A musician’s custom-pedal service.

Death By Audio was founded in 2002 by Oliver Ackermann, the singer and guitarist of the New York noise-rock band A Place to Bury Strangers. The company’s own account, on its website, says its first years were spent “warehouse-jumping from Virginia to Brooklyn.” Sources differ on where the business began: a Chicago Music Exchange interview, online by 2020, says Ackermann founded it in Brooklyn in 2002, while English Wikipedia says he moved to Brooklyn in 2003, and the company itself mentions Virginia first. We give all three.

A common shorthand calls Ackermann the founder of A Place to Bury Strangers. English Wikipedia says otherwise: the band was formed in 2002 by David Goffan and Tim Gregorio, and Ackermann joined after his previous group, Skywave, came to an end, becoming its frontman and main songwriter. Wikipedia also says he studied industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design, training the company itself mentions.

The company says it began as a web-based customization service, turning musicians’ ideas into working pedals, and that Ackermann used his design training to try new circuit layouts, “sometimes using intuitive arrays of sliders, dip-, and toggle-switches instead of traditional controls.” In the Chicago Music Exchange interview he says he designed his first pedal, the Total Sonic Annihilation, because he needed money to backpack through Europe; it is a feedback-loop device that routes other effects back into themselves. Guitar World reported in 2009, as cited by Wikipedia, that he had made custom effects for bands including U2, Wilco and Nine Inch Nails.

The warehouse in Williamsburg.

The name Death By Audio became attached to a place as well as a product. For about nine years, the company says, its workshop was in a warehouse in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which served as an effects-pedal factory, a recording studio, a live-work space for artists and musicians and — from the spring of 2007, according to English Wikipedia citing New York magazine — a venue for underground music and art. Wikipedia says the space took its name from the pedal company based there, and that the venue was run by Jason Amos and Matt Conboy. A Death By Audio record label began in 2007 to release music by bands that practised in the building.

The acts that played there ranged from Ty Segall, Dirty Projectors and Thee Oh Sees to Thurston Moore, Tony Conrad and Dan Deacon, according to Wikipedia, and The New York Times covered the space in March 2011. In late 2014 Vice Media rented the building, forcing the venue to close, and the last show was held on 22 November 2014, headlined by Lightning Bolt, according to Wikipedia citing BrooklynVegan. In 2016 Matt Conboy released a documentary, Goodnight Brooklyn – The Story of Death by Audio.

The closure did not end the pedal business. The company says that after the venue shut in 2014 it moved the workshop to Queens, where it now “handmakes effect pedals in an underground warehouse.” The Chicago Music Exchange interview, from around 2020, still placed the workshop in Brooklyn; we follow the company’s current statement and note the difference.

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.

Made by hand in Queens, the company says.

Death By Audio remains closely tied to its founder. In the Chicago Music Exchange interview Ackermann is described as the company’s “founder, owner, designer, and head decision-maker,” and we found no report of a sale or outside investment in the sources we checked; that is an absence in those sources, not a statement about the company’s finances.

On manufacturing, the company’s claim and the outside account broadly agree. Death By Audio says every pedal is made by hand, and the Chicago Music Exchange interview described the process: enclosures powder-coated, milled and silk-screened by outside suppliers, then each pedal assembled, tested, hand-numbered and boxed in the company’s own workshop, taking one to six hours. The company offers a lifetime guarantee — “If you can possibly break it, we will fix it” — and says it uses parts such as “medical-grade IC chips, obsolete transistors, and military surplus electronics.”

The catalogue is loud by design: the Fuzz War, the Supersonic Fuzz Gun, the Interstellar Overdriver, the Echo Dream 2 delay, the Total Sonic Annihilation 2 and the Absolute Destruction, which uses a power-amplifier chip and slider controls. Collaborations have widened it. The Time Shadows II delay credits Ackermann and EarthQuaker Devices’ Jamie Stillman, and the Amp Crash, a pedal with a real 3-watt amplifier, an internal speaker and a microphone, was made with Rainger FX, as Premier Guitar reported in August 2026. The website also sells records from Dedstrange, the label on which A Place to Bury Strangers have released recent albums, including Synthesizer in 2024.

For a design guide, Death By Audio shows how a brand can carry the identity of a scene — a warehouse, a band, a venue — into its products. Compare EarthQuaker Devices, its partner on the Time Shadows, and Electro-Harmonix, another pedal maker founded in New York City. For this guide we use black, concrete grey, a warning red and a white with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Death By Audio’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.