Peddler Effects started from a simple problem: a pedal nerd got his hands on an Earthquaker Data Corrupter and wanted a resonant low pass filter to double down on synthy goodness, but the available options on the market were well beyond my budget, long out of production, or both. 

That moment – wanting a pedal that didn’t seem to be readily accessible – sparked my interest in DIY pedal building. If I couldn’t find it, could I make it? If I could make it, could I sell it to someone else for a price that I would have been able to afford? It took a few years, lots of learning and research, and some lockdown-induced project time, before Peddler Effects was born. That very first concept – a compact, reasonably-priced, easy-to-use filter pedal – is now here in the Barn Owl, and my other pedals emerge from the same curious spirit.

While Peddler Effects is a new venture, it also fits with a family history of entrepreneurial spirit and the joy of hand-crafting. I am named for my paternal great-grandfather, (Abraham) Pop Stein, who came to America from Ukraine sometime before the First World War and set up as a shopkeeper and merchant in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he married Grandma Annie (as my great-grandmother was known) and where my grandmother, Sarah, and her brother Buddy were born. Pop’s first store went under during the Depression, and in the course of starting over Pop moved the family to Mobile, Alabama, where my father was born and raised. 

Peddler Effects is not only an homage to Pop’s merchant career; it is also a tribute to his creative spirit. As my own father Murray, of blessed memory, recalled:

One day Pop decided he wanted to learn to paint pictures.  Off we went to the one art store in downtown Mobile.  He plunged right in, buying a whole box of oil paints—must have been two dozen tubes of different colors—and an easel, a fist-full of brushes, a pallet and a whole bunch of other supplies.  The storeowner gave him a few hints about mixing the paints and he was ready to get started.

He did create a few pictures—landscapes with azaleas, pictures of houses—none to write home to mother about.  But he really didn’t care.  The process of learning to handle the brushes was more important than the outcome.  More important to me, though, was his talking to me about what he was doing, how to mix a little linseed oil into the colors, why you needed to mix some white in with the color, how to thin the paint with turpentine, how to prepare the canvas boards.  I remember it all—cadmium yellow, cobalt blue, lead white, cerulean blue, onyx black, and on and on.

And he let me—no, I would say he encouraged me to—use his paints and supplies...  I don’t remember any pictures I made, but I still remember the way the paint and the linseed oil and the turpentine smelled.