About

Oddbird Audio is my passion project, as anyone who I've ever tried to rope into helping me will tell you. I have a Bachelors in Physics and a Masters in Materials Science from Montana State University, and for the last seven years I've been teaching myself all about tube amplifiers and audio electronics.

I've always been interested in circuits and guitar (and also computers and all sorts of nerdery), but it wasn't until the fall of 2019 that I got into tube amps. Since then, I've spent many hours prototyping and reading up on the subject. For an "obsolete" technology, there is still much to learn and many fascinating ways this can be applied to music and guitar for novel and interesting results.

I originally started with a 10-watt single-ended combo amplifier, complete with an effects loop and tube driven spring reverb. This was fun, but in retrospect was far too complex of a project to undertake as an initial product.

Eventually I reduced my ideas down to their simplest - a classic boost pedal. There's a reason everyone starts with this. Manufacturing is hard. There's about a million things to juggle, and marketing is only a small (albeit crucial) part of the puzzle.

I have about a half-dozen more ideas in various stages of development - a pre-amplifier, a starved-plate compressor/limiter/overdrive, two different push-pull output stages, and a discreet transistor based spring reverb. I hope to document many of these with how-to videos, and possibly even open source the design files from the prototyping phase.

I hope you like the things I make, because I certainly do. I've put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into each and every one of these, and I hope to make many more. With any luck, this is just the beginning.

So anyways, if you're reading this, it means something worked. Thanks for stopping by. Tell your friends :)