Supercool Pedals are a small, boutique pedal company operating out of Toronto, Canada.
With sounds and effects ranging from the super cool to the super practical, Supercool Pedals owner and pedal designer (and builder, marketer, researcher and …) Jamie is bringing his own imagination to the market.
“There was no calculation to start getting into the business,” explains Jamie. “It was just a hobby that started paying for itself.”
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“But it was legitimately looking down at my board at a certain point, and wondering ‘Which of these pedals I can start replacing?’, and ‘What don’t I like about these pedals, and what can I improve on?’”
Jamie continues, stating that his goal has always been to make pedals for himself, to make pedals he thinks sound good. He believes if he can make himself happy, it’ll generally ring true for other musicians as well.
“It’s such a wonderful realisation,” he beams. “Everything creative was done by someone who wanted to do it, and you can just do it. You can just kinda do anything yourself at the end of the day.”
Jamie’s philosophy extends far beyond pedals, and we chat about how anything creative needs to have some intent behind it, or it’ll feel like a considered and calculated ploy.
Supercool Pedals had some humble beginnings, Jamie learning to repair his own equipment because he didn’t have the money to have it repaired, admittedly having a penchant for vintage, transistor-based stuff!
“The first [pedal] was a tape loop.” says Jamie. “I really wanted a (Roland) Space-Echo, and I missed the deals on those twenty years ago!” he laughs.
“I found this old schematic in a book, basically it was a little preamp loop that you could hook up into a Marantz three-head cassette tape deck. Basically turning it into a Space-Echo-ey thing.”
Having found this, and learning a bit from fixing his own pedals, he decided to have a crack at this tape loop. From here, Jamie learned more, made more mistakes, and ended up producing his own version of the DOD Overdrive Preamp 250 pedal.
“That’s still in the lineup actually. It’s called the Supercool 800, it’s a bit modified from where it began. It’s also really similar to the DIY Distortion kits that I sell to students and stuff like that.”
This schematic being the genesis for his own journey inspired Jamie to produce easy-to-assemble DIY kits for others, inspired to help others pursue their own sounds, musical dreams and modifications.
The range from Supercool has expanded far beyond this, now offering multiple drives in the ‘77 Fuzz Blender, Barstow Bat and more, as well as modulation in the Zig-Zag Chorus-Vibrato, and more utility boxes like compression in the Spritz! and a buffer in the aptly named Buffula.
He’s also quick to acknowledge that he’s learning something with every single circuit. Jamie had no official electronic experience to begin with, though relays that his family business is cabinet-making, so there’s an element of assembly, design and troubleshooting in his blood, having grown up helping his dad.
Today, Supercool have a range of pedals that’s expanding all the time. It’s obviously evolved beyond simply filling gaps on his own pedalboard, though Jamie’s ethos to design is simple: he scatters the releases and jumps between a pedal for his own satisfaction, a design he wants to do, and then the next release will be something for the market, either to identify a gap in people’s boards or to satisfy demands and ideas from customers.
“For example The Thneed was not a pedal I wanted to build at all. A friend had asked me ‘Hey, can you build me a Klon?’”
Jamie initially refused, having some hesitancy to enter the world of Klon clones, dismissing it entirely.
“I percolated on it for a while, and I started playing Klons out there and didn’t really like any of them out there. So I asked myself: ‘What don’t I like about it?’, and eventually I realised it would probably sell really well. How many people own more than one Klon, y’know?”
Jamie had finally wrapped his head around the fact that if people love a circuit, they love the subtleties and differences in it, and The Thneed was born, admittedly deviating a lot from the Klon.
“I just released The Triniphase, which was really for me.” he admits. “I was missing a phaser on my board, and I released that for me. The next pedal release I have to make sure is a bit more accessible.”
While some of Jamie’s designs are purely for him, they obviously have a market as we discussed earlier. The aforementioned Triniphase is a cool pedal, even just aesthetically its reminiscent of an arcade game or synth-wave album cover, and has five colourful controls to adjust it. The Depth controls allow control between 4-stage and 8-stage phase effects, and the Length control adjusts LFO modes. Phase based pitch shifting is controlled by the Mode switch, the two main knobs controlling Reso (aggressive or subtle feedback control of phasing effect) and Rate (to adjust the phase effect from subtle sweeps to near self-oscillation).
Speaking of aesthetics, Jamie makes a point to mention the packet of Camel cigarettes that inspired his artwork, a visual journey that had carried onto his entire range, namely on the Supercool ‘77 Fuzz Lite pedal.
“I put as much effort into the art and designs as I do the circuit itself, so it all has to fall together synergistically at the end of the day. That’s something that is brutally difficult to synthesize too.” he says with a laugh.
Jamie pushes this further, saying that even pedals he’s owned in the past need to speak to him artistically; from the design to the packaging to the sound itself.
“Right through it needs to speak to me as a piece of art.” he concludes.
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