Mad Professor
Harri Koski (above) and Bjorn Juhl started Mad Professor with the aim of building the ultimate guitar amplifier. The result was the original
CS-40 pictured here. Resting atop it are (left to right) the Mighty Red Distortion, Snow White Auto Wah, Mellow Yellow Tremolo, Forest Green
Compressor, and Sweet Honey Overdrive. |
Finland’s Mad Professor company is just eight
years old, but in that time the company has
built one of the most extensive lines of pedals
offered by any small-scale, independent
stompbox maker. The company is effectively
a partnership between founder Harri Koski,
amplifier specialist Jukka Monkkonen, and
electronics genius Bjorn Juhl, who designs
the company’s pedals.
Koski started Mad Professor after his experience
operating Custom-Sounds, a company
he founded in 1996 to distribute highend
guitar gear in Finland. Custom-Sounds
was also one of the first online boutique
dealers in Europe, and had a web shop up
and running by 1996. But for all his love of
boutique and vintage gear, Koski was still
frustrated with the limitations of much of
the gear he was hearing. Meeting fellow
tone obsessive Juhl led to creating the Mad
Professor CS-40, the amplifier that put the
Mad Professor brand on many guitarists’
radar. Since then, Mad Professor has built
a roster of 12 stompboxes that includes
three flavors of overdrive, a phaser, a fuzz,
an analog delay, a tremolo, and even auto
wahs for guitar
and bass.
Juhl still masterminds most of the pedal
designs. He’s self-taught in the ways of
effects building but has worked with musical
instruments since the age of 16 and studied
electronics for 30 years—ultimately drifting
away from his electronic service shop and
into design of his own effects pedals and
products for Mad Professor.
Bjorn Juhl is an electronics autodidact and the principal designer behind Mad Professor’s pedal line.
“If I could have gotten the sounds I wanted
to get at the time, I wouldn’t have bothered
trying to build stompboxes,” says
Juhl, recalling his earliest investigations of
effects. “Back in the late ’70s, I could look
at Electro-Harmonix, MXR, and Boss pedals,
which are all still very good today. And
I also read the excellent book
Electronic
Projects for Musicians by Craig Anderton.
But I learned by process of elimination, too.
I built little models of amplifiers to investigate
exactly why certain things sounded
bad and removed everything that sounded
bad until just the good stuff remained.”
Like many of the builders profiled here, Juhl
rejects the notion that the best pedals have
been made—that the stompbox frontier
was conquered decades ago. Tones that
inspired him include Pete Townshend’s Live
at
Leeds sounds, Billy Gibbons’ vast palate,
and the aggressive, monster grind of the
Sex Pistols. But he’s always on the lookout
for the ways in which existing pedals come
up short, and listening for sounds he can
imagine but doesn’t hear in the collective
soundscape. “I’d actually say that the
biggest inspirations for me are the most
uninspiring sounds,” Juhl says. “I’m always
trying to figure out why certain combinations
of guitar and amplifier work, why
some really
don’t work, and some work just
fine. Because you can change those things
when you’re in the know.”
So far, Juhl, Koski, and the rest of the Mad
Professor team have been successful in
uncovering the little differences that pique
the interest of a sizable number of tonehounds.
Pete Anderson, Jerry Donahue,
Marc Ford, and Jim McCarty are just a
few of the players who have stocked their
quiver with Mad Professor pedals. And
the company remains committed to adding
new tools to their line, including a
forthcoming EQ pedal that found Juhl considering,
among other things, the impressive
bandwidth of Shadows guitarist Hank
Marvin’s tape echoes.
But just as Juhl and Mad Professor look
for inspiration in odd places, they look to
make their products inspirational so that
players will unlock their imagination when
they plug in a Mad Professor box. And
Juhl hopes that commitment will help players
push themselves instead of relying on
gear to solve problems. “Back in the ’70s,
stores had one fuzz pedal and they’d tell
you ‘Take this, son—this is just what you
need.’ Then you’d go home and read Tom
Wheeler’s book where he says there may
be a little more between you and Jimmy
Page than a fuzztone pedal.”
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