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Q&A: Jon Cusack from Cusack Music and Mojo Hand FX

Thursday 13th of September 2018

Holland, Michigan: A town located on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan on Lake Macatawa and with a population of around 33,000 it’s a town I know next to nothing about. Some quick google searches reveal it to be incredible picturesque; rich in Dutch heritage, filled with tulips, beautiful farmland and cottages. A town that in 2010 was ranked the second healthiest/happiest town in the United States by the Well-being Index, but also a town not overly synonymous with music. In said town lives a man by the name of Jon Cusack. For the past 15 years Jon has built a reputation for being one of the most respected and innovative figures in the pedal world. His company Cusack Music has given him a platform to offer forward thinking effects that opened the possibilities of other companies around him. We recently had a chat to Jon about how it all started for him, his recent acquisition of Mojo Hand FX and what he thinks the future holds.

Hi Jon, thanks for taking the time to have a chat. So you call Holland, Michigan home, which is a place I know very little about. Can you tell us a little bit about your home town?

You’re welcome!  Holland is a small town originally settled by the Dutch, located in Western Michigan. It is  just a few miles away from one of the Great Lakes – Lake Michigan. It’s a great place to live and our biggest event is the annual tulip festival in May, which draws people from all over the country and the world.

I guess through Detroit, Michigan has quite a rich musical history, do you find that translates across to other cities in the state like Holland? Whats the music culture like there?

Well, there are no where near the numbers of places to play where we are! And that’s why we try to support the local music scene. We have a revamped movie theatre in Holland called the Park Theatre where we have provided a PA system, while also supporting local shows and an open mic night every Tuesday.

So we should probably get a bit of background on your personal musical history. Where did the whole thing start for you and how did that evolve to you designing and building things of your own?

Well, I first got started in electronics when I was twelve. I used to tear things apart to see how they worked using multimeters, and somehow I figured out a formula, which I derived on a desk and scratched it on the desktop with my meter lead. I later discovered what I had found was Ohms law, the basic formula in understanding electronics. After that I got into playing guitar, and was in a band in high school. When I went to college, I worked in the repair department of a local music store. This was around the time (amp guru) Bruce Egnator got his start creating different models with reconstructed Sovtek amps and I thought that would be a neat thing to try with guitar pedals. Eventually, years later after working for a corporation designing a lot of appliance controls I decided I would rather break off on my own and design pedals. I was pretty highly ranked at the time as a senior design engineer but I just didn’t want to work in the corporate world anymore. So I quit and started two companies; Cusack Music and Westshore Design (which was my consulting company that would design or fix designs for other companies). This was a way to pay the bills while designing guitar pedals. It grew to 30 employees, and I sold it in September of 2015 to focus on the music industry.

There’s quite a number of game changing things in the pedal world that actually started with you. As far as I understand you were the first to introduce tap tempo and the first to implement true bypass. Can you tell us a bit about where these ideas stemmed from and what were the first things you put them into practice with?

Well, I wasn’t actually the very first to do tap tempo but I was one of the very first in the boutique market and I was actually the first to do it on a tremolo, phasor and overdrive. As for true bypass, I didn’t invent true bypass itself but I’m the first that I am aware of that did it with a relay and a soft touch switch. I was also the first I know of to put a microcontroller in an overdrive pedal to control the bypass. The initial thing was I was asked by a great local player Danny Reyes to add tap tempo to his Zvex Ooh Wah. Since at the time I didn’t believe in modding other peoples pedals because I felt it was disrespectful to the designer, I called Zachery Vech and asked him if it would be ok if I added tap tempo to his pedal. He told me that it couldn’t be done, he had a few engineers already try and it couldn’t be put in the box. After I built the circuit and proved it could work, I fit it on a board that was an inch and a half by a half inch. As a result of this Zvex asked me if I could help him out with some designs and circuit board layouts. The Tap-a-Whirl was my first Cusack tap tempo design and it was the world’s first analog tap tempo tremolo.

Your Cusack Tap-A-Series pedals are something you’ve become quite synonymous with and they are the pedals that first bought you to my attention. With this range you’ve implemented tap control into generally non tap oriented pedals such as fuzz and overdrive. What was the mindset behind this range?

The mindset behind those last two was an April Fools joke. A dealer ordered ten of them, and after several people ordered them the feedback was that it was a unique pedal that gave them some creative ideas. I think there are still plenty of people out there that would love those pedals if they ever found them and spent some time experimenting with them. One of the features of our pedals is that they are more than what meets the eye, there are things they do not everyone knows about.


You were also the first to use the silent momentary switch. Was this something that had origins in customer feedback you had or something you thought would be interesting to push the industry forward?

It stemmed from my time as a repair tech fixing musical instruments in college. One of the number one failures in pedals was the mechanical bypass switch. They were difficult to replace because they had between six and eight solder joints. I wanted to design my pedals so that they would rarely if ever need repair. In my previous career we had to design relays that would survive over a million cycles. So a relay
seemed like a logical choice for a switching mechanism. Momentary switches will eventually go bad, but when they go bad because it’s going to a micro-controller and there’s no audio going through it , so you can usually hit it harder and it will switch, therefore you can still use it until you get a chance to replace
it. Mechanical switches that go bad cause your audio to fail or be intermittent.

The community among the boutique companies in the pedal world seems to be quite close-knit. I know you’ve also collaborated with some other builders on their designs; Phillipe at Caroline Guitar Company being the main one that comes to mind. How do you think this kind of mentality influences the industry as opposed to it being a more cut-throat competitive mindset among builders?

Having other friends in the industry makes it so that you can have others to bounce ideas and questions off from. If you have a specific problem you can usually find someone else in the industry that has dealt with that problem before. Plus it gives you people you look forward to seeing at trade shows!

Its also an industry that allows someone to be able to start up their own business as a very small operation and with very little initial buy in. Do you think the pedal world has reached saturation yet? And where do you see it heading in the next few years?

Yeah, I think  it may finally have reached saturation. You see new guys appearing every day, and other guys disappearing everyday. I kind of feel like there’s going to be an exodus soon by some. A lot of the new companies today don’t even design anything or build their pedals, it seems there is less innovation than there was, that it has become more about marketing than innovation to some. What I hope to see is more of the innovators coming up with unique designs and getting noticed in the future. We hope to be a
part of that story.

What kind of advantages and disadvantages do you think someone like yourselves or other boutique companies have over the bigger names like Boss, Electro Harmonix and MXR?

We have a personality, we are a small company with faces to the brand. Some of the companies you mentioned have  a majority of their manufacturing done overseas, and you don’t feel like you have a relationship with the company. With a small pedal company, you can build a relationship with the actual people that make your pedal. In our market, you are buying a product that we built, and with the large companies, you are buying something they may have had a part in designing, but they have someone else build it . On the other hand , they have large engineering departments and economies of scale. But we think there will always be people who like to know where both their food and their pedals come from.

 

The Pedal Cracker is of the most recent additions to the Cusack lineup. Can you explain a little bit about what this pedal does and what the inspiration was behind it?

We had a friend who had a vision for guitar effects for vocalists but wasn’t really sure what he wanted . While working on this application, we came up with the Pedal Cracker. It is a microphone preamp with an effects loop tailored to using guitar pedals, with a balanced XLR line output. It has a momentary switch on the effects return which does the opposite of what the bypass switch is doing, so the user can be very creative with it and the trails/presend switch. It also has phantom power and a ground lift. You can use it with vocals or miking instruments, and we’ve heard it also makes a great low noise and cost mic pre for recording with ribbon mics.


Since starting with pedals as your main endeavor you’ve now expanded to other products such as guitar amps and even guitar strings. Why the venture into these two worlds and what do you think
the Cusack range offers that’s different from what’s already out there?

The amps happened because I had always wanted to build an amp and I found out Reverend amps were for sale. They were basically what I was thinking of anyway in terms of size and sound. We redesigned them with as many USA made components as possible, to be as durable as we could make them. We don’t stock them, they are built to order. Our strings are made locally in West Michigan by a small shop with decades of experience making machines for some of the big string makers. They make them for us as a sideline and we package them. In both cases we just like having the ability to offer someone who likes our products and what we do an option of our own.

Another recent venture is the acquisition of Mojo Hand FX. How did this come about and what was it about Mojo Hand that excited you enough to take on another brand?

We spent a lot of time designing and building pedals for other manufacturers, and we thought, why not have another line of our own. I had known Brad Fee for many years and it was a combination of it being a great brand and it being the right time for both Brad and I. I had talked to many others but there was never really as good a fit as we had with Brad.


Whats the general philosophy behind Mojo Hand and how do you differentiate between what will be a Cusack design and what will be a Mojo Hand design as you move forward with both companies?

Mojo Hand has a basic vibe of it being vintage inspired, meaning the pedals are based on vintage pedal designs with improvements. The Cusack line is more of a ground up approach to design. We determine what we are going to make and then design it. We plan on keeping this format for the foreseeable future and they will remain their own unique brands.

Is there anything you can divulge as to what the plans are with either Cusack Music or Mojo Hand as we move towards and into 2017?

We plan to keep building brand recognition with what we have but are also taking a look at new current
technologies for our designs that we are now working today.

Thanks so much for taking the time to have a chat Jon! I’ve been fighting the urge with every question not be a jerk and ask you questions about John Cusack movies. But maybe for one last
question, whats your top 5 side 1 track 1s?

You’re welcome Dan !  Let’s see.., Better off Dead, Say Anything, The Sure Thing, Gross Pointe Blank, and One Crazy Summer, hahaha!

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