Classic guitar pedals often come with classic-sounding names. Think Big Muff. Fuzz Face. Cry Baby. Memory Man.
The name jumps out, as it was intended. It even has a recipe on the back.
It’s a new pedal that’s sold out of two batches, produced by Mike Trombley, a Blackfeet electrical engineer, and his guitar effects company, NativeAudio.
The Frybread pedal, adorned with a fun vintage-style cartoon drawing, is designed to be a flexible fuzz pedal, with enough thickness for heavy music and versatile definition of sound, while also spreading his heritage far and wide.
“We share culture through sound,” Trombley said in a Zoom call from his home base in Ohio.
Trombley’s gear names and designs all point to his heritage. His delay pedal, Two Medicine, has a graphic of Sinopah Mountain jutting skyward over the lake. His tremolo pedal (think of the quavering surf guitar sound) is called Rising Sun, with a trio of Blackfeet teepees watching the dawn. His overdrive-distortion pedal, the kind you’d want if playing some hard rock or classic metal, is called War Party.
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Trombley said that like many ventures, the company’s recent recognition didn’t come overnight, but after decades of learning with some failures and hurdles en route.
They remember wondering if the concepts were going to connect with people, so it’s been gratifying to “be able to see life, and bloom in such a cool way, that it fills not only the musician aspect, but it also hits the culture aspect of it, too,” he said.
“It’s just a really cool way to interact with the world and interact with the music industry.”
While the selection of guitar pedal manufacturers was once relatively small, it’s now populated by a dizzying amount of upstart, boutique companies like NativeAudio. They’re all meeting the demand from players — from the professional to amateur garage warriors — in search of distinct sounds to experiment with or otherwise give them a distinctive edge in their sound.
If you want to hear the pedals yourself, head to his website or to YouTube, where gear reviewers with thousands of subscribers have demoed them.
He’s also received an impressive endorsement online from Dylan Carlson, figurehead and guitarist for the influential rock band Earth, who released a ground-breaking and eardrum rattling drone-metal album, “Earth 2.” He’s mellowed out quite a bit since that 1993 album, even collaborating with Bill Frisell and stretching out into sounds informed by early rock ‘n’ roll.
In April, Carlson posted photos of his pedal board, which includes the Frybread Fuzz, the Makoyii overdrive-distortion and the Wilderness delay. While Trombley’s unsure how Carlson first heard of NativeAudio but they’ve corresponded online a bit. When Earth played a live session on Seattle radio station KEXP last year, one video included a shot that pans over a few Native Audio pedals.
“He’s just been a big supporter, which is really cool,” Trombley said.
From a hobby into a company
Trombley was born and raised in Browning. When he was in middle school, his family moved to Billings so his mother could pursue a degree. Then she met his now-stepfather, and they decamped for Dayton, Ohio.
He was always a tinkerer, the kind of kid who would fix the VCR for his grandmother, take apart toys to see how the motors work, or jury rig a way to turn off the light without getting on the top bunk in his room.
“I hated jumping off the bed and going and hitting the light switch, so literally I built a little pulley system,” he said.
In high school, he got interested in rock through Guitar Hero and then the real thing, going through the usual Led Zeppelin and White Stripes phases, learning music theory and playing in bands.
He decided to stay in Ohio for college, earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Wright State in 2015; then went back for a master’s in 2017.
After enrolling in engineering classes, he took note of the crossover between his homework and his hobby.
“A lot of the classes, they’re talking about diodes and transistors, and then I’m like, ‘Wait, that’s the same thing they’re using over here to build guitar pedals,’” he said.
Coding classes also proved useful for his pedal work, which slowly grew into a business on the side as he pursued his main career doing engineering on U.S. Air Force bases.
His first batch of pedals was released under the name Red House Electronics, with him and his pedal builder Micah Kemplin, later rebranding as NativeAudio.
He said the pedal world has evolved since he began — it’s competitive but small and connected. In the beginning, his dream was to get the pedals into as many shops as possible. When they did get into a chain, they began to feel disconnected from their customers and more focused on making a set number of pedals.
Now, they’re taking more of a direct to consumer approach, which gives them flexibility to revise a pedal as needed and take chances as they see them.
“We’re in this to have a lot of fun and express our creativity,” he said.
Regarding the Frybread, he and Kemplin talked over sounds that they wanted from a fuzz and brainstormed ways they could combine them in a versatile, single pedal.
“When you play through the Frybread Fuzz, you’ll notice that it’s fat, but also has a lot of mid character in it, so that it pops above the mix,” he said.
When it’s dry clean, meanwhile, it still has some crackle.
From idea to prototype, it took around four to five months of working through the electrical elements to get the product that did what they envisioned.
The pedal design matches that sense of levity he’s talked about. The face has a vintage cartoon drawing of “Stan the Pan” and “Frybread Man.” The individual control knobs are labeled “Fry,” “Bread” and “Fuzz,” while the back includes a full-on fry bread recipe from Trombley’s grandmother.
While everybody in the Native community knows what frybread is, he said, the pedals reach people who might not otherwise learn about it.
Recently, he checked on a gear thread on Reddit and saw posts from a customer trying his hand at cooking frybread. The user wrote, “So I added the NativeAudio Fry Bread Fuzz to my board a while back, this thing is fantastic and for those wondering about the recipe on the back, that also slaps!”
His website includes links to the Blackfeet Tribe’s site, and information about the Piegan Institute, a Native language immersion program.
The name and graphics are a way of “bringing that to life in a really cool and really interesting way that hasn’t really been expressed before,” he said.
