Truman Steffens
In our occasional series we call Gearing Up, we profile some of the people around town who make, repair or sell the instruments and other equipment that musicians use.
When Sounds of Shelby’s Truman Steffens posts photos of a guitar effects pedal that he’s built to his Instagram profile, the first one is usually not of the hand-painted enclosure, but of the pedal’s guts. The circuits are his takes on classic effect designs — such as the Fuzz Face favored by Jimi Hendrix and the Supa Fuzz made famous by Jeff Beck — made with new-old-stock electronic components manufactured during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s (but never installed in a device). Colorful resistors and diodes are laid out elegantly on fiberboard, wired point to point with flying-saucer-esque transistors, chunky capacitors and more, like a map of the first human settlement on a newly discovered planet.
“There’s a lot of really, really good current stuff — with brand-new surface-mount components — that I enjoy,” Steffens tells the Scene. “But there’s a different compression that you kind of feel in your fingertips when you play some of the older gear. I try to … capture the feel and the look of the older stuff. A big contribution to really achieving that is actually using the older components.”
Steffens, who grew up in Birmingham, Ala., got his first guitar in fourth grade, and he’s been playing classical music, heavy metal, sophisticated funk and more for about 20 years. In high school, he read an article about modifying pedals that you could pick up at any Guitar Center — alterations that would make the sound heavier or help it cut through the mix better — which sparked his passion for tinkering. He kept it up while studying political science at Auburn University, working on build-your-own-pedal sets that he describes as “like a Lego kit that makes noise in the end.” He wanted to be in a music town that wasn’t too far from home, so he settled in East Nashville.
As Steffens took jobs repairing vintage equipment, he made a careful study of circuit design. He was drawn to old-school distortion effects and Fender amplifiers, which were wired by hand back before the advent of printed circuit boards. That inspired him to settle on the method he’s been using for Sounds of Shelby pedals for the past four years or so, which involves cutting fiberboard, laying out his circuit and adding eyelets, testing components, soldering them into place and installing them in an enclosure that he’s decorated.
He’s found components at flea markets and in friends’ parents’ basements, and bought them from specialist websites and eBay. One component that’s useful in many circuit designs is germanium transistors made for the Soviet military. Steffens found a source for them — in Ukraine, just before the Russian invasion.
“The first time I bought stuff from this particular seller, the very next day there’s an airstrike in his city, and 95 percent of the city lost power as a result,” he recalls. “I thought, ‘Well, I guess I’m not going to get my stuff, but I’m not going to ask for a refund.’ It ended up coming two weeks later. ... It seems like a lot of Ukrainians are trying to stick with business as usual, [though] they’re acutely aware of being in the middle of wartime.”
For the past few months, Steffens put Sounds of Shelby on pause and went back home to care for his mother, who has a serious illness. However, he’s been able to complete a small batch of new pedals that he’ll be putting up for sale very soon. He says those will include a couple iterations each of his Uno (that’s a special take on the Fuzz Face with only one control knob on the outside), his spin on the Jordan Boss Tone (a gnarly fuzz that’s prominent on Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” ) and his Script Driver (a take on the 1970s MXR Distortion+ pedal used by late, great Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Randy Rhoads).
While Steffens uses only components that he verifies match the specification for the circuit he’s building, he points out that part of the magic is how no two iterations of these hand-built circuits ever sound exactly the same. Different manufacturers’ versions of the same component — or even ones made at different times by the same company — might create variations in tone or response to playing. That was the norm when Hendrix was buying his first Fuzz Face in 1966, but not something you’ll hear most pedal builders aspire to today.
“I know which guy has the best-sounding Fuzz Face that I’ve built. … I still think about that one. I got to hear him play it live through a cranked ’65 Princeton Reverb, and it’s incredible. It’s good just knowing that it’s out there.”
