As with all great stories, the story of Wampler Pedals begins with Night Ranger. When he was a kid, Brian Wampler first fell in love with rock and roll while watching his older brother’s band practice “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me.” Ever since, he’s been a total gearhead, but the gear never quite seemed to match the sounds he heard in his head. Then, one auspicious day, a friend of his showed him a Boss DS-1 that he had modified with different transistors and capacitors. Brian was astonished at how different it sounded from a stock model, so he got on the internet and joined www.diystompboxes.com. However, he was disappointed to find that the forum had its fair share of elitist members who wrote exclusively in confusing technical jargon. So, Brian began studying electronics in earnest with hopes of learning key concepts well enough to simplify them into everyday language for the average pedal nerd.
Because Brian was spending a couple hours a day helping his fellow DIY stompbox enthusiasts, he decided to compile all his knowledge into an epic tome called How to Modify Guitar Pedals. Widely regarded as the pedal encyclopedia, Brian’s book inspired legions of builders to tinker and tweak and, eventually, build their own pedals. That’s exactly what Brian did once several of his fellow forum members commissioned him to build custom pedals. As word got around that the man who literally wrote the book on pedals was building original circuits, several shops asked if he’d build them a few pedals, and things snowballed from there. Though Brian’s original goal was to simply share knowledge and help some friends reach the end of their tonequest, the incredible demand for his product forced his hand. He had to start a full-fledged pedal company!
Ever since, Brian’s considerable ingenuity, creative prowess, and commitment to sterling build quality have made Wampler Pedals one of the biggest names in boutique stompboxes. With his exhaustive research and development process, it’s impossible to make a bad-sounding pedal. First, he comes up with the basic design for the circuit–a process that can take as little as a month or a long as several years. Then, Brian and his team test the circuit using a vast array of different guitars and amplifiers to make sure that it sounds good with any configuration. Then, they take the prototype to a gig to make sure it passes muster in a live situation–because we’ve all known the pain of finding a pedal that sounds great in the bedroom but gets lost in the mix live. Then, and only then, the pedal goes into production.
Once that happens, the process doesn’t differ much from the early days of Wampler: they build each pedal with love and care in order to uphold their sky-high standards for build quality. As a result, Wampler pedals are full of endlessly-inspiring tones, and they are dependable enough to handle even the most rigorous of gig schedules. We invite you to browse our selection of Brian Wampler’s creations and take one for a spin so that you can experience the genius of the man who wrote the book on stompboxes for yourself.
