A garage, a forum and a self-taught designer.

Wampler Pedals is the company of Brian Wampler, a guitarist from Martinsville, Indiana. English Wikipedia dates the company to 2007, when it began trading under the Wampler Pedals name, and says the name became official in 2009; the company’s own website said in 2013 that it had “been around since about 2006, officially.” Before that, Wikipedia says, Wampler worked under the name Indyguitarist.

The roots are a hobby. In 2013 the Bedford, Indiana, radio station WBIW reported that it “all started in Brian’s Martinsville garage about 15 years ago,” with a guitarist who could not find the sound he wanted and took pedals apart to build his own. Wikipedia says he taught himself pedal design in his late twenties, partly through the DIYstompboxes.com forum, after a friend modified a pedal for him in 2001. The company says he began by modifying existing pedals and moved on to designs of his own; it calls him its founder, chief executive and chief engineer.

Teaching has been part of the brand from the start. Wikipedia says Wampler answered hobbyists’ emails for hours each evening and self-published books on pedal design, and he wrote modification articles for Premier Guitar, among them one on the MXR Distortion+ in 2008. The company runs a podcast, Chasing Tone, and Brian Wampler runs an online course on designing pedal circuits, GuitarPedalCourse.com, the website says.

Country players and signature drives.

Wampler made its name with overdrives and distortions, and with Nashville. The best-known story, which the company told Sonic State in 2014, is that Brian Wampler threw a prototype pedal onto the stage at the end of a Brad Paisley concert, then contacted Paisley’s technician through a forum. Paisley’s audio technician, Dave Rouze, told WBIW in 2013 that the two would work on designs together until Paisley was satisfied. Wampler went on to make the Paisley Drive, the Paisley Drive Deluxe and The Doctor, a lo-fi delay that Wikipedia says was used in making Paisley’s album Wheelhouse.

Other signature pedals followed: for the session guitarist Brent Mason, the Hot Wired, reviewed by Premier Guitar in 2012, and later for Cory Wong, Andy Wood and Tom Quayle. Wampler pedals have appeared on the boards of John Fogerty’s band and of Keith Urban, according to Premier Guitar features cited by Wikipedia.

The catalogue is wide. Among its pedals are the Pinnacle distortion, reviewed by Premier Guitar in 2010, the Plextortion, the Tumnus, a Klon-style overdrive, and the Euphoria, an overdrive first sold as the Ecstasy; Wikipedia says the company renamed a few pedals over name conflicts, also turning the Ace Thirty into the Thirty Something. Early Ecstasy and Plextortion units were tweaked one by one, the company told Sonic State. In 2019 Wampler showed the Terraform, a digital multi-modulation pedal with 11 effects, which Brian Wampler told guitar.com was the start of a new DSP platform. The company has also made amplifiers, Wikipedia says.

Design and documentation.

Guitar effects pedals have supported a long line of specialist American makers, from companies founded in the 1970s to one-person workshops that grew into brands. All seven makers in this group are based in the United States.

The oldest is MXR, co-founded in Rochester, New York, in 1972 by Keith Barr and Terry Sherwood, according to English Wikipedia; Jim Dunlop acquired the brand in 1987, and his company, Dunlop Manufacturing, is based in Benicia, California. Fulltone, founded by Mike Fuller in California in 1991, closed its Culver City workshop in 2022 and relaunched in 2024 with the pedal maker Jackson Audio handling manufacturing and distribution, Guitar.com reported; its website now gives an address in Keller, Texas.

Xotic says it began in 1996 in a garage in California’s San Fernando Valley, that its brand has been owned since 2000 by Prosound Communications, and that it now works from Van Nuys. Catalinbread says it began in 2003 on Nic Harris’s kitchen table and has been in Portland, Oregon, since 2006.

Death By Audio was founded in 2002 by Oliver Ackermann in a Brooklyn warehouse, according to English Wikipedia, and it says it now hand-makes its pedals in a warehouse in Queens. Wampler Pedals, which English Wikipedia places in Martinsville, Indiana, was founded by Brian Wampler in 2007. ZVEX, Zachary Vex’s company, is based in Minneapolis.

Much of what is said about where these pedals are made comes from the companies themselves.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Kentucky factory and a Californian group.

Wampler pedals have not usually been built at the Martinsville office. Early pedals were made in Brian Wampler’s garage and sold on eBay, Wikipedia says. By 2013, WBIW reported, they were “produced from a friend’s shop in Kentucky,” while administrative staff worked from an office building in Martinsville; in 2014 the company told Sonic State that it had “a dedicated factory in KY, adjoined to Warehouse Guitar Speakers,” where “the entire process of pedal production is performed.”

The business side changed later in the decade. In a March 2019 interview, guitar.com put it to Brian Wampler that the company had “become part of the Boutique Amps Distribution group,” the Californian firm that distributes brands such as Friedman and Bogner. Wampler said he had previously spent most of his time managing people, and that the group had taken over the business work so he could concentrate on designing pedals and making videos. We found no published terms for the arrangement, so we do not describe it as an acquisition or an investment. Today Boutique Amps Distribution, of Commerce, California, lists Wampler among the brands for which it is the exclusive worldwide distributor, and Wampler’s privacy policy gives the distributor’s address for written enquiries.

On manufacturing, Wampler’s claim is specific. Its website says each product “that bears the official ‘Wampler – Built in USA’ logo is custom designed and assembled in the USA using premium globally sourced components,” and it backs its pedals with a five-year limited warranty; in 2019 its website said its pedals were “manufactured right here in the United States.” We give those as the company’s statements: we could not confirm where assembly now takes place, or whether the Kentucky arrangement continues.

For a design guide, Wampler shows how a founder’s name, a teaching voice and artist stories can carry a boutique brand as it grows. Compare EarthQuaker Devices, whose founder, Wikipedia notes, also learned from online DIY resources, and Walrus Audio. For this guide we use ink navy, cream and a signal amber with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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