A brand name on a California electronics company.

Voodoo Lab is a trading name. The company behind it is Digital Music Corporation, and the link is set down in a patent record: when a pedalboard patent was assigned in January 2017, Google Patents shows the assignee as “Digital Music Corporation (DBA Voodoo Lab)” — doing business as. Its manuals still say that “Voodoo Lab and Pedal Power are registered trademarks of Digital Music Corp.”

The company dates itself to 1986. Its website says Voodoo Lab “has designed professional electronics for recording and touring musicians since 1986”; we found no independent dated source for that year, so we give it as the company’s. The oldest manuals in its online library are older than the brand’s fame in pedal power: an MX-28M MIDI patchbay manual and a System Mix manual are both marked “Copyright 1996 by Digital Music Corporation,” the first “Printed in U.S.A.”

The earliest copy of voodoolab.com in the Internet Archive, from April 1997, is titled “Digital Music Corp. Home Page” and lists MIDI routing, the Ground Control system, “Voodoo Lab Pedal Effects” and MIDI patchbays. Its address then was in Agoura Hills, in Los Angeles County. By November 1998 the website gave an address in Petaluma, in Sonoma County, and by 2007 one in Santa Rosa, the county seat about 15 miles north, where its contact page still places it.

The company has said little about its people. A staff page archived in December 2000 named Josh Fiden as “Digital Music president,” pictured with Art Thompson and Richard Johnstone of Guitar Player at the Frankfurt Musikmesse; another caption showed a staff member “drilling chassis for Voodoo Lab effects.” Fiden is also a named inventor, with John L. Clark, on the 2017 pedalboard patent. We found no source naming the company’s founders, so we name none.

Eight outputs, each on its own.

Voodoo Lab’s best-known product is a box most audiences never see. The original Pedal Power, described on the website in February 1998, offered eight 9-volt outputs, each “completely isolated, short-circuit protected, highly filtered and regulated,” from a toroidal transformer, whose ring-shaped core, the page explained, reduces the field that makes pedals hum. Isolation meant no ground loops between pedals; a switch on each output raised it to 13.2 volts for the Boss pedals that needed it. By 2000 the page quoted Guitar Player: “this was the first time I was able to connect everything in minutes and get great results without hum or profanity.”

The Pedal Power 2 followed; its manual carries the dates 1998 to 2001. Its successor, the Pedal Power 2 PLUS, which the company calls “the most dependable and widely used guitar effects power supply in the industry,” keeps the same recipe: eight isolated outputs, a custom toroidal transformer with separate windings for each, and linear regulation. “What’s good for charging a cell phone is NOT good for your pedals,” the product page says of switching supplies. Two outputs have a SAG control that lowers the voltage to imitate a dying battery. The British effects builder Pete Cornish was quoted on its home page in 2012 recommending the 2 PLUS “after extensive testing for both noise, stability and reliability.”

The newer Pedal Power 3 series, whose manual is dated from 2020, uses what the company calls a hybrid DC transformer design with linear regulation, works on any mains voltage from 100 to 240 volts and links to X4 and X8 expanders for up to 16 isolated outputs.

Switching came first. In 1997 the website said its Ground Control MIDI foot controller had been “the first choice for thousands of working musicians since 1991,” paired with the GCX audio switcher, whose loops used gold-contact relays “sealed in pure nitrogen.” The Ground Control Pro was announced as shipping in 2003. English Wikipedia’s gear lists for Metallica’s James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett include both units. The Dingbat aluminum pedalboards came later: the patent naming Clark and Fiden was filed in January 2017 and granted in November 2020.

The pedalboard trade.

A pedalboard gives effects pedals a fixed home and needs clean power and routing. The makers here are known for different parts of it: frames, isolated power and switching.

Some are best known for the frame. Pedaltrain calls itself an independent accessory maker based in Nashville, founded in 1999 as a one-man start-up, with a European joint venture in Belgium. RockBoard belongs to Warwick GmbH & Co. Music Equipment KG of Markneukirchen, Germany, the company named in its website’s imprint. Temple Audio Design, of Warman, Saskatchewan, in Canada, sells the Templeboard and its quick-release pedal mounting system.

Others are best known for power. Truetone started as Visual Sound, which its founder, Bob Weil, launched at the NAMM show in 1995; it introduced the 1 SPOT adapter, took the Truetone name in 2015, is based in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and says it is still family owned. CIOKS was founded in Copenhagen in 1991 by Poul Ciok, who, the company says, still runs it; it is based today in Køge, Denmark, and says its power supplies are made in-house by a sister company in Poland.

Two Californian firms make both power and switching. Voodoo Lab, of Santa Rosa, says it has designed electronics for musicians since 1986. Decibel Eleven, of Valencia, launched its Hot Stone power supplies in 2012; it is a division of the electronics maker MYE, which it says has production facilities in the USA and abroad.

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.

“Built by hand in the U.S.A.” — then “designed in the U.S.A.”

What the company says about manufacturing has changed. From 1998 to at least 2005 its home page said that Digital Music Corporation “has designed and manufactured electronics” since 1986 and that “All of our products are built by hand in the U.S.A.” From 2006 to 2008 it spoke of “Voodoo Lab’s handmade, all analog effects,” and rear-panel drawings in its Pedal Switcher manual of 2007 and its Wahzoo wah manual of 2010 carry the words “MADE IN U.S.A.” Today the Pedal Power 3 page says “Designed in the U.S.A.” — and we found no current statement, on the website or in the manuals we read, of where its products are made. We therefore make no claim about it.

The effects that gave the lab its name are still part of the range: the Sparkle Drive overdrive, now in a MOD version, the Superfuzz, and the Giggity analog overdrive and preamp, with Micro Vibe, Tremolo, Analog Chorus and Proctavia manuals in its archive. The brand’s slogan, used on its home page since at least 2006, is “Scary Good Tone,” and its newsletter promises “Scary Good News.” We found no published brand guidelines, staff numbers or revenue figures.

For a design guide, Voodoo Lab shows how a support product — power and switching rather than sound — can carry a brand for decades. Compare Strymon, another California maker that also sells pedalboard power supplies, and Boss, whose higher-voltage pedals the first Pedal Power was built to handle. For this guide we use black, bone and a violet with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Voodoo Lab’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.