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Interview: Tonerider

Guitar effects pedals for the workin’ band - By Morgan, Aug 04, 08

Based in China, Tonerider designs and manufactures electric and bass guitar pickups, and offers a custom line of effects pedals. We talked to one half of the duo behind Tonerider, Brad Ferguson, who is responsible for designing and building their line of guitar effects pedals: American Overdrive, British Distortion, Super Lush Chorus, and a Compressor.

SmartShanghai caught up with Brad to talk about the Tonerider company, their line of pedals, and towards the end, more general tips and strategies for buying guitars in Shanghai. Also in tow was our guitar-playing friend Johnny, who was down to nerd-out with guitar gear-head speak and drink cheap beer.

Apart from a look at what Tonerider is doing, there's some good info in the interview if you're looking to buy a guitar in Shanghai.

Incidentally, this interview was done at Windows Underground before Brad’s recent falling out with the owners there (he used to be the manager there), and as such, contains no juicy gossip dealing with that...

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Brad: So Tonerider was actually started by a guy named Andrew Cunningham -- a British guy living in Beijing and Shenzhen before that, and he was hand-making guitar pickups. Quite a few of the musicians in Beijing used pickups that were made by him. That was in 2003 when Tonerider started. And eventually he turned that into a real manufacturing line with several types of pickups and stuff. Last year he uh... you’re going to edit this to make me sound coherent right.


Brad: I don’t have to talk in complete sentences...


Brad: Okay, so I had been making guitar effects pedals for a long time off and on, and I have been doing some custom stuff -- one-off stuff in shanghai -- and I posted some messages on a DIY pedal forum, talking about some cool vintage stuff that I had bought in Shanghai. So Andrew saw that, and sent me an email: "hey, you’re in Shanghai making pedals, I want to do pedals," and so he came here to find me and we worked out a decent product line... We showed our first samples at the Shanghai Music Expo last year [Ed’s note: the Shanghai Music Expo is a yearly music equipment retail expo with suppliers from all over China], and shortly after that we went into production and we’re shipping all over the world now.


Brad: Right, so the two most popular ones are the "American Overdrive" and the "British Distortion." The American Overdrive is sort of the bluesy, gritty kind of sound. It works good on its own for rhythm guitar, and if you put it in front of a good tube amp, it can really drive the amp into overdrive and into distortion. It’s also good at a clean boost, so you can put this on the end of your pedal line for a solo or something like that. Or just to push the amp harder.

The "British Distortion" is more of a classic distortion sound... the difference between overdrive and distortion is kind of a technical thing to most people...


Johnny: Oh, I can’t wait to play in bands, man... wait are you recording this?


Brad: Yeah, there they are the same thing. They’re just different levels... in the guitar world, overdrive is mild distortion -- you can still hear all the individual notes and you can play chords and they still sound kind of clean and shinny...

Johnny: Up to here is overdrive (turns nob on pedal to 5) and more than that is distortion... kinda...

Brad: Yeah, but each start getting their own grit as you turn it up... so they two don’t end up in the same place. The distortion pedal is like a heavy overdrive... and the overdrive is like a light distortion. But the reason why it’s called "British" is the classic sound of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Johnny: I’ve had a lot of amps simulated and it’s always you know... "British Distortion."

Brad: Right, British distortion… like ‘60s... so this one goes from like a mild crunchy sound -- 60s and 70s, and even up to the 80s -- and is good for a modern super sweet long sustain Santana kind of thing.


Brad: Mostly, what’s available in Shanghai is two things... the Boss pedals and the Beringer pedals. Boss is the industry standard: they make pedals that anyone can buy and use and they all sound okay. Its just they’re a bit generic... and the Beringers are basically copies of those.

What we try to do is distill the Boss thing down. Obviously we want our pedals to appeal to a wide demographic, but we want them to have their own signature sound. And you can hear the difference if someone is playing through a Boss overdrive pedal versus a Tonerider American Overdrive pedal.


Brad: Right, what I would say is 'boutique quality pedals for an affordable price.' Like right now, it’s not that big in China but in the west there are a lot of tiny companies -- one-man operations -- making hand-made pedals. Usually, they are clones of other pedals, maybe tweaked slightly, but they sell for way more. But what were doing is providing the quality you get from a small operation but applying it to a production line... they’re still put together by hand but we’re keeping them affordable.
Our price overseas is generally 99 USD.

We don’t have a distributor in China, but anyone who wants to buy them in China can contact me directly (500rmb).

So it’s an affordable... I don’t want to say "vintage"... but I guess a "classic" sound.


Brad: Oh definitely, right now we’ve got an overdrive, a distortion, a chorus, and a compressor. And with those pedals you can get pretty much make any sound from the invention of the electric guitar up to the ‘90s or so. Right now, we’re missing a few things that you would need for anything that you would want to do with a guitar.


Brad: Yeah, well, that’s something that we’re working on. I think the next big one that a lot of people are waiting for is the delay pedal... so yeah I’ve got a prototype for an analogue delay: 600 milliseconds of analogue delay in this package [holds up an overdrive pedal] at a reasonable price. Which right now is pretty much unavailable...


Brad: Yeah, it’s a self-taught thing. I started playing guitar when I was like 12 or 13 maybe. And I always liked to play with electronics and take things apart, and I had a magazine with a pedal schematic in it. So I don’t know, I was maybe 14 or 15 years old and I built a fuzz pedal, so that was pretty cool... and I did some other stuff like plug in my guitar to a tape player and messing with the levels to make that distort.

Anything I could do to make the guitar sound weird. I was never able to play it well, and I always thought if I could find that effect to make me sound cool, then I wouldn’t have to learn how to play.

But I learned a lot in the U.S. when I worked at an electronics company, so I had access to a really good lab, some cool parts, and some smart people -- so I learned a lot then and just started doing it...


Brad: Contact me directly over the website. Can you put my email address in? I’ve got one at brad@tonerider.com.


Brad: Yeah, there’s audio samples on the website. What’s the Shanghai angle on this anyways?


Brad: We’re registered in Hong Kong.


Brad: Yeah, well in Shanghai the main place to buy stuff is on Jingling Dong Lu, and there are tons of little shops, a lot of them have fake instruments, or a lot of them claim that "this guitar was made in the Epiphone factory but we got it cheap." But pretty much anyone selling anything cheaper than retail is selling a fake.

But some of the fakes are okay though. There’s nothing wrong with the fakes, but the main thing is to try out as many as possible, I’ve bough one of the cheap Squire Telecasters. And retail in Shanghai is around 800rmb, but I literally played about 20 of them, and they all look exactly the same. But I played 20 of them and then I found one that felt about right, and then I switched the pickups to Humbucker pickups and it became a decent guitar.


Brad: Yeah, well, if you’re just learning, you’re not going to want an expensive one anyways: buy something cheap, learn how to play it, and then upgrade later. But if you know what you’re doing... my advice is don’t be put off by the cheap quality of the first guitar you see, they’ve probably got a stack of them in the back, and one of them might be good. You’ve got to be your own quality control.


Brad: It’s pretty much all the same, but there are a couple place that I like more than the others... one of them is Best Friend Music -- it’s one of the big ones.


Brad: Yeah for anything, they are like the retail level. Like, don’t think that you’re going to get anything cheaper than you would in the U.S., but its decent quality stuff and it’s real.

The other one is... I don’t know the name of it. It used to be called “Blue Hand”...


Brad: Yeah, it’s all the way at the end past Henan Lu...


Brad: Yeah they do... it’s a small shop but on the second floor they have a practice room. They got some cheap stuff, but they’ve also got some really good stuff. Like a hand-wired marshal amp. Like nobody in china could ever afford to buy it but it’s there and you can play with it...


Brad: I used to only go there when the owner was there because he was a cool guy. And also this guitarist used to work there, the guitar player for a band called Sultans of Swing that I used to book. He was a cool guy and could get me deals.


Brad: Taobao. But also some of them can order stuff for you. But then again if they order something and you don’t like it you’re kinda screwed...

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Tonerider has distributors all over the world and you can also get their stuff in Shanghai through their webpage here. Head on over for more info on their product line.

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