Adventure Audio might have never happened if founder Christian Terjesen hadn’t cracked open the back of an effect pedal, “just for the heck of it,” he says.
In 2014, Terjesen was a new college graduate living in Philadelphia and trying to find a job. “I started applying at restaurants and for delivery driver positions,” he says. “No one was hiring.” One day, while hanging out in his apartment, he opened up one of his pedals. Looking inside, he had a revelation. “I said to myself, ‘I could make these.’ ‘
“That was the beginning of Adventure Audio. Pretty soon, I was paying my rent by making pedals.”
The first pedal he built was a Tube Screamer clone from Synthrotek. “That kind of led me down the rabbit hole with Tube Screamer-ish overdrives,” he explains, which in turn led to the creation of the Glacial Zenith overdrive.
The Adventure Audio Team!
Though the company was founded in Philadelphia, Terjesen eventually moved it to its current location in Rochester, New York. At present, Adventure Audio offers five pedals: the Outer Rings ring modulator and the Dream Reaper fuzz, both of which have Expression inputs to control their filters; the Power Couple dual boost; the Whateverb V2 reverb with chorus/flange and an Expression input to control the amount of Warp; and the Glacial Zenith. Imagine if your delay time could trigger a clock that’s messing with another effect in your chain. Or if the envelope of your signal could inversely affect the amount of distortion on the signal.
What makes Adventure Audio’s pedals different from others? “Well, I have a scripted answer and an actual answer that I’m excited about,” Terjesen says. “The scripted answer is, ‘Our pedals don’t compromise the tone you’ve spent years crafting and perfecting; they complement it’—something to that effect.
“The actual answer is that we are starting to implement CV jacks on our pedals so that you can control multiple effects across multiple pedals. Imagine if your delay time could trigger a clock that’s messing with another effect in your chain. Or if the envelope of your signal could inversely affect the amount of distortion on the signal. Stuff like that.”
Adventurous pedal making machine.
As with effect pedals, Terjesen gravitated naturally to music. After playing guitar in a punk band in high school, he switched to bass when he joined a poppier punk group in college. “I did a few DJ gigs here and there in the early 2010s,” he says. “No formal training in any instrument really.” His pedal-building activities mesh well with his current musical interests. “Nowadays I just kind of mess around with pedals and my modular synth,” he says. “I don’t like playing out and playing rehearsed music. It feels too forced. It feels like work. I want music to be my relaxing time, where I kind of just let my mind wander.”
Terjesen says he draws inspiration from other pedal companies who create “awesome stuff.” “Chase Bliss is a huge inspiration for me, along with Old Blood Noise Endeavors, WMD, RedShift, Hologram Electronics, Electrical Audio Experiments…the list goes on and on,” he says. “I’m stoked by all the DSP stuff people are doing these days.”
Check out Adventure Audio’s pedals in the gallery below, and visit their website for more information, to order and to find dealers in your area.
