BRITTON WETHERALD: So I'm sitting down with Mike Matthews of Electro-Harmonix who [SOUNDS LIKE] has since been basically the guy that goes to you for tone as far as I'm concerned, and I just wanted to just go to sit down and talk with him for a second. Thanks again for sitting down with me.

MIKE MATTHEWS: My pleasure.

BRITTON WETHERALD: I just wanted to ask you. When did you start making pedals?

MIKE MATTHEWS: Actually, I started making pedals in 1967, and I founded Electro-Harmonix in October of '68.

BRITTON WETHERALD: What possessed you yo do that?

MIKE MATTHEWS: Well, like most of us in the industry, I was a musician and in the early '60s I was a pretty good keyboard player, really heavy early-60s R&B, you know, real good funky groove.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Yeah [INDISCERNIBLE]

MIKE MATTHEWS: And then when I graduated college, I had a straight gig. I was a salesman for IBM, and but with the music bud in your blood, you know, you just don't get it out so I wanted to quit IBM, go back, take another crack to make it big, and, you know, become a rock & roll star. So, but I was married and my wife -- my ex-wife, she was kind of conservative, so I figured I got to make a little pile of money quick for her so she was driving me crazy and you know like, "What's going to happen now that you're, you know, a starving musician?"

So, this was around '67 or maybe it was '66 and it was at this time the Rolling Stones had their big hit, "Satisfaction," and everybody wanted to have a fuzz tone and they couldn't build them fast enough. This guy on the music street at that time in New York, 48th Street, he repaired all the amps. He said, "Mike, I got...," you know like, "...my own custom circuit. Let's build together." So I said okay and I got a contracting house to build pedals and made a deal with Guild Guitars, and then this guy disappeared on me, and I was just all alone making these pedals, so the founder of Guild Guitars, Al Dronge -- by this time Hendrix had made it and was real hot, you know. By the way, I was friends with him before. He said that we were best friends when he was Jimmy James.

BRITTON WETHERALD: Oh man.

MIKE MATTHEWS: That's a whole story in itself, but so he wanted to call these pedals Foxy Ladies, so I bring to them Foxy Ladies, this place I made them, you know, I'd been working in IBM and then every once a week or every two weeks, I'd go over and pick up a few hundred pedals, drive them out to Guild, they'd write me out a check. Now, at this time, Hendrix was hot, and everybody wanted to now sound like Hendrix which was just like a distortion-free sustain, you know, the way Hendrix would just vibrate his finger and would just go so supple and loose it's sustaining. Ao from my colleagues at IBM, I met this guy who's brilliant, one of the greatest inventors, Bob Myer, from -- [SOUNDS LIKE] Where was he from? -- from Bell Labs, and he -- I told them, "Look I want to make a distortion-free sustainer," so which, you know, which was not an easy thing, especially in those times because you can sustain the signal when you build it up. The problem is when you play a new note, all of the sudden you have that high gain, a new note comes in, and it's a loud, popping [MIKE MATTHEWS IMITATING THE SOUND], so how to sense it fast or cut it down fast before you even hear it? That's the tough part.

Anyway, I went out to look at one of the prototypes, check it out, and I wasn't a guitar player. I would just bring out this guitar and just pluck on one string, and yet, in front of this box, this big box, was a little box plugged into it so I was just saying, "Bob, what's this little box?" He's just, "Oh. Well I forgot that the guitar you have only puts out a much smaller signal," so I put a little booster to, you know, so I have enough gain feeding the sustainer circuitry. So I tried that and then I tried to switch on this little box, and all of the sudden it was as loud as hell. And remember, this was mid 1968, and in those days only amps, you turn them up to 10 there's no distortion, no overdrive, and it's like if you can keep turning them off to 20 or 30 then you start to get like distortion. So, I said, "Wow! This is good. What's in this?" There was only one transistor, so that was my first product for Electro-Harmonix, and I left IBM.

I never did start to try make it again as a keyboard player because I got so involved in making the pedals. And in fact, at the first trade show I went to, in those days it was Chicago, everybody was waiting in line to hear this guy selling these little things out of the bag from 10 to 15 bucks, and one of them happened to be Hartley Peavey, and he wrote in his -- in a lot of his interviews, he said that he opened it up when he got back his room, he couldn't believe that it only had one transistor, and he incorporated that into one of his early amps and that became his first amp [SOUNDS LIKE] state with overdrive, and that was the product that shouldn't be an overdrive.