What's This All About?: Hi, my name is Sam Lloyd, and I'd like to give a little background (okay, a LOT of background) on my journey to this point. I think it helps to be able to understand how I got to the point I've arrived at today, and to see that my venture into producing pedals is just a natural extension of the interests and fascinations that have guided me since I was a kid. That being said, feel free to skip over the story if you couldn't care less whether the inspiration for my pedals was the result of an alien abduction interrogation session, or just some scheme I devised to make my first billion. Hint: I believe it's neither, although I sometimes wonder (as I'm sure others in my life have, too) about the alien thing.

When I was Young: I developed an early interest in electronics. When I was a kid I'd lay awake at night listening to the AM radio that was built into my older brother's  Lloyd brand phonograph (what a piece of crap! But then, consider the brand name). There wasn't much in the way of radio stations locally, but that was not a problem: Super-stations WLS in Chicago, and WOWO in Ft. Wayne, IN were loud and clear, at least sometimes.  Because of the nature of AM radio, the signals would be so strong one minute that they sounded like the transmitter tower was just across town (I'd later discover that the phenomenon of ionospheric "bounce" was responsible for this seemingly impossible feat). In seconds, though, the signal would fade to the point that I'd find myself hunched over the radio, face scrunched, and ear turned toward the speaker as I finessed the tuning knob, trying desperately to get the signal back. The signal would return, as strong as ever, and the process would repeat itself every few minutes until I finally fell asleep for the night.

Not long after that, I discovered that by fooling around with the innards of an AM radio I received from an uncle one Christmas, I could suddenly receive AM broadcasts from remote and exotic foreign lands! I didn't know exactly why or how, but when I  stuck a screwdriver inside those square metal cans inside the radio, I suddenly heard some guy speaking Spanish. Even though I had no second language skills I could pick out enough from these broadcasts to realize the signals I was hearing were traveling all the way from Cental America and Cuba.

To this 8 year old, that was some pretty amazing stuff. My dad explained that what I was hearing was called "shortwave", and that there were other radio stations, all across the globe, transmitting similar broadcasts.  When my next birthday rolled around I knew where I was going with the loot: Radio Shack. They had an incredible 4-band shortwave (DX-40?)for $29.95, and it was going to be mine. And so it began.

Also around this time, I discovered the magical world of guitar: A friend's older brother had a garage band, and occasionally they'd interrupt their renditions of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple tunes -and other hits of the day (after all, this WAS the mid '70s)- to partake in the obligatory "smoke" break. That was our cue to grab the drumsticks and picks, and strap on the old Silvertone (the black one with white accents and lipstick tube pickup), plug into the Fender stack, and wail away. Actually, the "wailing" consisted of randomly picking strings above the nut, resulting in a noise that, under the right circumstances, almost sounded like some kind of pseudo-oriental melody. At the time I probably thought it sounded like the sitar from Steely Dan's "Do It Again". Later, I realized it just sounded like crap. But that's okay, because we were having fun!

Back home, my interest in audio recording was already beginning to rear it's ugly-timbred head. I'd hook up the output of my shortwave radio, along with an "Electronic Organ" (aka a simple oscillator circuit, compliments of my beloved Radio Shack 150-In-1 Electronics Kit), to my mom's cassette recorder and press "record". Most people didn't get it, but for some reason I found great pleasure in the process of superimposing one sound over another, no matter how unmusical the result might be. I just enjoyed fooling around with all the "stuff".

We Don't Need No Education: My amazement and intrigue with the wonders of electronics eventually led me to pursue a degree in electronics. While in college, I finally got my first guitar. It was a cheap, broken, dime store, piece-o-junk semi-hollowbody that a roommate had salvaged from a dumpster. After negotiating a trade for a Lafayette stereo receiver (complete with blown left channel) I finally had myself a guitar of my own! Not only that, but it was an electric!! Since I didn't have an amp I'd plug into my Hitachi boombox  or my stereo, almost immediately blowing the tweeters of my homemade speakers.  After a few weeks of blistered fingers, and a few months of abusing this fine instrument, I decided I had to have real guitar, so I sold my high school class ring for $60 to use as a down payment on a beautiful, brand new, black 1983 USA Standard Fender Stratocaster at the music store downtown. After a year of saving, scrounging, scraping, selling and stealing, I had paid the store the last of the $415, and the Strat was finally mine!

My first effects box was a Realistic Reverb/Echo (the one with sliders that seems made to tweak while playing). This hooked me on FX! Before long I realized I needed a way of creating rhythym and backing tracks, so I placed a Casio SK-1 Sampling Keyboard at the top of my Christmas list that year. My "studio" was growing, but lacking a multi-track, I improvised by recording one track at a time to a Teac stereo cassette deck, then bouncing those down to one track of a Pioneer stereo deck. Repeating the process, I could get get 2 or 3 guitar tracks, some bass, piano, and synth sounds before the noise floor  became unbearable!

Get a Haircut: After graduating with my B.S.E.E.T., I found work as an  electronic technician, which helped grow my knowledge of electronics, and gave me access to plenty of electronic components and cool equipment, and a chance to experiment with ideas for fun, new sound manglers during slow times. It was around this time I built my first original effect: Inspired by the guitar sound from the Smith's "How Soon is Now" I laid out a design for an electro-optical based tremolo. It was somewhat crude, but it did a great square-wave trem, and I still use it to this day. 

Before long I had saved enough to get my first 4 track, a Yamaha MT-100. Over the next few years most of my free time was spent trying to master the art of recording and mixing on this wonderful little box. I had picked up a few MIDI pieces for backing tracks, and then an Alesis HR-16 drum machine and MMT-8 sequencer. Wow! I was awed by the possibilities and was quickly addicted when I discovered that I could sync my MIDI tracks to my 4-track audio. By now I had picked up some second-hand Rockman modules (Sustainor, Echo and Chorus- yep, still have 'em),and an ART SGX-2000. With this setup I thought I could get any possible guitar sound known to man, and then some.

At this point I had begun to accumulate serious quantities of music gear. As I'd buy piece after piece of guitar, keyboard and MIDI equipment it quickly became apparent that I had a severe case of G.A.S. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome). I now had 3 guitars, 4 or 5 rackmount FX units, a few keyboards and synth modules and an Alesis 16 channel mixer. The next few years were spent buying more and better gear with every spare penny.

What's In The Box?: Strangely enough, with all the gear I had bought over the years I only had a couple of stompboxes, ione of which was an old Univox Super Fuzz. I had gotten it from a friend before I even owned a guitar, and had kept it all those years, not even knowing what it was. I finally figured it out thanks to a response from an inquiry on the alt.guitar.effects usenet group by the esteemed effect guru, Kate Ebneter. Discovering this seemed to spark a fire in me, and before long I was purchasing pedals as often as possible, many times on a semi-weekly basis. I also got interested in tube amps around this time. I had owned a '77 Fender Princeton Reverb for about 15 years, but besides that and a Sovtek MIG-50 I didn't have much else in the way of amps.

In a few short years my pedal count has grown from about 2 to around 200, and still growing. I've gone from 2 or 3 tube amps to somewhere around 30. I've got about 15 guitars, including bass and acoustics, and a banjo and violin. Why all the pedals and amps? Because I LOVE this stuff. That, and I grew tired of all the hype, B.S., lies, misconceptions and misunderstandings about the differences between various amps and effects. It seems like someone was always touting one pedal or another as the "Holy Grail", and I couldn't help but wonder if these claims were simply the result of a kind of placebo effect in many cases. I mean, I've been very enamored with the sounds of various guitars, amps, effects, etc over the years, and often concluded that, for the most part, they were all equally "good". However, I might prefer one over all the others at a given moment, for any number of reasons.

For this reason, I wanted to amass a collection of guitars, amps and pedals that would permit me to reach some sort of conclusive position on what is good, bad and ugly in the guitar world. I wanted to understand which distortion pedals worked well with which amps, and how great a role the guitar plays in the equation. As some people have claimed, is tone purely in the players fingers? Or is it more a function of the gear he uses? Or a combination of the two? I wanted to compare and contrast and learn what I like best, because if you haven't tried something how do you know it's better (or worse) than something else? Are there any absolutes, or is it all purely subjective?

Well, I haven't answered all those questions, but I have been able to verify some of the widely held beliefs, and crush a few myths, at least to my satisfaction. This big pallette of FX has helped me determine that there are some boxes that tend to be better "fits" for certain guitars/amp combinations. Even with a single guitar, amp, and distortion pedal there are enough variables to go from killer tone to crap, all in the same setup. Even so, there are certain rules of thumb that can keep things fairly predictable:

1. Chimbo Foo
2. Glof Nug
3. Frop Nee, and
4. Dlag Pon

If this makes no sense, then it's late on the east coast.