BY ADAM MOORE
With the election of 2008 rapidly drawing to
a close amidst a financial crisis and national
uncertainty about our next move as a culture,
it seems that populism has become all the
rage, the en vogue form of political rhetoric.
Our presidential candidates criss-cross the
country, pacing in town halls and standing
on picnic tables, proclaiming Power to the
People! We’re told we now have the power
to change things, that we are in charge. The
elites are out; the average Joe is in. Wall
Street is railed against, Miller High Life is
cheaper than ever and Larry the Cable Guy
seems poised for a curtain call. It’s a strange,
strange world we live in.
For guitarists, the hilariously ironic thing about
this sudden outcropping of populist sentiment
is the fact that we’ve been taking power into
our own hands for decades. That’s not to say
that guitarists are all of a certain political disposition, but instead that we uniformly believe
in a certain way of looking at the musical
world. You have the power to construct the
tone you want; it literally begins in your hands
and your fingers. Still don’t like your sound
after mastering those hammer-ons and double
stops? Get your hands on a new guitar, a new
amp, a new stompbox. Don’t like the options
available to you? Create your own gear; start
your own boutique line. The only thing limiting your tonal exploration is your gumption
and drive.
It’s all part of a philosophy rooted in the ideas
of self-reliance and empowerment, and ulti-
FEATURE
mately a belief against any one, controlling
interest when it comes to your sound, whether
that be a corporation or a guitar tech. If
guitarists were to establish a platform, the
opening sentence might read, “People have
a right to good tone, unobstructed by ploys,
gimmicks or interference.”
All of which brings us to one of the industry’s
most recent monuments to tonal self-determinism, a small three-person operation
known to savvy players as Build Your Own
Clone—frequently referred to in its shorthand form, BYOC. Located in the small town
of Moses Lake, Washington and operated
out of a two bedroom house full of amps and
guitars, BYOC has been supplying guitarists all over the world with the ingredients
necessary to build their own pedals, supplied
in the form of anyone-can-do-it kits. As the
name would imply, the designs are all primarily “clones” of classic circuits, those sounds
that have long been sought after by guitarists but have escaped their reach due to the
acceleration of the vintage market in the past
few decades. From Fuzz Faces to the MXR
Distortion+, guitarists can purchase a kit at a
fraction of the price for an original or a boutique reissue (most under $100), pick up the
soldering iron and quite literally take tone
into their own hands.
And despite the fact that mega-corpora-tions like Microsoft and Boeing dominate the
area—Moses Lake is situated directly between
two of the state’s largest cities, well within the
hub of tech and aerospace innovation known
as the I- 90 corridor—BYOC has maintained a
comparatively simple existence. The company
exists with the company existing primarily
in the form of a pared down website and its
accompanying forum, providing everything
from a place to post kit development requests
to soliciting technical advice from other BYOC
devotees. Spending a few minutes on the
BYOC website leaves you with the impression that this is one of the most grassroots,
people-centric projects to emerge from the
guitar industry in years. And while he denies
any political/social angle to his business,
owner Keith Vonderhulls—an even-keel guy
who generally avoids self-promotion or hyperbole—does takes a certain amount of pride in
his product’s relative non-complexity. “I think
people are learning that doing it yourself isn’t
as hard as they thought it was,” he says from
his bedroom-turned-office. “It’s like baking
cookies—as long as you use the right ingredients and follow the recipe, it’s going to turn
out good every time.”
