FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

 

What is Sister Pedal Company?

Sister Pedal Company is a guitar pedal design and manufacturing concern headquartered in Seattle, WA.

Sister focuses on original analog circuit designs, bombproof builds, and impeccable sonics. The sonics are the most important part. Each pedal is designed and tuned by an exceptionally sonic person.

Who are the people behind Sister?

Just me for now.

What is the Aerator?

The Aerator is Sister’s flagship guitar pedal. It’s a boost and distortion circuit with an impressively broad range of applications. And it has some goblins in there.

At minimum gain and distortion settings, it brightens and fattens like a boost pedal. Got a fat Les Paul? It isn’t fat enough; make it fatter. Put some treble sheen on the neck pickups, they sound like shit. Got a Telecaster or a bright Strat? Punch the low end while making the top end even brighter.

At low gain and distortion, the Aerator sounds like vintage dirt. It sounds like the main riff from George Harrison’s "What Is Life". That’s a great song.

At medium settings, the Aerator will do whatever your guitar wants when given a top-quality distortion pedal. It sounds like your guitar, except with a better frequency response, and also you kind of sound like Nirvana now.

At high distortion settings it goes totally apeshit. Depending on where you set the tone control, that could be High on Fire, Pantera, Black Dice, Sonic Youth… all types of wild and gnarly beasts.

Aren’t there enough distortion pedals in the world?

Absolutely not. 

 

What’s the hardest part of running a guitar pedal company?

Selling t-shirts.

Here are some other difficult aspects, each of which suggests a dizzying array of challenges and sub-problems:

• Designing circuits that sound musical, responsive, and clean, while also delivering unique sonic characteristics that appeal to a wide array of players and styles.
• Embedding the possibilities of the circuit into user-friendly controls.
• Fitting all that shit into a tiny box with enough room for a battery.
• Soldering, and doing a truly exceptional job at it, because the components are sensitive and they’re very close to each other, and moreover, your customer deserves a circuit that’s as pleasant to look at as it is to play.
• Powder-coat painting metal enclosures.
• Silkscreening artwork, using the same inks they use on road signs for maximum clarity and longevity.
• Selecting and implementing tax and accounting software.
• Continuing in these and many other endeavors, even as their monetary expense, long lead times, and exceptional levels of effort lead you to consider an alternative career in the performing arts, or, god forbid, software engineering.

There are others. And yet still: selling t-shirts is the hardest part.

 

Why is selling t-shirts so hard?

Because, unless you’ve dedicated your whole enterprise to clothing the customer, your options are limited to the kinds of websites used by drop-ship hustlers trying to make a quick dollar on a shoddy product. The business practices of the drop-ship hustler websites are opaque and the quality of the products are questionable. The software integrations are a pain in the ass. It takes a lot of time and sweat to figure out your t-shirt provider is going to screw your customer. It can be done, however, given the tenacity of the spurned, wild-eyed, guitar-pedal-company-operating zealot.

 

I want to buy a t-shirt. Is that ok with you?

I guess so. I did all the work. I did a lot of it from a hotel room in Glasgow City Centre while the American Rock’n’Roll Rodeo bar below my hotel room emptied the previous night’s empty bottles into their recycling dumpster every 90 seconds or so.

What were you doing in Glasgow?

Tagging along on someone else’s trip and pining for my workshop. Wishing I were designing and testing and building instead of fucking around with t-shirt websites. Enjoying world-class tap water sourced from the bootblack waters of Loch Kartine.

Will I like the t-shirt if I buy it?

Yeah, absolutely. I put a lot of time into making sure you would.

It will take a long time to get to you, though, because it’s coming from Latvia.

Why is it coming from Latvia?

I had to make some difficult decisions about the quality of the product, the consistency of the manufacturing, and the labor practices of the people tasked with printing the shirts. Latvia was the best I could do. The selection process took about two months, which is almost as long as it took to design and tune the Aerator circuit. That’s really fucked up to think about.

Do you have any advice for me?

Buy an Aerator. I made it by hand, just for you, and it sounds amazing.