CHASING BLISS When your first pedal is a hit, expectations change. Not only those of the buying public, but of the crew manning the ship. Chase Bliss Audio’s Joel Korte knew this, and has planned his company’s slow, but steady growth accordingly.
THE BEGINNINGS for boutique pedal provider Chase Bliss Audio weren’t necessarily rich with happy times. Founder Joel Korte graduated from college with an electrical engineering degree and soon found a job in the field. A lifetime stutterer, Korte struggled with it more once out of school and in the private sector. Meanwhile, his brother had relocated to California in pursuit of an acting career. In February 2007, Joel’s brother Chase was killed in an automobile accident. “So I started working and just really hated my job,” explains Korte. “Part of it was I think that I was really sad about my brother, part of it was that I didn’t like my job and part of it was I was really struggling with my stuttering. I think in college I was kind of able to sort of hide from it, I didn’t have to worry… well I worried about it all the time but I would be out with friends and just trying to hide from it and it wasn’t as central in my life but then once I started working it was like this huge change and it was the com-
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bination of all that that just made life really horrible for a while.” Korte decided to reengage with a speech therapist, even though earlier experiences with one were mixed at best. After a more positive experience, he decided to pursue a career as a speech language pathologist. That decision pushed him into grad school in the fall of 2008. It was around that time when he started playing in a band with friends. He wanted out of his engineering gig, but knew he needed money while he was going to school. Enter ZVex Effects. “I sort of just harassed Zack Vex until I got a job,” says Korte. “I was like, you know I have this electrical engineering degree, I have some knowledge and experience, I just want to work. I just want a job that I care about. I was seeing everything through the lens of losing my brother and thinking about things in terms of like, ‘life is short’ you know? I don’t think I thought about life like that before. So I started to work at ZVex. I worked there part time while I was going to school for about a year
and I just loved it. There was this cross fade where I really liked the engineering work at ZVex and stuttering was becoming less and less a barrier for communication in my life. Then I was playing in a band and had this huge pedal board. You know, you just get obsessed! The part time job at ZVex turned into a full-time job and I decided I wanted to continue on with the graduate degree in speech language pathology but I switched that to part time. I worked at ZVex for like four years.” Korte left ZVex in early 2013, just about the time he was wrapping up his graduate degree. He found himself at a bit of a crossroads — pursue a career to utilize his masters or move deeper into his passion for tone. Korte soon began working on what would become Chase Bliss projects. He spent some time working under contract to ZVex, and other times as a speech language pathologist. Over time, he realized that of his multiple endeavors, the speech work days were his ‘least favorite’ days. He became more ob-