About me
Bought my first real effect when I was 15 or 16, so that must've been at the end of the eighties of the last century. It was an Ibanez MT10 Mostortion. Not sure why I bought specifically that one, I think because it was on sale at Timmer Muziek for like 120 Gulden which is something around €60. It sounded great with my cheap Avora amp and when I got myself a Marshall JCM900 half stack it sounded great too. I even bought a spare one on eBay for I think €90. Then I switched to old London City DEA130 amps, tried some other drives and distortions (TS9, Fulltone Fulldrive 2, MXR Distortion+, Zoom PD-01) but I kept going back to my good ol' Mostortions.
The London City amps are amazing but unfortunately they can be very unreliable. At a certain moment my second spare broke down while the other spare and my main amp were already at the amp tech. That's when I decided to buy a new and reliable amp and settled for a custom made Kool & Elfring Straight 8 with plain tolex. Again the Mostortions, one as a drive and one as a distortion, just ripped on that amp. Currently I'm using them on a Vox AC30 and the Vox just eats them like cake. So they've been my staple for more than 3 decades now.
When it comes to other effects than overdrives and distortions I'm not that adventurous. It's basically just delay (Boss DD-5), some reverb (EHX Holy Grail), an octaver (EHX Octave Multiplexer) and a fuzz (Big Muff Ram's Head clone). Got some choruses, phasers and loopers but they didn't make it to my current pedalboard. I've played around with digital effects a lot but I just prefer the sound and feel of analog effects.
My first efforts with building my own effects started around 2007. I tried cloning a Coron Distortion 10 (which I dubbed Aifa 10), designed and etched my own PCB, boxed everything up and… nothing. Hugely disappointed I stacked the effect somewhere. 11 years later when cleaning up I stumbled upon the effect again, dusted it off and with my improved soldering skills and better equipment I decided to check all soldering joints. To my amazement the effect just worked. So I said to myself, you know, you can do this! And I picked up building my own effects where I left it 11 years before and here we are now.
Enough small talk, my name's Jeremy and I go by the handle of autostatic on the interwebs. I've been very active for the Linux Audio community, helped out one of the first commercial endeavors that emerged from that community (MOD Devices) only to realise that I'm much more an analog guy. Got two kids, live in the beautiful town of Beverwijk (some might consider that a contradictio in terminis) in The Netherlands and I'm a DevOps engineer by trade. Oh yeah, I also play guitar and sing in a number of bands, currently Ride The Fader and Classic You!.
