholic). Rotondi is also the lead guitarist for the hard rock bands Hundred Hounds and The Cringe, and currently writes songs, composes music for television, and pens articles from his studio in East Nashville.