NAMM Show 2011: Daring Audio

By: Dr. Matt Warnock

I arrived at the Agile Partner’s booth slightly early for my interview with Collective Soul guitarist Joel Kosche, so I decided to take a look around at what they were showcasing at this year’s NAMM show. I poked my head around the corner of the booth and noticed a display of effects pedals, complete with headphones, sitting next to a man, who would turn out to be Darius Mostowfi, an engineer with Daring Audio who also worked on Agile’s AmpKit.

Anytime I see a rack of pedals laid out my interest is engaged, so I struck up a conversation with Darius, which ended up hooking me in as he told me about the company and their products, so much so that I was a few minutes late to my interview with Joel. Since our conversation was cut short that day, I made sure to stop by the following morning to catch Darius, which I was able to do along with Daring VP, Chris Rigatuso.

Both Darius and Chris showed me around the booth, and the very cool pedals that they had on display. Though the effects pedals are built and marketed towards bass players, as a guitarist I was impressed with their attention to detail, knowledge of what makes a great pedal great, and their vision of the future of the company. Almost made me wish I played bass. Almost.

Daring Audio’s Darius Mostowfi gave us a rundown of the company’s pedals and more in the following interview.

Daring Audio Pedals

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Matt Warnock: How did you launch Daring Audio and begin making bass pedals?

Darius Mostowfi: I met my partner and we identified a hole in the market. A lot of bass players were using guitar effects that really didn’t do the job, having to send them off to get them modified. We got together and started playing around with some set ups and that’s how it evolved. We found a hole in the market and designed the pedals to fill that need.

Matt: What makes your pedals different from other models on the market?

Darius: You know, we started from the ground up for the bass, with a total respect for the bass signal; the frequency, the high press packers that you encounter in the popping, slapping techniques that other pedals just don’t handle that well.

So the circuitry is designed from scratch with high head room, internal 18 volt adaptor, very high dynamic range and very unique aspects of the circuit that handle the bass signal better.

Matt: How do you make the mechanics work when you take a pedal and turn it into an App like AmpKit for the iPhone?

Darius: In amplifier modeling we look at the schematic, we do measurements on amplifiers and the stimulus signals and look at how they respond, essentially capturing the dynamics, the mathematics and those equations that refer to our core engine.

Daring Audio Green Laser Engraving

Matt: Will digital Apps ever replace physical pedals, and is that coming sooner or later?

Darius: If you play digital effects today you’ll find our engine for the AmpKit, and especially the Apple hardware, has the dynamic range and quality that exceed a lot of pedals on the market today. Especially the first generation ESP pedals. We’re definitely at the level of, and above the level, of the some of the physical devices out there.

Matt: All of your products are Green, why did you choose to go that way and how exactly are you a Green company?

Darius: When we decided to do this company and make these pedals, we wanted three things; to be green, use the latest manufacturing processes and not impact the environment as much as possible, as well as support the local economy. We have a group of companies that live in the Bay area that have been there since the Silicon Valley days, and so we’re supporting local machine shops and local paint shops.

We came up with a very unique process, working with a laser where we can etch our artwork onto the powder coated box in one or two minutes flat. It’s no waste, no paint, no drying and is very environmentally sound. It also gives it a very unique, cool look that’s very clean and very high tech looking, which is also part of the motivation there.

Daring Audio Pedal

Matt: Which pedals do you have on the market right now?

Darius: We’ve got four pedals right now in the initial launch. Two distortion pedals, one that was designed to capture a sort of mild distortion for players who are playing through a two-band breakup or speaker break up. It adds just a small amount of edge, almost an unnoticeable level of distortion, but it brings out the color in the tone. The other box we’ve got is over the top full blown distortion, good for metal players.

Then we have two fairly unique pedals, an edge activator we call The Spankster. It’s a combination especially cued for bass and also a high frequency harmonic enhancer, great for palm-slap, pop-style bass. And our compressor limiter is a two-slope compressor where, a lot of times speaker protection is important so you don’t blow your speakers, so we have a second threshold you can set as a limiter to not blow your speakers.

The unique part of this pedal is that we have a side-change shape control, where you can send separate frequency components to the protector and essentially let the compressor respond to different frequencies differently. For example, if you just want to send your bass part, you can maintain the high crispness of your bass and compress the low frequency to get a really fat sound.

On the flip side if you just get the high frequencies there, you can fix problematic basses where you’re getting a lot of clacking and you’re hurting peoples’ ears, you need to let the bass signal come through completely uncompressed. All our pedals have a very unique blend control where you’re able to cross fade or blend between the clean signal, bringing in the bottom end and a little bit of effect.

Matt: Now that you have the four pedals out, what are you focusing on for the future?

Darius: We’re focusing in on basses and there’s really a need there. We’re getting a great response. We hope to be here next year with several more bass pedals and we’re listening to bass players. What are the problems they’ve got? What are the things we can’t do these days? We’re working on answering those questions with our pedals.