“Nathan [Navarro] is a bass player on the rise … When
his Skrillex cover video went viral, the Hot Hand-
controlled Envelope Filter and Wave Distortion became
go-to products for a whole new way of playing the
bass. We are now tied in with a new genre of music.”
—Will Cady, Source Audio bass product management
McAlack. “Unlike Line 6 or Digi Tech,
we are in a more boutique realm where
it is all about analog—sounding like
Hendrix, or the Stooges, or whoever.”
Again, Remignanti weighs in. “You
design it and think it is a cool thing that
people will be into—we think of musi-
cians as artists, and artists are usually
forward thinking and experimental—but
it initially proved to be just the opposite.
Guitarists tend to be very conservative
and take a long time to come around to
an idea like this.”
The company has also struggled with
issues once faced by Electro-Harmonix:
Some customers have expressed a concern
that the units were too big and that the
housings didn’t appear to be roadworthy.
The first quibble was hard to argue with.
Players who wanted to add the original
Hot Hands to their pedalboard would
have to lose three or four smaller ones to
do so. Even the smaller Soundblox series
requires a hefty chunk o f real estate. But
the second concern about toughness was
purely one of semantics. Though the
housings are plastic, there is nothing deli-
cate about the type Source Audio uses—
they say they’ve literally driven a car over
these cases to no ill effects.
Even so, with the Soundblox 2 series,
the company has addressed both issues:
They now have metal cases that are half
the size—and yet they still somehow fit
more controls and switches than previ-
ous models. “A lot of it is fashion,” says
Remignanti, “just changing the knobs to
black makes it look more traditional.”
The company has had to accede to
the demands of the market in other
areas, too. For all its brilliance, the origi-
nal Hot Hand was tethered to the pedals
by wires, restricting hand and arm move-
ment and limiting the ability to control
