THE VIDEOS
It’s no secret that Andy’s
video demos are what put Pro
Guitar Shop on the map, and
thus it seems in retrospect to
be fairly ridiculous that he was
originally brought on to handle
daily shipping and mundane
data entry duties. The idea
for the videos came about
much later on. Aaron had
just entered into a business
relationship with Z. Vex Effects,
and when browsing the
pioneering pedal company’s
website, he happened upon
Zachary Vex’s informative,
entertaining, and charmingly
wry product demonstration
videos. We began watching
all of them at the shop, in
between fi lling orders and
answering phones, and we
quickly became obsessed.
It didn’t take long before Aaron
wondered aloud if we might be
able to do something similar
ourselves, producing high
quality demo videos of our
rapidly ballooning inventory
of unique effects pedals as a
way to educate and entertain
our customer base and drive
traffi c to our then-new website,
proguitarshop.com. At the
time, many of the pedals we
carried were quite obscure, so
most of our customers had no
idea what they really sounded
like. Fortunately for Aaron, he
already had the perfect team
for the job sitting right next to
him. Andy’s formal education
is in fi lm and television, and
mine is in audio engineering.
Throw in Andy’s formidable
guitar skills and golden ears,
and it soon became clear
that the fates had aligned.
We saw great success from
the videos right away, as no
one on YouTube at the time
was doing gear demos of
comparably high audio-video
quality and musical content.
Aaron took advantage of
this success and assigned
Andy to full-time pedal
demo duty, and set me to
work upgrading the rather
primitive audio recording rig
we launched our experiment
with. The video library
expanded at a brisk pace from
that point, and before long
the
ProGuitarShopDemos
YouTube channel and its star
Andy Martin had become
a genuine phenomenon in
the industry. The video library
was always a great and lasting
source of pride for Aaron,
both in the way it served the
guitar community and the way
it helped build PGS. It truly is a
gift that keeps on giving.
Here’s an example of one of the first
Pro Guitar Shop demo videos featuring
Andy Martin.
ToneReport.com
17