W
hen he wasn’t busy
spearheading ElectroHarmonix’ industry-
shaping product innovations in the 1970s, Mike Matthews took
some time to ponder life’s bigger challenges. He studied tapping alternate
energy sources such as wind power with
giant umbrellas and the magnetic fields
or “lines of force” in the magnetosphere
60 miles above the earth. With even
greater passion he investigated the possibility of “whipping death in our lifetime” by harnessing and focusing
mankind’s intellectual potential on
medical science through various metaphysical means including mental telepathy. The common theme of these explorations—harnessing and utilizing potential—also steered Electro-Harmonix,
where Matthews harnessed and utilized
the creative potential of some of the
industry’s brightest minds, including his
own. While he never “whipped death”
in the cosmic sense, he did manage a
small-scale equivalent when he twice
resurrected the company whose products helped shape the sound of rock ’n’
roll. Today, with his unruly white hair,
rocker’s black T-shirt, and the ever-
Reprinted with permission from the October 2003 issue of Music Trades Magazine
THE GUITAR MARKET
How Industry Pioneer
Mike Matthews
Founded Electro-Harmonix, Redefined Guitar
Tone, Kept Vacuum Tube Production Alive,
And Left An Indelible Mark On The Music
Industry...And He’s Just Getting
Started
THE NEW SENSOR FAMILY (l-r) Owen Matthews, assistant sales manager, with a Holy Grail reverb; Mike Matthews, president,
with a Big Muff fuzz tone; and Suzi Matthews, artist relations, with Sovtek and Electro-Harmonix vacuum tubes. In the background, hundreds of Electro-Harmonix effects pedals packed in their distinctive Russian-made wooden boxes.
present cigar he chews but does not smoke, Mike Matthews cuts one
of the more colorful figures in the music products industry from the
helm of New Sensor Corporation. Encompassing the world’s largest
vacuum tube manufacturing operation and a much-diversified
Electro-Harmonix, the Long Island City, New York-based New
Sensor provides another medium for Matthews to harness creative
potential and challenge conventional thinking.
While simultaneously completing Cornell University’s MBAprogram
and a five-year BSEE (which the school later commuted to a masters),
Matthews, a keyboardist, still found time for playing rock ’n’roll. But
his real talent, he says, lay in promoting top acts such as Chuck Berry,
the Byrds, the Lovin’Spoonful, the Young Rascals, the Isley Brothers,
the Coasters, the Drifters, and the Shirelles throughout the early- and
mid-’60s. After performing one gig with the Isley Brothers in 1964, the
band asked him to quit college and join them on the road. “Their funky
groove was my bag,” he says, but he resisted temptation in order to
complete his education. One act that Matthews booked as a warm-up
for Chuck Berry proved pivotal in training Matthews’ear and targeting
his career. Jimi James, who later became known as Jimi Hendrix, took
to Matthews, and the two became friends. Matthews even played a role
in urging Hendrix to break away from Curtis Knight and the Squires,
start singing, and launch his solo career, and over the years Matthews
attended many of the rock icon’s New York recording sessions.
Following his graduation in 1965 Matthews hired on with IBM as a
computer salesman, but throughout his three years with Big Blue he
directed his creative, business, and electrical engineering energies to
building innovative new products. His Alpha Neon Resonator,
designed to relax the brain and promote creativity with a number of
small flickering bulbs, had few takers. But when the Rolling Stones’
“Satisfaction” popularized a raunchy, distorted guitar sound, he
designed a fuzz tone that caught the attention of Guild Guitars founder
Al Dronge. Matthews contracted with Guild to produce fuzz tones that
it branded “Foxy Lady,” capitalizing on the hit by Jimi Hendrix.
Spurred on by the success of his fuzz tones, Matthews left IBM in
October 1968 to launch his own company, Electro-Harmonix, with
$1,000 cash, a $5,000 bank loan, and some increasingly focused ideas
about harnessing the rock ’n’ roll-driven music market’s commercial
potential.
While still at IBM Matthews befriended a gifted Bell Labs inventor
named Bob Myer and asked him to create a distortion-free sustainer.
“That’s what guitarists thought they wanted to duplicate the sweet,
singing tone associated with Jimi Hendrix,” he observes. When
Matthews visited Myer to test one of the prototypes, he noticed that
between the guitar and the effect was a small box with a single toggle
switch. Myer explained that after over-estimating the guitar’s output
voltage, he compensated by inserting a single-transistor preamp. “I
plucked the guitar,” Matthews recalls, “and when I hit the switch, it was
really loud. I said, ‘Wow, that’s a product!’”
Indeed, it was a product—the first to carry the Electro-Harmonix
brand name. Matthews dubbed it the LPB-1, short for Linear Power
Booster. As simple as it was, the LPB-1 was revolutionary, the industry’s first product that provided overdrive to guitar amps. “In those
days, when you turned an amp up to 10, it was still clean,” Matthews
explains. “They had a lot of headroom. The LPB-1 overdrove the signal and dramatically changed the sound. We sold hundreds of thousands of them.”
Electro-Harmonix' early impact on the industry is illustrated by
Hartley Peavey's recollection of the first time he heard the LPB-1 at
the 1969 NAMM show in Chicago. “There was a crowd gathered and
THE GUITAR MARKET
Mike Matthews...
A Life Intertwined With Music
Born to rock, Mike Matthews playing the piano for
Cornell University fraternity party twisters in
1961.
Mike gets down
on the ElectroHarmonix MiniSynth in 1980.
Glasnost with a backbeat, Mike Matthews (not
shown) and fellow musicians literally stopped
the show at a groundbreaking 1979 Russian
trade convention, where Electro-Harmonix was
one of just two American companies exhibiting.
Still rockin’, Mike is
always near a
piano. Now and
then he even takes
time out to get in a
few licks at his
office in Long
Island City, New
York.
a line of people waiting to enter a
product demo room,” he recalls.
“After waiting in line for about 15
minutes I saw a guy with long, bushy
hair, wearing overalls and a cotton
sack slung over his shoulder. He was
playing this cheesy guitar, one of those
first Japanese electrics with a
Masonite top, through a lousy, noname amp and this little box he called
the LPB-1. I thought, damn, that guitar
played through that amp should sound
like crap, but it sounds great! He was
selling the little box for five bucks! I
bought one, went back to my hotel
room, and used the blade on my fingernail clippers to open it up to find
out what was inside. There was nothing to it: a single transistor, a couple or
three resistors, a couple of caps, and a
battery! How could it make so much
difference in the sound? When I got
back from Chicago I started experimenting with raising the gain on my
own amps. Every amplifier at that time
had two channels, so I patched the output of one preamp into the input of the
other preamp in our VTA400. That was
where the whole channel-switching concept came from. That guy with the bushy
hair and the little five-dollar box was
Mike Matthews. He didn't invent the
concept of channel-switching, but his
LPB-1 was the inspiration for it.”
Matthews immediately reinvested profits from the LPB-1 into designing other
effects that would fit into the same box
including the Screaming Bird treble
booster, the Ego microphone booster,
and the Mole bass booster. Even more
popular was the two-transistor Muff
Fuzz, which Matthews describes as “a
little distortion unit with a milky, muffled overdrive and a muffled sound like
a signal going through a slightly torn
speaker.” About six months later he
introduced a modified, four-transistor
version in a bigger floor box. Named the
Big Muff to capitalize on the success
and name recognition of its predecessor,
it became one of the company’s biggest
sellers. Over the years the Big Muff has
been used by such luminaries as Jimi
Hendrix, Carlos Santana, Pink Floyd’s
David Gilmour, and currently John
Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers,
among others. In particular, use of the
Big Muff by Jimi Hendrix and Carlos
Santana helped fuel demand for E-H’s
full line of products. Matthews recalls
being “really proud” when he attended
one of Hendrix’ recording sessions and
noticed, “Jimi’s axe was plugged into an
Electro-Harmonix Big Muff. Jimi
rocked on that session.”
With minimal start-up resources,
Matthews initially sold the first ElectroHarmonix products strictly through mail
order, but he soon realized that a much
larger opportunity awaited him in music
stores. To hedge his bet throughout the
transition, he maintained the mail order
channel, but to avoid forsaking the retailers he’d begun to court, he sold his products at full-list price. “Our ads also told
the reader that our products were available at leading music stores around the
world,” he explains. “But they also
included a mail-back coupon. When the
order coupons came back to us, we could
tell which magazines were producing
[sales] for us. Eventually I only advertised where the ads were producing. I
didn’t have to make a significant profit; I
just needed to avoid making a loss. That
process allowed my itty-bitty company
to advertise really effectively, and I got
the company’s name out a lot.”
Matthews followed his hit LPB-1 and
Big Muff products with a string of industry firsts. Highlights included the
AC/DC/battery-operated Freedom Amp
(1971); the Small Stone phase shifter
with feedback (1975); the Electric
Mistress guitarist’s flanger (1975); the
low-cost Memory Man analog delay
(1976); an inexpensive, two-second
digital delay (1979); a 16-second digital delay (1982), and the inexpensive
Instant Replay sampler (1980). Mike
reports that the factory couldn’t build
the all-time bestseller Small Stone fast
enough to keep up with sales of nearly
7,000 units a month.
In 1973 Bob Myer finally developed
the distortion-free sustainer, the product that Mike Matthews had originally
asked him to design. Matthews reveals
that its commercial name, “the Black
Finger,” implied that it would help a
white musician get a soulful, “black”
sound. “But it turned out that people
didn’t want it to be totally distortionfree,” he says. “They wanted a few
more harmonics. Our new Black
Finger, which has two vacuum tubes,
sounds really wonderful.”
Electro-Harmonix’ runaway success
in the ’70s suggests that Mike Matthews
possessed a fundamental understanding
of what rockers wanted to hear. Adistinguishing element of his effects design
philosophy is his willingness to accept a
little noise in return for organic tones and
new sounds at the edge of oscillation. “I
hate hum,” he stresses. “Hum sucks, and
I don’t ever want it in our gear . But noise
is different. W e created ef fects that, when
you turn some knobs, they began to
approach some weird, new effects, but
they also got noisy. We left that in, giving
the musician the choice to crank it up to
that noisy, novel stage or not. When
you’re playing rock ’n’ roll live, you
don’t hear that noise, and the warmth and
response of the sound was so much nicer
than you get with digital effects. The
Japanese product designers hate noise.
They always eliminate it. But a lot of
times the result is dull; it’s less lively.”
Another area where Electro-Harmonix
products scored with consumers was its
price tag. “Cost was very important,”
comments Matthews. “I knew what it
was like to be a starving musician, so we
always tried to keep our effects affordable.” In time that simple formula—great
sounding, innovative products at a great
price—rang up annual sales of $5 million.
Mike Matthews’ musings on Life’s Big
Questions took him deep into the human
mind and to the magnetosphere. In busi-
THE GUITAR MARKET
ALL ELECTRO-HARMONIX pedals are thoroughly factory-tested before shipment.
ness his vision was a little more provincial, but during the 1970s, not much. He
started doing business with China in
1974 after he was invited to attend a
trade show in what was then Canton. “It
was all Mao Tse-Tung and the Red
Guards then,” he recalls. “Everybody
was wearing the same color. A third of
the population was working in the fields,
and two thirds were standing around in
circles reading Mao’s little book.” Early
in the decade he began selling effects
pedals to numerous Eastern Bloc countries including Hungary, Poland,
Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. And in
1979 Electro-Harmonix was invited to
exhibit at the Consumer Goods and
Fashions Exhibition in Moscow, the first
Russian consumer trade show that was
open to Western companies. “We were
already doing so much business in that
part of the world, and Russia represented
a huge market, so I figured I had to
exhibit,” he recalls. E-H was one of only
two American firms to be represented at
the show.
Initially Matthews planned to attend
with just one demonstrator as he had at
other trade shows. But then he got “carried away” and started inviting some of
the musicians among his factory workers
to form the six-piece Electro-Harmonix
Work Band. “It was a ten-day show,”
Matthews recalls, “and by the third day,
the band was rockin’. It was a very big
trade show; some countries like India
and Colombia had their own buildings.
We shared a separate two-story building
with companies from Japan and
Germany. Aside from our demos, the
band played three times a day, and during
those performances, all the other buildings closed down to go hear the crazy
guys from America. We started glasnost!”
Matthews’experience at the trade convention in Moscow was more than a
good party, and more than good business. In ways that he couldn’t have predicted at the time, it created options that
would later facilitate his rebirth in the
industry.
By 1978 the company Mike Matthews
had launched with little cash and a small
bank loan was operating in a 50,000square-foot Manhattan manufacturing
facility and generating $5 million in
annual sales. For this remarkable
achievement The Small Business
Administration named him New York
State Small Business Person of the Year
and sent him to Washington, DC, where
he hung out with Jimmy Carter and
rapped about the Small Stone.
It might have seemed that nothing could
impede his ascent, but ironically success
and public recognition had drawn attention of a less auspicious type. After he
declined a 1979 “invitation” to unionize
his company, union organizers set up
outside the E-H factory and attempted to
persuade its workers to join the union.
Enjoying a good relationship with Mike
as well as paid vacations, health insurance, on-the-job training, and meritbased pay and advancement, his employees turned down the union. Three years
later the union returned to set up a picket
line and accuse Matthews of exploiting
minority workers. It offered money to
employees to sign union cards and
threatened those who refused, effectively
blocking the factory’s entrance. One
summer day in 1981 six men attacked
Matthews as he attempted to enter the
factory. They knocked several teeth out
of an employee who tried to defend him.
“It wasn’t like a real labor union
action,” Matthews contends. “They
were labor racketeers who took over the
Ladies Garment Workers Union. Their
people brought in picket signs and out-
side thugs who started harassing and
beating up me and our employees. The
police set up barricades, but they didn’t
do much to protect us. They were unionized, so they sided with the people posing to represent the union. They treated
it like a labor dispute, which it wasn’t.”
With nowhere else to turn, Matthews
called his friend Jim Van Sickel, who
was a TV reporter with the local NBC
News channel. “Two days later he told
me that he’d used hidden cameras to film
these gangsters clubbing people at the
subways and throwing eggs. NBC covered the story on the 6:00 and 11:00 news
for three nights.” Matthews also stated
his case on a local TV talk show. All the
media exposure spurred the National
Labor Relations Board to issue a cease
and desist order to the union, but by that
time the damage to Electro-Harmonix
was done. After struggling for five
months to return to full production—in
the dark, with minimal electricity supplied by an in-house generator—
Matthews was forced to file for bankruptcy in January 1982.
But Matthews was far from beaten.
Though most creditors were wary of a
broke manufacturer with a history of
“labor problems,” Matthews managed to
THE GUITAR MARKET
The Freedom Amp
cranks out 15
watts from a
rechargeable bat-
tery and features
a handcrafted
pine cabinet and
great tone from
a custom 8”
speaker.
The LPB
2UBE Stereo Tube
Preamp is the 21st century
version of the LPB-1, the
product that started it all for
Electro-Harmonix.
A Legacy Of Innovative Products
The MINI Q-TRON
Envelope
Follower fits the
funky sounds of
its bigger
brother into a
small, inex-
pensive
pedal.
Russianmade versions
of three E-H pedals
feature simpler cosmetics
and a significantly lower price tag.
buy back his company within a couple of
months by selling his 123 acres of oceanfront property in the Hamptons. He had
the factory staffed and running a few
weeks later. Electro-Harmonix was full
of promise as it expanded into new territory with its electronic art, Mini
Synthesizer, and inexpensive samplers.
According to Matthews, it was also
enjoying tremendous acclaim and a fastgrowing profile. E-H products were
being exhibited at New York’s Museum
of Modern Art and sold from its own
kiosk in Bloomingdales, and the son of
Panasonic’s founder expressed interest in
buying the company. But while the
reconstituted Electro-Harmonix was still
regaining its financial footing, Matthews
found himself confronting an increasingly competitive industry with “rules” he’d
never dealt with in the past. Just as Japan
was taking over the U.S. auto industry,
large Japanese musical instrument manufacturers began to devour market share,
especially in the electronic instruments
and accessories segments. This powerful
new competition alone represented an
imposing challenge. But Matthews’ plan
to meet it head-on with a new range of
groundbreaking products was thwarted
when his supply of next-generation integrated circuits was held up in Japan.
“We were the first company to offer an
affordable solid-state echo, the Memory
Man,” Matthews explains. “It used
Reticon Bucket Brigade chips, which
were a little noisy. A couple of years
later Panasonic introduced a quieter
chip, the MN3005, with longer echo
capability. In 1979 we designed new
products—the Stereo Memory Man and
the Deluxe Memory Man with chorus—
to use that chip. I knew from my experience with hot products in the past like
the LPB-1, the Big Muff, and the Small
Stone that these second-generation
echoes would be bigger than all of them.
We were getting tons of orders [for new
products], so we placed big orders for
the chips with Panasonic USA, but the
chips didn’t come. They kept saying
‘next month.’ I’d ordered thousands of
chips and they sent me a couple of hundred. Finally I went to Japan to visit
Panasonic. They promised me the chips
again, but we never got them.”
Electro-Harmonix went bankrupt again
in 1984. Years later a salesman who had
worked with Panasonic in the ’80s
revealed to Matthews that the Japanese
giant had diverted the chips it promised
Electro-Harmonix to Roland, Ibanez,
and other Japanese competitors, and to
several karaoke machine manufacturers.
“I don’t think any of our competitors
instigated it,” he adds philosophically. “I
think it was Japanese cultural tradition to
serve their countrymen first.”
Matthews regained ownership of the
Electro-Harmonix trademark in 1991,
but, twice burned, he was hesitant to
return to that arena. Instead, he began
cultivating some seeds he’d planted in
Russia back in 1979. “At the end of the
1979 Moscow convention, the Russians
wanted to buy a lot of stuff from us, but
no one had any money,” he observes. “So
I started wondering what I could buy
from them. The first thing I looked at was
the cheapest type of older integrated circuits, what we called ‘jelly bean’ICs that
sell for around 15 or 20 cents apiece. I
knew from building solid state electronics that the integrated circuit market is
very cyclical. Every few years the manufacturers stopped making the cheap ones
to concentrate on making the big money
stuff. But when supplies of the cheap
ones ran out, their price would shoot up
to a dollar or a dollar-fifty—if you could
find them at all. I figured that when the
price cycled upward again, I’d have the
source for them—Russia—where I could
get them cheap and where they’d stay
cheap.”
Matthews started selling ICs in the mid’80s, when all Russian electronics were
handled through the Central Ministry of
Electronics. In 1988 during one of his
trips to discuss business with the
Ministry he saw some vacuum tubes like
the ones used in guitar amps. He took
some samples of the Russian tubes to his
friend Jesse Oliver, who had designed
most of Ampeg’s amps, and who gave
the tubes his stamp of approval. “It was
easy to start manufacturing in Russia,”
says Matthews. “Russia was full of military factories that were out of money and
struggling to make the transition from a
military economy to a consumer economy. They were looking for non-military
stuff to produce.” Making a transition of
his own, Matthews worked his way out
of the IC business and began investing
time and money into a vacuum tube factory in St. Petersburg. In 1988 he founded New Sensor Corporation, and a year
later he launched the Sovtek (pronounced SAWV-tek) brand of vacuum
tubes for guitar amps.
The business grew, and in 1999
Matthews bought the vacuum tube factory outright. Sovtek tubes are used in
amplifiers made by Fender, Peavey,
Mesa Boogie, Crate, Soldano, Korg,
Marshall, SLM, and “countless other
types of amplifiers all over the world,”
he says. “There are only about five factories in the world that make vacuum
tubes. Ours is the biggest, and it’s the
only one with designers who create new
types of tubes. Also, we offer the best
quality and price. Vacuum tubes might
be considered a dying technology, but
most guitarists still prefer them in their
amplifiers.”
Hartley Peavey adds, “Mike really got it
right on these tubes. You can buy cheaper tubes, and you can buy more expensive tubes, but today he delivers the best
tubes you can buy.”
In a very tangible vote of confidence,
Fender gave Matthews a low-interest
loan when he announced his plan to purchase the Russian factory. “Our tubes
were vital to Fender,” he notes. “They
wanted to ensure our stability in case we
got cash-tight.” Matthews gratefully
accepted the loan but never had to use it
thanks to New Sensor’s quick market
penetration and steady growth. In 2001
he launched a range of higher-end tubes
marketed under the Electro-Harmonix
brand name. The line includes models
that were specially engineered to replicate the tone and noise characteristics of
classic tubes of old, including prized
models made by Mullard, Telefunken,
and RCA. “Our customers are attracted
to our price, our quality, and our service,” Matthews says. “When we get an
order faxed in the morning from a customer in Japan, we ship it out the same
day. They also trust us to bill them for the
“That junky guitar played
through that cheesy amp
should sound like crap,
but this little box made it
sound great! I had to figure
out what was inside.”
Hartley Peavey
correct freight; we calculate it out and
give them the best type of shipping.”
As his vacuum tube business was
growing Matthews noticed that some
of his old stomp boxes were commanding top dollar—up to ten times their
original new price—in the vintage
instrument market and later on eBay.
Initially he didn’t have the capital to
resume production on them, but as
Sovtek prospered he began exploring
ways to revive the Electro-Harmonix
effects pedals operation—again. The
decade’s first newly made Big Muff,
Small Stone, and Bassballs pedals
were manufactured at the factory in
Russia. While continuing that overseas
production, the company then began
making a full line of effects at its U.S.
headquarters, which is now a 45,000square-foot building in Long Island City,
New York. “More of our customers
throughout the world want to see products that are made in the U.S.A.,” notes
Matthews. “Most people prefer the U.S.made Big Muff, but some people prefer
the Russian-made ones, which are about
25 to 30 percent cheaper.” Today the
company ships thousands of pedals a
year from both facilities to music stores
throughout the world.
Matthews’ diversification of New
Sensor has continued, providing a steadier revenue stream than his effects boxes
did even during Electro-Harmonix’ halcyon days in the ’70s. Although it enjoys
strong sales of vacuum tubes to music
stores and manufacturers of guitar amps
and high-end audio equipment, its most
profitable base comprises several thousand service shops worldwide where guitar and hi-fi amps are repaired. Matthews
explains, “The repair shops buy our
tubes, so it’s convenient and cost-effective for them to also buy capacitors and
transformers for tube amps, as well as
speakers and all sorts of other replacement parts like jacks and switches.”
Matthews points out that New Sensor
has become the world’s lar gest independent distributor of speakers including
Celestion, Eminence, and its own
Electro-Harmonix lines. New Sensor
began offering its own line of guitar
strings as well, marketed under the
Electro-Harmonix brand.
Introducing promising OEM lines like
Electronic Harmonix speakers and guitar
strings is enhancing New Sensor’s rev-
enues and stability, but Matthews’greatest professional passion remains designing and marketing innovative new products. In 2001 E-H debuted the Holy
Grail, its first entirely new offering since
the ’80s, and quickly followed it with the
Holier Grail. And at last month’s AES
show in New York, Electro-Harmonix
ventured into a new category with two
exciting new products. Matthews
describes the NY-2ACompressor, created by J.C. Morrison, as “a super-highquality vacuum tube compressor, better
than the famous early LAcompressors. It
uses special military tubes that we make
at our factory in Russia.” The company’s
new rack-mount stereo envelope follower, designed by Mu-Tron and Q-tron
inventor Mike Beagle, includes many
additional features created especially for
the recording studio.
Still harnessing and utilizing human
potential, Matthews recently rehired
David Cockerell, whom he calls “the
greatest circuit designer in the music
industry,” to work on a new generation of
Electro-Harmonix innovations. Among
other products, Cockerell designed E-H’s
best-selling Small Stone, its early samplers, and its 16-second digital delay.
Matthews cites Cockerell as one of the
reasons he expects Electro-Harmonix to
reclaim its notoriety as an innovator as
well as a source for rock ’n’roll’s classic effects. “We’re about to release a
range of dynamite new products.
Instead of seeing all the re-issues and a
few new tube boxes, you’re going to
see some really amazing things.”
For 35 years Matthews has trusted
designers like Myer, Cockerell,
Beagle, and Holy Grail inventor John
Pisani—as well as his own ears—to
guide Electro-Harmonix’ product
development. “We don’t do market
research,” he states flatly. “We just
develop what we dig and hope it fills a
niche. Too much research leads to less
novel products. I’d rather take my
chances and have five duds and one hot
product that can satisfy musicians for
years and years.”
In general, Matthews favors tubes over
transistors for musical instrument applications, as is illustrated in E-H’s new
tube version of the Black Finger
Compressor, its LPB 2ube Stereo
Preamp, and several other tube-powered
effects. “Tubes’ warmth, the way they
distort, and their noise characteristics are
more musical than those of solid state,”
he asserts. Similarly, he is amused by upto-the-minute digital technology that
samples or models decades-old amps,
speakers, cabinets, and effects, and he’s
undaunted by the trend to cram dozens of
effects into a single product. “The small,
dedicated devices sound better,” he suggests. “The more complex the product,
the more you chop up the sound, compress and compand it, the more you lose
the feeling. The feeling starts when you
first pluck the string; the note’s attack
contains frequencies that get lost in these
complex digital devices. Some companies claim that they model or simulate
our effects, but even if they sound basically the same to the audience, they just
don’t feel the same to the player. Alot of
the musician’s playing well comes from
his getting off on the sound and the feel.
Why do you think electronic drums
haven’t replaced the traditional drumset?
“During the time that Electro-Harmonix
was out of business, the demand for our
old products and our reputation grew so
that we have more fans now than we did
back in our heyday in the ’70s. Those old
products still have their special sounds.
It’s very easy to lose a sound. A minor
change such as a different capacitor or a
THE GUITAR MARKET
JOHN PISANI (right), whom Mike Matthews
calls “Johnny Pi,” created Electro-Harmonix’
Holy Grail. He is working with Mike on several
new product designs.
“Hum sucks, and I don’t ever
want it in our gear. But noise
is different. When you’re
playing rock ’n’roll live, you
don’t hear that noise, and the
warmth and response of the
sound was so much nicer than
you get with digital effects.”
new transistor, even one that has the
same specs as the old one, might distort
a little differently, and without intending
it you depart from the original sound. It’s
hard enough to keep your own products
as true to the original as possible. For
someone else to copy it, especially on
analog circuits... It’s like a special cookbook recipe. So we just do what we do.
Instead of trying to compete with the big
company’s products on price and develop huge sales volume, we’ve been satisfied just to sell our steady volume of
Electro-Harmonix and grow in our tube
and speaker businesses.”
Though Matthews is still a divergent
thinker and adventurous rocker at heart,
time and adversity have focused his
commercial pursuits. He admits that
along with getting “hit with too many
obstacles at once”—namely the labor
racketeers and the diversion of critical
supplies—he had “expanded into too
many areas at once. I was always into the
fringe,” he says. “Sometimes I exploited
it; sometimes it got me into trouble. I’m
much more conservative than I was in
the old days. It used to be that I spent
every penny I made to pay my bills and
expand the company. Now I go slower,
and we have some money in the bank.”
“A lot of people think Mike is crazy,”
says Hartley Peavey, “but I think Mike
is crazy like a fox. I have a lot of respect
for him. He's had his ass kicked two or
three times, but each time he’s dusted
himself off and kept on going. Most of
the people who change industries are
characters. Mike is one of our industry's
true pioneers.”
Matthews’ projections for New
Sensor’s future? True to form, he replies
simply, “Rock ’n’roll.”
THE GUITAR MARKET
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