El Rey FX loves Fuzz pedals. And we can’t disagree at all. Recently The Guitar Knobs Podcast were joined in our studio by Jimmy Nelson, the founder of El Rey FX– the guitar pedal company he founded in Cincinnati, OH. He surprised us before the interview with a box of pedals to play with that were damn good. Good enough in fact that Guitar Player Magazine gave his top pedal, the Fuzz De La Muerte as an Editor’s Pick Award. Jimmy makes some other great pedals as well each with a great bit of wit and a ton of great sound. There is the Op-amp style Lucha Fuzz with controls such as “Headlock”, “Grapple” and “Pile Driver”. There is also the tremolo aptly named the Chicago Typewriter which is a 1930’s slang term for a machine gun. El Rey also makes an overdrive/fuzz called the Mystic which looks like an Ouija board and has two controls– yes and no. It is this clever bit of wit that first got us interested in El Rey FX without even having heard the pedals.
Jimmy Nielsen is west coast dude who found his way out to Cincinnati in the heart of America, Ohio. He started out with a homemade boost pedal that got shoved in a drawer somewhere and forgotten about. A friend asked if he could have one like it years later. Then another friend, and another and the rest is history. He has what he calls a “big boy job” so he is not a fulltime builder and does not have a large team. Yet somehow he has managed to get quite a bit of exposure and now sells almost solely through retailers. The big boost he shared and we as those part of the guitar community all acknowledged was being able to have a presence on Reverb.com. Thanks to that site we all have access to far more awesome gear from “small guys”.
There is nothing small about Jimmy Nielsen. He is a big hombre with a big personality and and even bigger sense of humor so he fit right in with us. We spent our usual hour and then some talking guitars and pedals and having a lot of laughs but really focused on his story. We find that the back story on the makers and players we interview is just really damn interesting and that has been at the heart of our podcast. He shared with us some of the pedal ideas he is working on but said that it was not about getting a pedal out there in a regular cadence. El Rey Fx finds it to be more important to take the time to hone the sound he is looking for and keep tweaking until he loves it.
As the show wrapped Jimmy was kind enough to bring us some El Rey FX swag and we gave him some of ours, which felt like sort of a tribal guitar ritual thing. We felt obliged to feed big Jimmy since he made his way up to Columbus so we took him to Mikey’s Late Night Slice, a favorite spot for the weirdos there in Columbus for some killer pizza, brews and some more laughs. Big thanks to our fuzztastic amigo from El Rey FX who you can check out at elreyfx.com.