By Natasha Mekhail / Photographs by Darren Wolf
It’s easy to envy Ryan Clarke and Tanya Bach. They live in a cute house and sleep until they wake up, usually noon. After breakfast they head to the basement. A step from the workshop, Bach deposits Little Miss, their puppy, into a playpen full of chew toys. Clarke double clicks on a BBC sitcom. Bach chooses a couple reams of coloured vinyl. After a few sips of coffee, she sits down at a low table beside the vinyl cutter. He starts to work on electronic components. They can both see the computer.
Collectively, this guitar pedal-making duo is called Dr. Scientist. Friends and family didn’t get it at first. (“What’s a guitar petal?”) Even the couple, who live just east of Edmonton, had panic attacks, wondering whether their ultra-specialized niche business would pay the rent.
Guitar pedals add a little something to the electric riff. There are devices for distortion, chorus, delay, reverb. You name it. The standard fare is a painted metal box with knobs and a button to step on.
Dr. Scientist’s contraptions are different. A lot of love goes into these babies. Clarke, 32, studied electronics engineering, and Bach, 25, took sign- making. They met at a NAIT hangout where Tanya was a server. He played guitar, she did vinyl art. Their relationship got serious. So did the business plan.
“He thought the pedals needed something to make them look really cool,” Bach recalls. “Spray paint didn’t work.”
Using her vinyl skills, she created a theme for each pedal style. Sunny Day Delay looks the part with a white-picket fence and blue sky. The Cleanness has a bright retro print. The Frazz Dazzler bears their unofficial logo, a robot. They also do custom jobs: Bach designed an orca motif for one band and a ninja kitty for another.
As for the sound, sites like guitargeek.com sing the pedals’ praises and music mag SLUG declared Frazz the new fuzz. Pretty good for a company that doesn’t actively sell its product, and never has.
At first, Bach worked but Clarke lived on small business loans, getting his designs down and the website up. The site was tight. He had a flash animator create it as a space fantasy and wrote the copy in the persona of a cosmic mad scientist. He also posted plenty of meaty sound clips from the pedals. Their URL hit the big guitar forums and by its August 2006 launch, Dr. Scientist had 100 orders, some from shops in the U.S., England and Denmark. Now they fill hundreds of orders a month, each pedal selling for $150 to $250. Just like that, their biz went global. The question changed from “Can we eat?” to “How do we keep up?”
“We’re just so lucky,” Clarke says, gesturing towards Bach, the puppy and their blissful workspace, “to be doing exactly what we want to do.”
