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■BicmSl
Bernstein Funeral 1 lome liti.t Annual
Christmas
Rememberance Service
*
December 16, 2010
Special Music:
Reg Gattie and members of
Prince Ave. Baptist Church Choir
6:30pm
Rememberance Message:
Dr. Paul Baxley
Senior Pastor, Athens First Baptist Church
7:00pm
T here's an old cliche that the people
who make the amps, guitars and pedals
so thoroughly abused by modern musi
cians are former musicians themselves,
unmoored from their positions as players by
one abiding principle: If what they were play
ing didn't sound good, it couldn't possibly be
them that was the problem; it must be the
gear. That couldn't be further from the truth
in the case of Jason Roach. A genuinely mod
est guitar virtuoso (he took home first prize
from the 283 Shredfest last year), Roach is
unflappably amicable and persistently unas
suming, despite his talents on the fretboard
as well as the circuit board. After establishing
himself as a go-to fix-it guy for local musi
cians, he's now in the process of launching a
line of original pedals under the typically no-
nonsense banner of Roach Pedals.
Growing up in the middle of upstate New
York (which is another way of saying the
middle of nowhere), Roach began tinkering
with (read: destroying) anything he could get
his hands on at an early age.
"Toying with gear began pretty much from
the get-go, way prior to even being in bands,"
he says. "When I got my first guitar [at age
12], if something went wrong with it, I kinda
had to figure out how to fix it. Even prior to
instruments, [I was] tearing apart toys and
other things I had lying around. I had a weird,
neurotic obsession with figuring out how
things worked."
All of this was pre-Internet. By the time
that endless encyclopedia became a household
amenity, a 16-year-old Roach was moving on
to new horizons.
"I helped my friend build what's called
a tone dialer to steal phone calls from pay
phones," he says. "It was basically, 'what can
we tear apart and make fun and use to our
advantage?" At college, Roach met multi
instrumentalist Matt Kurz in the school's music
business program. The two formed the Gimme
Five, a sort of "dueling bass guitars" version
of Motorhead. It was around this time that he
started working at a music equipment shop.
"I started messing around with various
effects and things like that just from work
ing there. I would see what would happen if I
wired things up wrong—-that's when it really
started to take off."
A year or so after Matt Kurz moved to
Athens to further develop his one-man band
the Matt Kurz One, Roach, along with his
girlfriend Jennifer Weishaupt, realized they
"were kind of fed up with winter, so we said,
TA/hy don't we get out of the snow for a
while?'" A little while after moving to town,
Roach joined up with Mary Joyce and later
Adam Hebert to form tech-metal power trio
Maximum Busy Muscle, where his riff dexter
ity began turning heads, along with a bizarre
modification he'd added to his guitar. "It's
what's called an EMG afterburner, and it's basi
cally a clean boost that's miniaturized with
a tiny PCB mounted to a push-pull pot, and
when you pop it out, it's supposed to make
your signal boost up to 20 decibels," says
Roach. "I wired it so when it's off, technically
in the off position, it's actually on, so it's
always boosted a little bit and adds a little
clarity. But when I turn it on, it goes into a
feedback loop, so it self-oscillates, basically."
In English? "It sort of sounds like a theremin."
While playing around town ana working
at the 40 Watt, Roach noted the popularity
of boutique effects pedals: limited edition
stompboxes made by small companies like
Mid-Fi Electronics, Z-Vex, or Death by Audio.
With the backing of local producer Joel
Hatstat, Roach designed his inaugural piece,
an overdrive pedal. You've probably heard it
being test-driven around town: Reid Bateh .
of Bambara, Erica Strout of the Incendiaries,
and Brant Rackley of Japancakes are all trying
Roach's pedal out for size. Beyond the over
drive and a forthcoming retro-sounding fuzz
pedal, Roach says, "I'd like co keep it open to
doing custom stuff; that's kind of the idea—
to have people come to me and say, 'Hey, can
you do this?' and that'll be the modus for now.
"I saw what was being built was sort of
out of the price range for people, like, 'Here's
a S400 overdrive pedal.' And I was like, 'Well,
I can do that a lot cheaper and pretty much
do the same thing.' I mean, I play music, and
I can't afford that kind of gear, but I can put
that together and sell it for $150, and it's
pretty much the same thing. It won't have
the name on it that everyone would've heard
of, but [the idea is] just doing it and doing
it for working musicians—people who have
a service industry job—basically just helping
out people."
Jeff Tobies
Roach's band Maximum Busy Muscle is playing at Go
Bar on Wednesday, Dec. 8.
20 FLAGP0LE.C0M • DECEMBER 8,2010
ERICA STROUT