Interview with Rockfabrik Effects

At Guitar Summit 2017, there were many boutique pedal makers from all over the world. Rockfabrik from Istanbul first got my attention with their awesome design and then with their distortion pedal Mind Abuse. Later I caught up with them for a chat to hear their story.

What makes your pedals different?

There are 2 branches in the effects pedal market: boutiques and mass producers. Although the designs of the mass production companies are successful, they use poor quality components in order to reduce costs. Boutique producers do not need to lower the cost of parts because they do not have high rate of production.

Our company is composed of an Electronics Engineer, a Mechanical Engineer and an Illustrator so, circuit design, mechanical design and visual design are all made with a lot of attention and produced with the best quality parts.

Tell me about my favorite one : “Mind Abuse” Distortion. 

Mind Abuse is a kind of amp-like distortion pedal, though we do not want to talk about this since it is seems so cliché lately…

It has 6 stages with 18 V operation and can reach higher gain levels than almost all of the distortions on the market.

We have several modes on the pedal. In the classic mode there is more boost on the mid-gain levels. Vintage mode is like overdrive at low gain and medium gain levels. Modern mode is designed for 7-8 strings and dropped tuned guitars at high gain levels.
There is also a unique equalizer.

Will you make some other stuff? Like vibrato, chorus etc.?

Right now we're working on tremolo and delay and other modulation effects like delay/chorus that allow digital control. So although the effect is analogue, you can take advantage of the flexibility of digital control. But it will take some time to work on that.

And who is responsible for these awesome designs you have?

Our designs are made by Burak Şentürk. He has done work such as Spotify's Greenday documentary animations, Greenday concert banners and Nike advertising banners. We had the chance to meet him and I think that because he is a guitarist, we found we communicate on the same frequency. We always give him very tiring work; hopefully he’s not complaining. But we are very pleased with the designs that came out of it.

Rockfabrik Effects are a boutique pedal builder based in Turkey, currently offering distortion, overdrive, booster and buffer pedals. Learn more on their website, http://www.rockfabrik-effects.com