Look Closely, & You’ll Hear New Haven

Donato Biceglia of Dual Stage Amplification has been making and repairing amplifiers, guitar pickups, pedals, and other music gear for years out of his Erector Square space. He’s expanding his business now by rolling out a couple new pedals, among them a compressor and a phaser, all embedded with New Haven-specific messages burned right onto the circuit boards he uses for his gear.

Look closely, and you see the messages in the circuitry: ​“Why the hell did we let Anna Liffey’s close?” 

Another reads ​“three cheers for Three Sheets,” ​“Bone Church forever” — referring to the New Haven-area band — ​“Stella Blues has surprisingly cheap Red Stripe,” ​“please don’t ask Jeff or anyone else at Louis Lunch for ketchup, it’s not funny,” ​“go to 91 Shelton for a good time,” and a picture of New Haven-area musician Freddy Kaiser. 

Finally: ​“wanna go to Cafe Nine and see literally anything?”

What Are Pedals?

Specializing in amplifiers and pedals may sound esoteric, but as Biceglia has discovered, it can make for steady work. 

Anyone who has gone to an amplified music show may have noticed an array of small boxes at the feet of the musicians onstage. Those boxes are pedals; each of them creates an effect that manipulates the sound of the musician’s instrument, and they can be turned on and off with switches the musicians hit with their feet, which allows the musicians to change the sound of their instruments on the fly during a performance (think about an electric guitar that goes from sweet and gentle to loud and raucous in an instant). 

Some musicians have only a few pedals; others have several pedals, all chained together with cables. 

Clever, creative uses of the effects the pedals allow have been responsible for some of the most beloved sounds in popular music, whether it’s the distorted guitars in classic rock, the crackly wah of 1970s funk, the polished sheen of the 80s, the crunchy grunge of the 90s, or — in the 21st century — the explosion of complex live effects that allow a handful of musicians to create sweeping soundscapes.

The ubiquity of pedals has made the amplified music world a playground as much for engineers and tinkerers as for musicians, pretty much from the moment musicians started regularly plugging their instruments into amplifiers. 

As early electric and electronic music gear was produced by a multitude of small companies, a certain consensus emerged, a technological foundation, that hasn’t changed much in decades. Music-gear makers tend to try to make everything compatible with everything else, using essentially the same cables, cable jacks, and power sources that have now been around for decades — even as the market remains relatively ungoverned. 

It helps also that for every musician seeking to replicate a classic sound, there are others trying make something they’ve never heard before, making the gear market as expansive as ever. 

“To this day, it’s still the Wild West,” Biceglia said.

Some of the first pedals didn’t have circuits in them, but circuit boards have been part of pedals since the beginning, because the engineers ​“wanted consistency” and ​“speed for them to go together,” Biceglia said. The complexity of circuit boards, however, has changed, as much live music now involves integration with electronic instruments and other devices. Analog and digital devices must work together, and analog and digital effects work together side by side. Within some modern effects boxes, analog and digital controls are in the same box.

“Everything is a building block,” Biceglia said, and ​“not every building block is the right one for you. It’s a matter of trial and error. But I want to lower the barrier to entry.”

Black Boxes

As musician David Thomas of Pere Ubu once said, ​“rock music is about moving big black boxes from one side of town to the other in the back of your car.” He could have said ​“big and little” and been just as accurate. Biceglia does both. A guitarist himself, he started off working with tube amplifiers as a teenager, and moved into other types of repair, first out of his garage, then from a Monroe storefront, then from a space above Space Ballroom, and finally from his current spot in Erector Square. 

“It’s what I grew up doing,” Biceglia said. As he contemplated starting to build pedals as well, approaching effects from ​“amplifier point of view gave me a very different understanding of what I wanted to do. I repair amps for a living. I sell amps for a living. It would be foolish for me not to do this as well.” His pedals are ​“my take on classic things” and ​“what I think would be helpful to players.”

He started out with three pedals — a phaser, an overdrive, and a tremolo pedal — but is now rolling out a new line of pedals, including a compressor.

“A compressor is a device that will limit the transient response of sound to a predetermined amount and will not allow you to go above it,” Biceglia said. In the simplest terms, it puts a cap on how loud something can be. Compressors are a ​“compensatory measure,” as Biceglia put it, in the chain of other effects musicians may put on their instruments, other pedals they may be using, that might make the signal too strong and create unintended distortion. 

With a compressor, ​“you’re fixing an issue,” Biceglia said. His compressor ​“will limit to a threshold. I wanted to make it this way because it’s exceptionally quiet. There’s no hissing, pumping treble noise. I had been unhappy with some of the circuits I’d been putzing around with for a while, and it had begged the question: should I try and develop something? Because it takes tons of R&D. I decided ​‘hey, why not?’ So I did.”

Biceglia’s customers shared his dissatisfaction with some of the compressors on the market. But he had positive role models as well. ​“I had done a repair on an amplifier for someone that had a compressor built in, and I was enamored by it. It was well-designed, it was well-integrated.” He examined how it was done, and went down a rabbit hole of ​“certain compressor types, certain compressor architectures” that had been developed since the 1960s, when compressors first hit the market. He wanted to make something that had a ​“modern heart” but a ​“vintage feel” while also being ​“very easy to use.” This required building from up-to-date circuitry that was more difficult to work with but ​“dead quiet,” Biceglia said. ​“I fell in love with it.”

It took him about two years to develop the compressor pedal he had in mind. ​“I’m constantly doing board revisions” and ​“prototyping,” he said. He makes one model after another, tweaking designs and trying them out. The prototyping is essential, but ​“there is math and there is reality,” Biceglia said. ​“Just because the math says it’s fine, that doesn’t mean it’s going to sound or feel good to the player.” Biceglia plays guitar, but he’s just one musician; half of developing prototypes is ​“getting them into people’s hands” to try them out, ​“which I’ve thankfully done, to say ​‘give this a shot. Give me your notes. Tell me what you think.’ ” That lets him figure out what other controls musicians might want on the pedals that allow them to better craft their sound.

The phaser pedal, meanwhile, took about eight months to develop. Biceglia liked the technology in existing phasers but ​“didn’t want to make a clone, because that’s silly.” He experimented with different ways of designing a phaser that is ​“pleasing in all ways, because you have to cater to a bunch of different things,” from ​“very light funk work” to Parliament-style ​“big whooshy sounds. It has to be able to do both.” His phaser offers four controls that let musicians dial in a sound from subtle to grandiose. At its most subtle, Biceglia said, ​“there’s no vowel to the phase — it’s a bunch of ooohs and ohs.” At its maximum settling, it gives the ​“high treble sweep” of psychedelia and deep disco. Another switch allows musicians to turn it on and off fast.

But Biceglia also makes sense there aren’t too many features. ​“I would never assume that I know all the end uses” for a specific pedal. ​“I need to be able to accommodate the widest uses, while not being a Swiss Army Knife.”

“At the end of the day, these are tools,” Biceglia said. In designing both pedals and amplifiers, ​“I don’t like the super new artistic way of doing things.… What it says is what it should do,” and musicians should be able to work the pedals easily, ​“until it feels good” to play. ​“You shouldn’t have to have an owner’s manual. You should just know what it is.” He wants musicians to be able to pick up his effects boxes and think ​“what does this do?” — and then quickly play around with it until they get a sound they like. He’s aiming for ​“bulletproof” and ​“easy to use,” ​“reliable,” the kind of thing you can ​“throw in your bag, and off we go.”

Keeping It Local

Biceglia is expanding his local footprint as a business at an interesting time for music retail. Large music stores, like Guitar Center and Sam Ash (which closed its New Haven location last year), are ceding ground to online suppliers like Sweetwater. A few smaller instrument shops remain in New Haven County — violin luthier Kevin Chapin in New Haven; Brian’s Guitars in Cheshire; Youngblood Guitars in Guilford — but they are ​“fewer and farther between” than they once were, Biceglia said (RIP Foundry). 

But they, like Dual Stage Amplification, have what Biceglia is offering. ​“I want people to be able to come here, test what they need, take what they need, get outfitted in one place, and say they’re good,” he said. So far, he has been rewarded. ​“Sales are remaining steady,” Biceglia said. He sells his products through online dealers, through Brian’s Guitars, and through his website. 

But look a little deeper, and Biceglia’s customizations get more than individual; they get personal. He named one pedal after a customer’s daughter. And though he sources most of his parts from various manufacturers in the U.S., he even has included local customizations in places where only he and a person on the other end of a supply chain might see them.

In addition to the messages about Stella Blues, Anna Liffey’s, and Cafe Nine, one circuit board is full of those hot takes about New Haven’s apizza. ​“Mashed potato bacon is just as New Haven as the white clam. I know what I said,” reads one message. 

Another: ​“Pepe’s > Modern, except for their sausage calzones.” 

And another, that speaks to something larger: ​“so glad I designed this during a global semiconductor shortage, cool.” 

The world of music and electronics is full of uncertainty, and Biceglia has story after story about the complications and vicissitudes of supply chains, for circuits, vacuum tubes, and other component parts. But with the support of a community of musicians and studios that know and respect his work, he keeps going. It’s not just the music, but the hands that make it.

To learn more about Dual Stage’s products and services, visit its website.