![]() Having become a devoted admirer of this little magic box, I was excited to visit Fractal Audio headquarters in New Hampshire and to have the opportunity to speak with Cliff himself: The Axe-Fx packs in an extensive collection of vintage and modern guitar amps, cabs, effects and gives its users the freedom to craft practically any rigs they want and switch through them quickly. ![]() IC: What’s going on in your world? Obviously, the release of the Axe-Fx II must be keeping you very busy. Can you fill us in a little bit?ĬC: Yeah, the release of the Axe-Fx II consumes just about all of my waking hours at this point. We’re working on ramping up production as much as possible at the moment and trying to meet our obligations to our customers and dealers around the world. We’re producing them faster than expected, so no complaints there. IC: I know you recently added a new dealer, Tone Merchants, to the line-up. Do you have plans to add more dealers as the company grows?ĬC: Tone Merchants has been a dealer of our products for probably about a year now anyway, but we mainly sell direct in the U.S., so I don’t know that we will be taking on any more dealers here. The main reason we use Tone Merchants is because the California market in particular, L.A. and Hollywood, is huge and a lot of artists go through there on their way towards U.S. tours so it’s a good location to have a dealer. We do have dealers, of course, worldwide. We just brought on a distributor in Singapore. We have Australia, Japan, another distributor just brought on in South Korea, and probably China soon as well. ![]() IC: So I want to track back and find out a little bit more about the man behind Axe-Fx. Which was first for you, engineering or guitar playing?ĬC: Kinda both, you know? I started working with electronics when I was just a kid. I was fascinated with electronics from the time I was like eight years old, and I was a musician from about the same time, although I didn’t play guitar in those days. I’m a bit embarrassed about what I did play so we probably won’t go there! Suffice it to say, I was somewhat adept at the woodwind family. IC: You know, I played flute in sixth grade…ĬC: Ok, I played clarinet and saxophone. There you go! And then one day, the turning point was when I heard Boston’s first album. That guitar tone was like ‘wow! What is that? That‘s the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard!’ And that was probably the last time I ever picked up my clarinet. I went out and bought myself a Peavey T-15 and a little crappy practice amp, and started playing until my hands hurt every day. IC: I think they had a unit that came out in the late 80s that was supposed to model the Boston guitar tone.ĬC: Yeah, everyone had a Rockman in those days. It didn’t sound anything like the Boston album. It’s kind of like a cartoon version of it. I actually worked with a guy at my previous company who did Tom Scholz’s electronic designs for him. ![]() He said Tom was an eccentric guy, putting it mildly, but very smart and very driven. IC: At which point would you say that you decided to pursue a career in engineering?ĬC: I knew ever since I was a kid I was going to be an engineer. That’s all I did – guitar and screwing around with electronics ever since I was a little kid. In those early days I broke more than I fixed. I used to try and make my own things and sometimes it would be successful. I tinkered with radios, and then started making my own guitar effects and all that stuff. IC: Obviously, there was a big step between the idea of something like the Axe-Fx and actually starting work on a project like that. At which point did you decide, ‘ok, I’m going to make this unit. It’s going to do all these things,’ and then get to work to it?ĬC: It wasn’t really one day I just said ‘hey, you know, I’m going to make an Axe-Fx.’ I was tinkering around with some algorithms. Actually, I had started writing stuff for PCs. ![]() I was working on some reverb algorithms and some graphic EQ stuff and kind of got frustrated with the PC environment. ![]()
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