Local Startup Hologram Electronics Wows Guitar Nerds With Innovative Effects Pedals

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In his cozy workshop in a North Knoxville warehouse space, Ryan Schaefer clicks a button on an effects pedal, plucks two strings on his guitar, and closes his eyes as the notes swell into one never-ending chord, hanging perfectly and unnaturally in the air.

“See, there—you just play a few notes and you have the soundtrack to a Herzog documentary,” Schaefer says.

The pedal is called Infinite Jets Resynthesizer, and Schaefer should very well be able to describe it: He’s spent months fine-tuning every blink and twiddle in preparation for the device’s official unveiling on Thursday. Retailing for $425 and likely to sell out its preorder offering within hours, the complex stomp box has the potential to be something of an event in the tight-knit but booming boutique guitar-effects industry.

“I don’t know what this one’s going to do, but people seem pretty excited about it,” Schaefer says.

Schaefer, the frontman for local noise-pop institution Royal Bangs, has reason to be confident. Infinite Jets is the second pedal available from his Hologram Electronics, following the Dream Sequence, a novel blend of rhythmic delay and octave that sold out limited-production runs throughout 2016. The unexpected response to that debut offering—also $425 a pop, with the quality and careful design to back it up—put Schaefer and co-creator Jason Campbell in a daunting position to meet demand.

“There was a lot of hype surrounding the pedal, and I think people perceived it as being very hard to get,” Schaefer says. “But it was really that we just couldn’t make very many of them at a time.”

By the time the Dream Sequence went on sale, in January 2016, Hologram had already moved into its own space. (Two years of research and development had left Campbell’s living room an unnavigable mess.) But the consistent response, including a year-end bump courtesy of niche YouTube listmakers, led to a crash course in full-scale business concerns.

Campbell and Schaefer hired a small staff (currently Teddi Kreutzberg and Blake Cass) to help build and ship the pedals. They enlisted an American company to pre-produce the pedal’s circuit boards, speeding up production and offering a better grip on quality control. And demand from influential resellers recently spurred Hologram to offer the Dream Sequence outside of the company’s own online store.

The evolution has enabled Hologram to ship nearly a thousand Dream Sequences into the hands of adventurous guitar players and producers around the world, including a number of notables Schaefer and Campbell decline to brag on. But despite the sprint, says Schaefer, demand has kept the pedal on about a one-month back order.

“So now we make way more of them, and it’s still kind of hard to get,” he says.

The expanded operation has, however, left its creators room to develop their follow-up, Infinite Jets. In fact, the pedal’s quick turnaround is itself the payoff of one of the first decisions the pair made for Hologram: to develop a stomp box template they could repurpose as necessary, and start off with their boldest possible vision.

“We came up with all these ideas about what we could do with it. Then Jason developed this hardware platform that, if it can do what the Dream Sequence can do, it can do all of the rest of it,” Schaefer says.

Plugging the mostly-assembled pearl-white pedal up to the one of the workshop’s many guitars, Schaefer gleefully shows off presets that instantly evoke the Radiohead or My Bloody Valentine guitar textures he’s spent the past months bending his software to match. But it’s the pedal’s key feature set, an endless sustain that grabs tones and seamlessly extends them, that Schaefer believes will find favor among musicians. While the Dream Sequence offers its own sonic frameworks, Infinite Jets invites performers to create their own from scratch.

“A lot of these ideas actually predate the first pedal, but we didn’t use them there because it’s kind of the opposite,” says Schaefer. “Dream Sequence is taking your playing and conforming it to its own rhythm, but the new one takes what you’re playing and completely abstracts it.”

At its most basic, the effect is, as he says, like something out of a finished film score. If that’s not intriguing enough by itself, Hologram will be releasing an extensive demo video as soon as the preorder is live. Just keep in mind that the first batch may be gone before you’re done watching.

Nick Huinker is fortunate to have spent the past 15 years living and covering Knoxville’s near-constant DIY music renaissance. Once a year he does his best to return the cultural favor as producer of the Knoxville Horror Film Fest; most of the rest of the time he’s of limited use.

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