The story of JAM pedals!
How a hobbyist pedal builder from Greece got his pedals all around the world.
If you’re a pedal nerd you’d definitely have seen a few colorful boxes on many pedalboards that immediately grab your attention with their quirky designs. Most of the time, those pedals are made by JAM pedals, a company from Athens, Greece that makes guitar pedals for more than 15 years and has well established its position with its hand-crafted, hand-painted, and focused on every little detail pedals.
Since we’re both in Athens, Greece, I’ve had the chance to visit JAM’s custom shop and talk to Jannis Anastasakis who’s the founder of JAM and we had a great little chat about his story, how he got to building pedals for famous guitarists around the world, and his plans for the future of JAM pedals!
Jannis Anastasakis - Founder of JAM Pedals
Question: So Jannis, tell us how this whole project started.
Jannis: I started building pedals back in 2005, mainly for myself, and only a year in 2006, I started selling them to friends and a few shops here in Greece. It was in 2007 when I started participating in exhibitions abroad and that’s when I started selling my pedals to other countries besides Greece. The first exhibitions were in Italy and that’s where I met a famous Italian guitarist, Massimo Varini, who asked me to do a custom signature pedal. That led me to EKO which later became the distributor of JAM pedals in Italy. Due to that, I started selling a lot more pedals, and then after joining the Musikmesse exhibition in Frankfurt the company took off and started selling all around the world by 2008-2009.
Q: In 2005, with a lot fewer online resources about pedal building, how did you initially got involved in making pedals?
J: I was an Electronics Engineer student back in 2005 so I was quite familiar with circuit boards and electronics. I was also a guitar player so a friend suggested I should start messing around with pedals. Since I already had some electronics knowledge, I found schematics online, discussed them in online forums, and started experimenting. I trusted my ears on what sounded good and made a lot of tweaks and designs. I also started pedal designing and building around the same time Christos from Crazy Tube Circuits (another world-famous pedal company from Greece) did, so we discussed a lot about the industry. Once I started getting positive feedback about my pedals, I thought that I could maybe turn this into business so I created a website and started pursuing this more actively.
Q: What was the first pedal you made as JAM?
J: The very first pedal was the Rooster which is a treble booster, then the Fuzz Phrase, a germanium fuzz, and by 2007 we had around 6-7 different pedals.
Q: Nowadays, JAM is a very established & respected pedal brand for making analog, handmade pedals. In the past few years, the pedal & music gear market has blown up and everybody is competing over more features, digital control over everything, etc. but you still stay true to your roots and produce “simple & classic“ pedals and still have a place on the market. How do you do this?
J: Firstly, guitarists as a target group are a very different audience than synth enthusiasts and all-around producers. They are still looking for that “special” vintage sound that goes down to their guitars, tube amps, and, of course, pedals. And since it’s extremely expensive to buy a 70s vintage guitar or a 65’ original Fuzz or Univibe, we saw that gap and decided to faithfully recreate some of those classic circuits, like, for example, our Retrovibe pedal, which is a Univibe clone that sounds as close as possible to the original one. And to do this is not as easy as it seems, because it’s quite hard to find the parts that will make something that has the same sound. The thing that made JAM stand out from the crowd is the attention to all those little details that will make the best possible recreation of vintage tone.
Another thing that we deliberately do, is to try and make our pedals as simple as possible. We try to make them as compact as we can, even if the original inspiration is a chunky metal box, and also add only the absolutely necessary knobs for it to operate. Oh, and colorful.
Q: Yes, if you actually observe a pro guitarist’s pedalboard, you mostly see the simplest pedals possible. Few options that sound good and make their lives easier.
J: Exactly, since this is our main audience, we try to make the pedal reliable and easy to use in a studio or live session. No displays, no menu-diving, and a good sound. Even on our most feature-packed pedal, the Delay Llama Xtreme, where you have a few secondary controls, you can still use it as a standard analog delay which a few hands-on controls. And if you want to go deeper, you can, but again, without many controls to get you lost. You can tweak your sounds, then hold two buttons and save it as preset. We actively tried to make it a great & simple pedal for both the hustle-free guitarist & the one that wants to go a little deeper and explore some weirder sounds. And the Delay Llama is, as a series from 2007, one of our most recognized and best-seller pedals!
Q: Is the Delay Llama inspired by another pedal? And in general, how much is inspired vs original ideas?
J: Yes, our main goal was to make an analog delay pedal that sounded like a Tape Echo. And that’s why it has such a Lofi character. An analog delay can be as clean as you want it but we decided we wanted to make it Lofi to sound like a classic tape echo effect.
In general, when I first started, all of my designs were based on vintage pedals. Along the way, I started experimenting with those circuits by adding or changing parts to tweak them and make something new. There are times when I started with something that already existed and ended up making a completely different and unique pedal. And that’s the whole point. To just make a clone isn't something that we are looking for. We always try to give a few extra features and do some changes to meet our needs and expectations. But we also have some original designs like, for example, the Harmonious Monk, which is a 100% original design.
Q: So, let’s talk about the artwork on your pedals. I think you’re the only pedal company in the world that massively produces pedals and hand-draws every single one of them. After 15 years, you keep on painting every pedal even if you could just print the designs on your boxes.
J: Yeah, that started as a personal thing. When I first started making pedals, I did everything by myself, the design, the circuits, the soldering, and, of course, the painting. But as soon as the company grew bigger, I decided to hire an artist (Aggelos Kralis) to do the artwork on every pedal. My initial designs were a lot more abstract like a Jackson Pollock painting, but along the way, we decided to have some kind of branding on each pedal that stayed the same. For example, the Rooster has a rooster, the Llama a Llama, and so on.
But, to this day, we still have the option for custom designs on every pedal. We always accepted custom orders of all sorts and we try to do them all! Through the years, we’ve gotten so many crazy requests. Someone asked us to have his personal stamp collection on a pedal, a guitarist’s wife sent us a half-naked picture of hers to draw her as a pinup girl on a pedal to give as a gift to her husband, and we even had someone that wanted his marriage photo on a pedal (that was one of the few requests we didn't do haha).
Q: Have you ever thought of making some parts of the process outsourced and mass-produced?
J: I did, and for a company our size, I think we are probably the only one that still does everything by hand. We could print the designs but it’s just not the same. So, as long as we can keep doing this, we will stay true to it and make everything here. We paint, we use through-hole components, we assemble here, and we audio-check every pedal. There are almost 40 people working at JAM whereas in a similar-size pedal company that does not produce everything by hand, there are 10. But it feels nice to have people that share the same passion and are also artists, to have a job and that’s why I still love to have this production process.
And another thing that only JAM does, is that we also do custom-builds with lots of pedals in one box. Anyone can order a custom pedal with any number of JAM pedals on it and we can build it for them. That’s especially convenient for touring artists that can only take one pedal & one power supply and have a whole pedalboard with them.
Q: So, what’s the future of JAM pedals? What are the pedals you want to add to your collection?
J: We have a ton of plans for the future! There are a few different types of effects that we don’t produce and would love to create. A Reverb pedal is currently in an R&D phase, an Octaver, a Ring Modulator, and a Flanger are some of our plans for the future.
Q: Any thoughts on adding digital parts to your pedals?
J: I’m not against digital pedals at all. The only thing that I don’t like is when digital pedals try to sound like an analog pedal. Digital pedals have certainly caught up and some of them sound very close to an analog one but, to my ears, analog pedals still sound better. I haven’t heard a digital delay, chorus, filter, fuzz, etc. that sounds like an analog one. Digital components add a lot of flexibility and features but you lose on the sound which is far more important to us.
If you embrace a pedal’s digital character and don’t try to imitate an analog pedal, there is a lot of potential. But we still think that there’s a lot of ground for us to cover using analog technology with a few digital additions like Tap Tempo, Presets, etc., and we want to keep exploring the analog world.
Q: The pedal market has grown so fast since 2005. What are your thoughts about the music gear industry becoming such a huge deal in the past decade?
J: So many things have changed from when I started. There are a lot of hobbyist musicians nowadays that drive the market and love experimenting with pedals, synths, etc., and since music gear is much more accessible today more and more join. When the pandemic started we thought that we would have a big drop in sales because musicians stopped going to the studios and stopped touring but we were surprised to see that we doubled our sales during that period.
Professional musicians also tend to stick to a certain type of gear for a long time. If it’s working for them, it’s hard for them to change it. But hobbyist musicians tend to buy and sell gear on a regular basis. They are up to date with new releases and they want to try out more stuff. They are a big part of the industry and probably the reason the market blew up!
Q: What’s your favorite JAM pedal and what’s your favorite pedal from another company?
J: My favorite effect is the delay, so I’ll have to go with the Delay Llama Xtreme. This was an innovative pedal for JAM with all those extra features and since I like to play experimental, avant-garde music, it’s my favorite one.
From other builders, I think it’s the Boss 505 Loop Station. It has a few built-in pedals, and a lot of channels for looping, so only with that and my guitar, I can create so many layered sounds. But, to be fair, since it’s more of a utility pedal, as an effect pedal, I recently started playing again with ring modulators so one of my favorite ones is the Ring Stinger by Lovetone!
Q: What’s the biggest reward you got from making this for so many years?
J: My biggest reward is definitely seeing my pedals used by artists all around the world. Having artists that I personally loved using my pedals is such a huge reward. Artists like Bill Frisell, John Scofield, Graham Coxon, Sonic Youth, and Blur, to name a few, had a JAM pedal on their boards and that’s so rewarding.
Although, the funny thing is that nowadays this doesn’t drive sales. People nowadays tend to trust more influencers, YouTubers, etc. on what to buy rather than acclaimed artists that tour the world playing music every day. In my mind, if you like a certain band or artist and you are trying to make similar music to them, the obvious thing to do would be to check out what they’re using and get this if you want to sound like them.
And the best compliment I get for our pedals is that JAM pedals are musical. Musical in the sense that they inspire you to play music and have a lot of soul inside of them!
A few final thoughts by Sinesquares
Meeting Jannis and the JAM team for this interview was such a pleasure. And it’s really inspiring to see a local company succeed in this crazy market that seems to have taken the corporate capitalistic route in the past few years. JAM is a company that stays true to its vision and respects its craft and customers. They could compromise on many things during all those years but decided to keep on making pedals exactly like they wanted in the first place without sacrificing the quality and hand-made character of their brand.
If you have a chance to try out some of their pedals, just do it. You’ll certainly hear the impact of a true analog hand-crafted to your tone and you’ll fall in love!
Spoiler alert: A full review of the Delay Llama Xtreme is coming soon on our website so stay tuned!
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