was in a band at the time but I could not
afford a new pedal, so I tinkered one
together just for my own use. It was
some time later that a set of
opportunities came along that got me
into doing it for a living. It took a year to
get the first product out which put
Frantone in the hole financially at the
start, so after the Hep Cat was in
production by late ‘95 I had to design
other effects to create a line that would
sustain Frantone.
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pedal, and in that sense it is based on
another design, but more to the point in
that regard I copied myself.
TR: Many pedals in today’s market are
based off of previous designs, usually
tweaked to create something new to
the builder’s liking. Did your pedals
start from previous designs or are they
all original?
My compressors were a completely new
concept, and I had to design my own
optocouplers and manufacture those
components in-house to bring it all
together. The Peachfuzz may have been
the first fuzz pedal to not use diodes or
under-biasing transistors to get the
effect, I’m really not sure, but instead of
using rectifiers or making transistors go
non-linear I exploited some exotic
properties of an op amp that I liked to
achieve a natural distortion that would
clean up with the guitar volume knob—
much more like an amp overdrive turned
to 11.
FB: All original. The Sweet is based on
some of the ideas I had that were
rejected by EH for the Big Muff reissue
that I thought would still make a great
The Cream Puff was a concept that came
to me very suddenly; I had one of those
pink coconut Hostess snowballs in my
hand and thought “man, wouldn’t it be
INTERVIEW //
The Return of Real Boutique: A Chat with Fran Blanche of Frantone