5 Boutique Stompbox Builders You Should Know
Mad Professor
Finland’s Mad Professor company is just eight
years old, but in that time the company has
built one of the most extensive lines of pedals offered by any small-scale, independent
stompbox maker. The company is effectively
a partnership between founder Harri Koski,
amplifier specialist Jukka Monkkonen, and
electronics genius Bjorn Juhl, who designs
the company’s pedals.
Koski started Mad Professor after his experience operating Custom-Sounds, a company he founded in 1996 to distribute high-end guitar gear in Finland. Custom-Sounds
was also one of the first online boutique
dealers in Europe, and had a web shop up
and running by 1996. But for all his love of
boutique and vintage gear, Koski was still
frustrated with the limitations of much of
the gear he was hearing. Meeting fellow
tone obsessive Juhl led to creating the Mad
Professor CS- 40, the amplifier that put the
Mad Professor brand on many guitarists’
radar. Since then, Mad Professor has built
a roster of 12 stompboxes that includes
three flavors of overdrive, a phaser, a fuzz,
an analog delay, a tremolo, and even auto
wahs for guitar and bass.
Juhl still masterminds most of the pedal
designs. He’s self-taught in the ways of
effects building but has worked with musical
instruments since the age of 16 and studied
electronics for 30 years—ultimately drifting
away from his electronic service shop and
into design of his own effects pedals and
products for Mad Professor.
“If I could have gotten the sounds I wanted
to get at the time, I wouldn’t have both-
ered trying to build stompboxes,” says
Juhl, recalling his earliest investigations of
effects. “Back in the late ’70s, I could look
at Electro-Harmonix, MXR, and Boss ped-
als, which are all still very good today. And
I also read the excellent book Electronic
Projects for Musicians by Craig Anderton.
But I learned by process of elimination, too.
I built little models of amplifiers to inves-
tigate exactly why certain things sounded
bad and removed everything that sounded
bad until just the good stuff remained.”
Like many of the builders profiled here, Juhl
rejects the notion that the best pedals have
been made—that the stompbox frontier
was conquered decades ago. Tones that
inspired him include Pete Townshend’s Live
at Leeds sounds, Billy Gibbons’ vast palate,
and the aggressive, monster grind of the
Sex Pistols. But he’s always on the lookout
for the ways in which existing pedals come
up short, and listening for sounds he can
imagine but doesn’t hear in the collec-
tive soundscape. “I’d actually say that the
biggest inspirations for me are the most
uninspiring sounds,” Juhl says. “I’m always
Harri Koski (above) and Bjorn Juhl started Mad Professor with the aim of building the ultimate guitar amplifier. The result was the original
CS- 40 pictured here. Resting atop it are (left to right) the Mighty Red Distortion, Snow White Auto Wah, Mellow Yellow Tremolo, Forest Green
Compressor, and Sweet Honey Overdrive.
trying to figure out why certain combinations of guitar and amplifier work, why
some really don’t work, and some work just
fine. Because you can change those things
when you’re in the know.”
So far, Juhl, Koski, and the rest of the Mad
Professor team have been successful in
uncovering the little differences that pique
the interest of a sizable number of tonehounds. Pete Anderson, Jerry Donahue,
Marc Ford, and Jim McCarty are just a
few of the players who have stocked their
quiver with Mad Professor pedals. And
94 PREMIER GUITAR NOVEMBER 2010
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