Who is Death by Audio?

In this week’s interview, Nick and I got a chance to sit down with Death By Audio founder Oliver Ackermann, and the conversation that followed was every bit as metal as you’re imagining. I’ve included the highlights below, but if you’re the type of person who likes to skip the end of the book (or in this case, article) to see how it ends, I’ll give a little disclaimer: I end up telling you to go out and buy a Death By Audio pedal. Like, immediately.

Is it a twist ending? Not really. Is it a happy ending? 100%. 

Now, on to the interview.

JOSH

What was the first album you bought with your own money [that] you picked out?

OLIVER

I [remember] getting these albums that I really liked. It was one of those BMG [deals]...I remember the Cure’s The Head on the Door was the first one. 

JOSH

Do you come from a musical family?

OLIVER

My dad plays guitar, but it wasn't what he did [for a living]. They're both math teachers. I guess they appreciated music.

JOSH

How did you end up sliding into loving music?

OLIVER

I guess there's that time in your life when you find something that really clicks and you fall in love with [it], and that was music for me. I remember one day my brother took me out in the car, just him and me, and he had some punk tape or something [playing,] and turned the stereo up as loud as it could possibly go. I just thought that sounded so incredible. It completely just [shook my] world and was such an inspiration. A friend I knew played guitar. We'd go over to his house and play. And when you plug a guitar into an amplifier and crank it up, it's like, holy smokes. It's like this weird power you have over the air.

JOSH

How did you end up with a guitar in your hand?

OLIVER

My brother had [been] taking guitar lessons and didn't like it, so we had that guitar in the family, which was a Gibson SG. I would play that sometimes. And my dad had a couple of acoustic guitars, but [in] this first band that I started with some friends, I was going to be the bass player, so I remember I saved up and got this Washburn Lyon series bass. I think I like glued some old refrigerator parts to it to make it not quite say Lyon Series on the front.

JOSH

Yeah, that explains a lot. (laughs) That's very revealing. Do you play any other instruments?

OLIVER

Yeah, I can't really play anything. But I do love to play the drums and guitar and bass and homemade weird instruments. I took piano lessons and pretended to play the trombone in high school. In middle school, I used to just mime the guy sitting next to me, but then I remember the teacher would call on me and be like, “Hit an A,” or something like that. And I'd be like [imitates sad trombone noise].

JOSH

Walking in here, [we saw a] lot of recording equipment. Your shop's immersed in [it]. You make music, you record it, obviously. What was your first experience with hitting record on something you're doing? Like, why do you love that so much?

OLIVER

I remember that some friends had a six track cassette recorder, [so] my Mom wrote me a note to skip school so me and my buddy could go and record an EP there on cassette at our friend's studio, which was called Dead Cabby Studios. Apparently some cabby hung himself in the studio. We got to go there and finally recorded a cassette.

JOSH

That's amazing. Your mom's like, “Skip school and go record.”

OLIVER

Yeah.

JOSH

What was the first guitar pedal that you owned?

OLIVER

I’m not positive, but I think the Ibanez [Soundtank] PowerLead? I remember being like, “Wow, this transforms the bass into something so cool.” I remember you couldn't always turn it on and off.

JOSH

The life span is like 90 days on that device…The Soundtank [series] is the gateway for so many people. So how did you decide to start a pedal company?

OLIVER

I had been building a lot of equipment for myself and just collecting a lot of stuff at that time. In the late nineties, there was still the opportunity to get gear for almost nothing. [This was] before Ebay, when there were people auctioning stuff or you could find stuff in pawn shops [and in] these weird stores where people wouldn't know what they had. You could take apart a lot of equipment. So I was trying to figure out how to build stuff myself. I had this girlfriend at the time, and we really wanted to go to Europe for a month and backpack. It was getting closer and closer, and I didn't have a job. I didn't have any money or anything to make this happen.

I was like, “Oh crap, what am I going to do?” And so I had this idea for this effect that I didn't know anybody else had ever come out with: a feedback loop. A very simple pedal. I was like, “This would be very minimal investment to just put a potentiometer in a box and put some jacks on it.” The results you get are just wild. You know, it's so incredible. I thought it was like the coolest thing. Total Sonic Annihilation was the pedal, and Death By Audio was the brand. I thought after I did that, it was going to be basically, “Okay, I sold these. Probably nobody's going to want any more of these anymore,” but then people ordered more of them and then I started getting bombarded with emails, “Do you think you can build me a pedal that does this?” The company lived on, I guess.

JOSH

Up to this point, you've learned to solder and you've learned some stuff. Talk about that. I'm assuming [it was a] DIY journey, maybe even the first time you picked up a soldering iron. What was that process?

OLIVER

It must've been 1995. It might've even been ’94. Upon leaving high school, I was already into playing music. I remember at some point being a freshman in college and like picking up a soldering iron off the ground not realizing it was plugged in and I burned myself really bad. It smelled really great, like a hamburger or something. Regardless, I still was constantly trying to build these projects. [They] would fail miserably, because I didn't know how to solder. All of my information was from books reading about how to solder. Maybe it doesn't really explain what you should be doing.

I would check out these books and I would read them from cover to cover and not understand what they [meant], you know, just in the hopes that I would gain some sort of electrical engineering knowledge, that somewhere something's gonna make sense. It took me two years to actually solder something correctly. I started modding a bunch of the equipment that I had. The Electric Mistress Flanger [was] one of the first successful mods I did. I was also trying to build a bunch of these really complicated circuits, and then eventually was like, “Forget this.” I made a tone shaper. It was like a boost and you could select the different caps inside. That was when I finally discovered grounding, I was like, “Oh, this is this thing that all these people were talking about. That's why none of these circuits I was building could even work, because I wasn't grounding these circuits.” This is four years down in the journey, [when] you can circumvent something without grounding because someone already did that for you.

JOSH

Coming [out] in the mid-nineties before the power of the internet and [the] DIY world there, do you think it helped you inform your company? What do you think it did to you?

OLIVER

I think that it helped in some ways to not have the internet, you know, helped and hindered. There was a different sort of thirst for this knowledge. You hear about this library that has technical books or something, and you're really excited, you know? And so you go and you spend your time in this library, looking through these technical books, you know, to find out that you can’t check some of these out, or you're trying to figure out a way to Xerox these pages that you think are really important. 

If you only have like 30 resistors, you have to figure out a way to make this work in such a way with this little bit of knowledge that you have. You're hanging on every word because this is all you have...You’re imagining and even coming up with your own language of what electronics are, your own theories. Some of these things make sense to be building blocks, to make some other interesting things happen. And if the end result is really awesome, who really cares?

JOSH

Yeah. If it works, it works...I love a lot of things about your pedals. One is the aesthetic, but it's really obvious when you see a Death By Audio pedal, the look, size, knob layouts. There's a hundred reasons I could list them, but I'd love for you to just talk about that aesthetic. Why do you choose the way they look? What are you doing there? What's in your head?

OLIVER

There's a couple of things. I'm a fan of really old equipment, like submarine controls and stuff. I'm sure everyone who builds pedals is a fan of tech. Whenever you see big panels and giant knobs, that's incredible. And there's something that draws you into wanting to turn a big knob. I really like those orange amplifiers where you just have a graphic and you're supposed to know what this means…[Sometimes] it's a mystery as to what this knob is going to do, and that can inspire you to want to turn it. Some of the layouts have to do with being a touring musician and working with equipment. A lot of people don't always make things that are conducive to actually play with or to have them last for the whole tour. So, we've tried to balance [out] a lot of those different things.

JOSH

So the Fuzz War is spray-painted with a stencil, but most of your pedals are screen printed with manual screens out here on a table. Talk about that. Why do you do it?

OLIVER 

I just always loved the way silk screening looked. I think that there's something that happens when you take some really nice clean design and you run it through a screen with bubbles, all the edges and everything that is so pretty and how sometimes they get [messed up]. We used to even send out all the mess-ups, too. Now we don't do that. But I even liked the way that it looked when some of the letters didn't print, [when] things [look] different. You know, even just making the screen how they sometimes get a little bit like fuzzy edges. It's just like an Instagram filter in your artwork. But it’s something that anybody could do, too, if they wanted to do.

JOSH

Death By Audio. Where did the name come from?

OLIVER

I just thought that sounded cool. It really wasn't anything besides that. I don't know what my obsession with death is, playing in the band A Place to Bury Strangers. And some of the names of these pedals [are dark], like the Apocalypse. For some reason that stuff draws me in. I guess maybe it's like the opposite of my character. If you get to meet me, I’m not very morbid.

JOSH

I thought that it came from a venue you were working out of. You apparently created a venue, like a [creative] incubator-type environment in another location? 

OLIVER

Yeah. So we had this other space that I found in 2005, a totally raw warehouse. It took us a month or two to build it out to where we even had rooms. Like, everyone's sleeping on concrete floors. We didn't get warm water for four or five months in the place. Everyone has to take cold showers, [and they’re] pissed at me for being like, “This is gonna be great, guys!” So we built this practice space which was all cement walls and stuff. We built a second floor. We had this giant cargo net you could jump on. All this cool team playground [equipment]. It was often a lot of artists that were living there. And a few years later we took over the whole floor of that building and then turned a section of it into a music venue. Originally it was supposed to be a photo studio, and that failed miserably. So it was like, “What do we know that we can do?” We can throw [together] shows.

JOSH

That's fascinating...You've [also] published a book of photography?

OLIVER

Yeah, a friend of ours, Ebru Yildiz, pretty much lived in the space for the last month. We knew that the place was getting shut down because Vice magazine was taking over the building, so for that last month we just had all sorts of really crazy shows. The photos [of] the final end of the space [showed] the refrigerator smashed on the ground. People ripped up magazines and just covered the floor with everything that was left over, so it was like a good fun celebration

JOSH

Success has different meanings for different people. What would you say in your own frame of that? What was the point at which you said to yourself, “I guess Death by Audio is successful.”

OLIVER

There were definitely some milestones, like Trent Reznor asking me to make him some particular pedals. That was pretty insane. And then hearing that someone was like, “Oh, Lou Reed told me to get this [Death By Audio] pedal.” When [I] hear those things, I feel like I've crossed over into something else. I [used to be] a kid who listened to those records and stuff and would be driving around blasting the Velvet Underground or Nine Inch Nails in the car. [Now I’ve] stepped into some [different] world.

JOSH

It's like a parallel universe. “I'm in this world that I tried to look into, and now I'm sitting in it.” 

OLIVER

It's kinda crazy to think that you could have had any influence on this world. Maybe all for the worse. Has music gone downhill? Who knows?

JOSH

Is there a breakout pedal for Death By Audio?

OLIVER

We've had a few. The one that has just always been consistently the most popular was the Fuzz War. There were just like a bunch of artists who really embraced it. “This is now my sound.” A lot of people even got rid of their whole pedalboard and just used the Fuzz War. Even now, we'll be playing shows with other bands, and so often a band has a Fuzz War on their board. 

JOSH

There's a lot of different approaches to design. Some people are super scientific, you know, they're electrical engineers and have degrees. How would you label your method of creation?

OLIVER

Madness (laughs) I don't know. We’ll approach it from any angle whatsoever. We're constantly searching for new technologies that we're going to get involved in, or even weird old technologies [that we can] experiment with. It's constant experimentation, constantly throwing a bunch of crazy stuff together. We spend all our time trying to improve these ideas that we have. That sometimes yields the best results, when you take one idea and smash it with another.

JOSH

What is your favorite pedal that you make?

OLIVER

The Apocalypse is [my] favorite pedal that we make. It's just so practical. Everyone should have an Apocalypse. It adds five messed up distortion sounds into your setup. Most people don't have super messed up, weird, backwards-designed fuzz circuits, so it's good. There are no buffers or anything like that. Depending on what you put before and after it, it sounds totally different...You've got yourself a bunch of weird flavors that definitely aren't available in your [typical] rack gear.

JOSH

Let's picture a guitar shop. Your stuff’s for sale in the guitar shop. A kid walks in and he's interested in pedals. He grabs a couple of your pedals. He goes into a room and plays them. What do you hope he says after he’s played your pedals for the first time? 

OLIVER

Depends on the kid. I guess if they're into that messed up sound and they wanted their guitar sound like a car driving down the road with their bumper hanging off, then they’ll love it.