Hello.
We have a new pedal available for preorder. It is called Big Time, and it is a collab with Chase Bliss. Go read about it here and come back if you want some more random thoughts and anecdotes. If nothing else, watch the minidoc because it beautifully encapsulates this slice of my life.
Big Time is a funny name. It’s a bit of a riff on things like “Prime Time”, or the fact that this pedal took a long time to make, but it also has a sort of riled-up whimsy to it. Like winning the lottery or being a champion at a sport. (There’s also that total banger of a Peter Gabriel song. So much larger than life, indeed.)
In some ways, we’ve been at this for six years. (Just the sheer number of haircuts in that minidoc, jeez.) The original intent to collaborate dates back to 2020. It took us a little while to develop a serious pitch, and things moved pretty slowly because of the pandemic. There was a bit of a false start where we pulled on a variety of disparate threads. We learned quite a bit about what we didn’t want, which in itself is a huge luxury. But once the final concept sunk in, we all got swept up in it.
The value of an extended development timeline isn’t about the literal time spent working. It’s about the gaps where you can pause, reflect, reinvent, brainstorm, follow tangents. We did all of those things. We collectively released a dozen or so products since we started, and bits of all of them influenced Big Time.
Designing pedals is one of my greatest passions in life. I’ll never take this one for granted.
Anyway, here are some thoughts and anecdotes, presented sans context or connective tissue. I might edit this to add more later on.
Joel gave us a truly staggering amount of creative freedom. On one hand it was an incredibly humbling gesture. On the other hand, a light touch meant that we were running purely off on my own unreasonable expectations and desire to impress someone I consider a luminary of the industry.
The culture of Chase Bliss is remarkable. Their playful exterior is the result of enormous hard work. And the staff is overflowing with musical talent.
This project meant I could spend nearly every day talking to Charlie, engineer extraordinare. We’ve been internet friends since before he started at Chase Bliss (dating back to the halcyon days of Gear Tumblr), but now he is one of my closest friends. Not only is he an engineering polymath, he’s also a devoted husband and father, a phenomenal guitarist, and a joy to have at a D&D table.
Speaking of D&D, I ran a session when some of the Chase Bliss folks came out to visit. (This one, to be exact.) You had to be there.
On the last day they were here in Boston, we had a marathon day consisting of an afternoon Red Sox game followed by a mini renaissance faire down the street from my house. There was sword fighting and pizza. The venue ran out of 0.5L mugs. It was pandemonium. It was one of the most fun days of my life.
Big Time contains ideas or circuit blocks from Sending, Clean, Halberd, Glaive, and at least 2 things I haven’t released yet.
As part of this we studied a few old rack units. Two standouts:
Lexicon PCM42: My favorite part about the PCM42 was throwing the limiter calibration out of whack and using it for hyper-compressed, disintegrating infinite delays. This was a big influence on Big Time’s Compressed state (aka “Blue Mode”) on Big Time. The X2 filter mode (steep brickwall at 10kHz) was also a highlight.
Ursa Major Space Station: originally made here in MA! Miranda and I restored one over the course of a few months in 2025. It was a spiritual influence on Big Time’s Cluster slider. Miranda cleaned what appeared to be a liquid spill inside, while I (after much wailing and gnashing of teeth) found a bad RAM chip that was causing the delay line to glitch.
I am weirdly proud of the name for #!&% mode. Other candidates (disintegrated, wrecked, melted) all felt a bit clinical. This injected just the right amount of whimsy onto the front panel.
This pedal is partly a love letter to my old circuit-bent PDS 20/20 that I’ve had since age 16.
We got to cross off a fun bucket list item of mine, which was making sounds at the Waterworks Museum here in Boston. Some of that is in the mini doc.
Zack at Chase Bliss (another lovely and talented human) made this instrumental album which includes some Big Time beta testing material. I’ve listened to it every day since it came out.
Anyway. I don’t even know where to put it all. Big Time is here now. I’m excited to make some music with it.
Thanks everybody.
-John
